808S & Heartbreak: Katherine Mckittrick & Alexander G. Weheliye

Image credit: Ray Zilli (2017)
808s & Heartbreak

Katherine McKittrick &
Alexander G. Weheliye
In an article about the Roland TR-808, discontinued by Roland in 1984, Kurt James
Werner, Jonathan S. Abel, and Julius O. Smith III, write that the drum machine was
“considered somewhat of a flop—despite significant voice design innovations,
disappointing sales and a lukewarm critical reception seemed clear indicators that
digitally-sampled drum machines were the future.”1 Centralizing an analysis of the
circuits, sub-circuits, and software of the Roland TR-808, the authors suggest that,
since its discontinuation there has been an inability to digitally replicate the analog
sounds of the Roland TR-808. The authors take the machine apart, break it up, and
think about inabilities, noting that misinformation and misconceptions about the
sound, the beats, the bass of the original 808s has led to the inability to emulate it.2
They find remnants of Ace Tone’s 1964 R1 Rhythm Ace. They write, “A bass drum note
is produced when the μPD650C-085 CPU applies a common trigger and (logic high)
instrument data to the trigger logic.”3 They pay close attention to the circuit behavior
of the 808. They emulate.
The authors dive into the mechanic circuitry and deep beats and bass of the
Roland TR-808 drum machine, but say little about its significance for the musical,
sonic, and textural sciences that are imagined alongside the unit. We thus consider
the insights developed in “A Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model of
the Roland TR-808 Bass Drum Circuit,” and overlay them with the mathematics of
Black life, in order to think through the mechanics of emulation with and outside of
itself. This is especially meaningful, since a “lack of interest drove second-hand prices
[for the TR-808] down and made it an attractive source of beats for techno and hip-
hop producers.”4 Emulation, in this sense, honors black creative labor and
invention—the boom-bap-blonk-clap of 808s—as diasporic literacy, yet also
understands this work as a series of inaccurate repetitions that disclose the awful, the
hurtful, and the intrusive.5 Emulations, like 808s, are injuriously loving. We situate
the 808s as one of many enunciations of black studies, as heavy waves and vibrations
that intersect with and interrupt black life discursively and physiologically, as
heartbreak.
Propter Nos 2:1 (Fall 2017)

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Heartbreak captures, at least a little, those injuriously loving emulations of
what it means to be Black and human within the context of white supremacy.
Heartbreak works with and in excess of the bio-mythological heart, the hollow
muscular organ and its narratives of affectively variegated tenderness and loss.
Heartbreak represents the reverberating echoes of our collective plantocratic
historical pasts in the present. Heartbreak elucidates how the violence of racial
capitalism inaccurately reproduces black life. Heartbreak bursts apart. Heartbreak is
feeling outside of oneself. Heartbreak is the demand to feel outside of ones’
individuated self. Heart/////break cannot be recuperated. Heartbreak fails the
heartbroken. Heartbreak waits. It sounds. It envelops us like the thumping bass of the
TR-808. Heartbreak cannot be repaired or resisted. It emulates but defies emulation.
Boom.
Before House and Techno musics, before Hip-Hop, before Miami Bass, before
Electro, I hear and feel R&B group Blaque’s 1999 song “808.” Before getting to the
song’s historical significance, I want to emphasize how the track’s music and lyrics
amplify the pleasure and joy of feeling the thump of the 808-machine, of sensing its
meta/physical reverberations around and through the flesh:
‘Cause I’ll be goin’ boom like an 808

Be makin’ circles like a figure 8
You know it feels good from head to toe
Now hold on to me baby here we go
You’ll be goin’ boom baby boom baby boom
And I’ll be goin’ ooh baby ooh baby ooh
(check it out)
Blaque’s song encodes the flesh-memory of the innumerable hours I’ve spent listening
to music made with the TR-808 in clubs, in living rooms, on headphones while
walking, hearing/feeling the 808s boom from passing cars, etc. and the sheer
enjoyment derived from it in a way that is difficult to cordon off into words on the
page. Blaque’s song achieves this feat by analogizing the fleshy neural feelings set off
by the boom of the 808, because “it feels good from head to toe,” and the internal
neuro-viscous reward system derived from love and sex. By conjuring the power of
Blaque’s superlative skills at moving their audience, the song also imagines a different
kind of physical sensation:
See what I believe is
We was granted the power
What’s that? Power, wha…
Ha, the power to make you dance

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Like this
Like this? Like what, though? Like wo? Like a Sssshhhh? 6
Love and sex are always knotted to broken hearts, because the throb of feeling
good, from dome to foot, has a painful musicological history. The heart (muscle) and
its narratives of loss and tenderness—tender losses—move to, stop with, pause on,
slide across the boom of racial-sexual violence. Heartbreak, then, is always already
part of the 808s Black circuitry, boomingly amplifying joy and pain, sunshine and
rain.7 The thump, the boom, create shivering circuits of pleasure laced with damage,
loss, sorrow.
“808” was written by Robert Sylvester Kelly, who preyed on young Black girls
from Chicago’s South Side and secretly married his protégé Aaliyah Dana Haughton
when she was a teenager. The members of Blaque were very young when this song
was released, the youngest member being sixteen. While Kelly appears in the music
video for “808,” it is not clear how much interaction occurred between him and the
members of Blaque. The bitter irony of Kelly’s predatory ways is that as an artist, he
has been extremely adept at writing songs from “female perspectives”—for example,
his duet with Sparkle “Be Careful,” Nivea’s “Laundromat,” several songs for the
Changing Faces, or his own “When a Woman’s Fed Up.”8 How does being a sexual
predator, who referred to himself as the pied piper of R&B, correlate with Kelly’s
adeptness for writing songs for Black women performers?9 Rather than thinking that
this cross-gender groking is something that supersedes or mitigates Kelly’s predation,
we want to insist that this tendency contributes to R. Kelly’s continued violation and
sexual assault of numerous Black women and girls. It is tantamount to not shush the
many different forms of violation in this context, since they represent the structural
conditions of possibility for sexual violence but also remain significant in their own
“right,” even while they are too often drowned out by the focus on the physical
aspects of violence, sexual and otherwise. What structures and repertoires must be in
place in order for acts of sexual violence to occur and what acts of violation (of trust,
of corporeal boundaries, of confidence, and so on) precede physical/sexual violence?10
What modes of violation follow the brutalizations, for instance, when family
members and friends refuse to believe victims, or when state apparatuses vilify and
criminalize survivors? Where do broken hearts go? They probably cannot find their
way home.11
[F]or black girls, home is both refuge and where your most intimate betrayals happen.
You cannot turn off that setting. It is the dining room at your family’s house, served
with a side of your uncle’s famous ribs. Home is where they love you until you’re a
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ho.
Kelly’s musical ability for cross-gender identification feeds into and cannot be
disentangled from his predatory actions. It is not per chance that Kelly would often

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prey on young girls after Lena Mae McLin’s gospel choir classes at Kenwood Academy
in Chicago, his alma mater, playing the role of musical mentor in order to gain favor
and groom his victims.13 This raises the general question we are uncomfortably left
with: in what ways do desire, sexuality, violence, and ungendering coexist in (Black)
life and in relationship to the TR-808? Kelly’s oeuvre also includes several cuts besides
“808” that deploy machinery and technology within the context of love and sexuality
(“You Remind Me of My Jeep,” “Ignition,” etc.) that extend the tradition of sex
machines or feeling computer blue, because there must be something wrong with the
machinery.14 Considering that Kelly, like many other Black celebrities, claims that he
himself was a victim of sexual violence, are there ways to think about racism as not
only being engulfed by increased “group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature
death,” but also the extreme susceptibility to many different forms of sexual violence
and violation.15 Perhaps not being able to elude sexual violence is the ghost in the
machine of this particular version of kinship, to emulate Saidiya Hartman’s
memorable aphorism.16
What if the kind of heartbreak Kelly violently enacted cannot be resisted or
repaired? What if it just settles in, awful, hurtful, and intrusive? Receding at certain
moments, like the driving away of a car with an elaborate booming system, only to
abruptly reappear at the most inopportune situations, its reverberations shaking you
up to core when you least expect it. What do we do with that? Can the 808s and the
mechanics of the deep boom, signal—at least in a small way—something else? This is
sexual violence writ large. This is violence that is purposefully enacted within the
context of longstanding intelligible plantocratic logics, where multiple affective and
structural registers of Black love are always dragged through and into and across the
sexual trauma of racial capitalism. I don’t want this. We don’t want this. Can the 808s
and the mechanics of the deep boom, signal something else without losing the
messed up vicious stagnancy of the predation (or the sinister twin practice of
forgetting and/or excusing the violence either in the name of art/musical genius or
racial solidarity)? Perhaps this is where we learn, at least momentarily, that black life
and love are not something you can have, but something you do and can never get.17
Perhaps that which is awful and hurtful and intrusive, as unresisted heartbreak,
should stand alone (un-flee-able), in plain sight and as negative affect, with the
difficult knowledge that the act of naming violence does not engender the kind of
reparation sexual violence requires, particularly if we take into account the countless
acts of violation that precede, accompany, and follow sexual violence. Thus, predation
represents a brutality in itself, unrepaired, intelligibly negative, and with a booming
soundtrack—even in the unspeakability…like a ssshhh. How do we, who watch this
and narrate this and hear this and live this, come to terms with the irreparable?
Coming to terms with the unrecoupable means, above all else, having to exist with it
and necessarily going on living. What cannot not be possessed does not follow the
laws of redemption, instead it lingers as living in and with the after-life of the TR-
808’s sonorous echo. Living in and with. Something you do and can never possess.

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Blaque have stated that their name is an acronym for Believing in Life and
Achieving a Quest for Unity in Everything. Blaque member, Natina Reed, was killed
when a car hit her as she was crossing the street on October 26, 2012.18 In addition,
the group was mentored by Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who was tragically killed in a car
accident in 2002 and who had set her boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion on fire in 1994 after
a violent dispute, which had its basis in Lopes’s heartbreak.19 Is it possible to believe
in (Black) life when surrounded by death and violence? Blaque are now also signifiers
for the disappearance of R&B singing groups, or the last great flowering of R&B
singing groups at the turn of the millennium (Destiny’s Child, 3LW, 702, B2K, 112, and
more—many with abbreviated band names wherein the numbers signify a particular
history, place, or identity). While much of this is the consequence of “simple”
economics—it is cheaper for R&B singers to multi-track one voice instead of paying
several group members to sing harmonies; it is less expensive for rappers sing their
own hooks through Auto-Tune rather than paying an R&B singer to do so—it also
highlights the continued devaluation of R&B music as an art form, especially Black
women’s creative and affective labor, which are so central to this genre. Where is the
appreciation for Black women R&B singers’ sounding of the strenuous labor of both
love and heartbreak?20 How does the Black female voice carry out the care work of
Black women’s labor, which cannot be recognized as such, as Saidiya Hartman
argues? Where is the love for that something you do?21
The importation of the TR-808 sound into Black musical cultures is often
attributed to Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982), which replays and emulates
two different Kraftwerk tracks (“Numbers” and “Trans-Europe Express”). In 2016,
several men came forward to state that Bambaataa had sexually molested them when
they were as young as thirteen.22 As young boys, all of the men told of difficult family
circumstances and declared that Bambaataa had taken on a parental role in their lives
and served as their mentor before he began to sexually abuse them for extended
periods of time. The narrative of these survivors becomes part of the computing that
structures the boom of the TR-808s; desire and pleasure are qualified by the
significant yet variable expression of sexual violence/violation as and with technology.
Names are fading…Aaliyah, the unnamed young girls from Chicago’s Southside,
Bambaataa’s awful and injurious sonic boom, and the unlisted and untenderness.
Rewind and come again, re-rewind. Marvin Gaye’s 1982 “Sexual Healing,” was
one of first songs that featured the TR-808 drum machine. It was also Gaye’s last hit
before he was shot by his father, with whom he had a contentious relationship, with a
gun that he had given to his father as a present in 1984.
“My father,” Marvin told me in Europe in 1982 during a discussion of “Sexual Healing,”
“likes to wear women’s clothing. As you well know, that doesn’t mean he’s
homosexual. In fact, my father was always known as a ladies’ man. He simply likes to
dress up. What he does in private, I really don’t know-nor do I care to know. You met

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him at a time when he was relatively cool about it. There have been other periods
when his hair was very long and curled under, and when he seemed quite adamant in
showing the world the girlish side of himself. That may have been to further
embarrass me. I find the situation all the more difficult because, to tell you the truth, I
have the same fascination with women’s clothes. In my case, that has nothing to do
with any attraction for men. Sexually, men don’t interest me. But seeing myself as a
woman is something that intrigues me. It’s also something I fear. I indulge myself only
at the most discreet and intimate moments. Afterward, I must bear the guilt and
shame for weeks. After all, indulgence of the flesh is wicked, no matter what your
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kick. The hot stuff is lethal. I’ve never been able to stay away from the hot stuff.”
Gaye was heartbroken for most of his life, in part, due to his father’s visible
ungendering, so much so that he added an “e” to his last name. The extreme physical
violence meted out to him by Marvin Pentz Gay Sr. resulted in Gaye suffering from
extreme anxiety and stage fright and also in Gaye extending the abuse in different
forms to the relationship with his much younger second wife, Jan Gaye.24
Perhaps 808s soundtrack black studies and provide a technology, or boom, of
blackness that organizes itself through heartbreak—actuating both heart muscles and
a kind of ongoing hurtful tenderness engrained in the flesh. With this, 808s provide
aural glimpses and moments of heartbreak that cannot be forgotten—they are plain
in sight, harmfully—and situate sexual violence as a terrain that demands a response
that is not invested in prior injured states.25 Responses and alternatives to injury are
awful and difficult and forever; they emerge as song, story, grooving, crying, fight,
jumping, quietness, laughing, poem. And more. Always more. This is living,
necessarily living, and finding our way through earlier modes of heartbreaking
damage that comprise the mattering of Black life, though not exclusively so. Where is
the love?
Shhhh.
808s are one way to think about black life as an invitation to listen. The book
Phonographies provides a way to imagine how technology—most crudely, machines—
are enunciations of black life. The book uses sonics, or flows, to delineate this
enunciation of life within the context of racial violence and modernity. These ideas
also emerge in relation to vocoders, drum kits, LinnDrums, 808s, clap machines and
other VSTs. How do these sounds, vibrations, and machines offer us a genre of being
human that does not begin with objecthood? Heart/////break. What do 808s do to
us? And how do mechanics-machines refuse black humanity (the logics of the middle
passage and plantation slavery did and continue to roboticize black people) while
demanding that objectification cannot/should not define black life (I can never be
your robot).26 These questions are not exactly new, of course—there is a really long

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and comprehensive list of scholars who think about the mechanization,
objectification, and commodification of black and other marginalized people and
longstanding resistances to practices of dehumanization. But the sounds and
vibrations can also engender “flesh memory”—and this overlaps but is very different
than what M. NourbeSe Philip calls bodymemory, right?—which interrupts the
objectification-resistance dualism by asking how sound or vibrations, the 808s and
the clap machines, are not simply extra-human devices or technological appendages
that refine or degrade humanness as cyborg.27 Instead the 808s narrate life, Black life.
So, the VSTs—the sounds and beats and grooves they make—are not outside us or of
us, but praxis. The story—the stories told above—cannot be told without the deep
boom, clap, unspeakable yet audible heartbreak. Like a sssshhh—eviscerated, ear-
piercing silence.
Avoiding a linear-afro-future-post-humanist territory—by giving technology
as purely embodied by machines too much clout—how do we talk or write or think
about loving, desperately, the unspeakability of music and the loudness of heartbreak.
The 808s are not the answer but they might help us sort this through. With this, we
must refuse disciplinary and epistemological bifurcations (the tendency to
analytically separate the sciences, for example, from poetics), to study autopoeisis and
self-replicating systems, and to think about the mechanics of blackness outside
corporeal black politics, where our broken flesh or our degraded bodies are either
liberatory devices or signifiers of anti-blackness. Heartbreak. So, to rephrase: what do
808s do to us, physiologically, psychically, poetically? In what ways do the 808s
contribute to the mattering forces of Black life?
Jumping.
Sylvia Wynter. Her first use of the term “the science of the word” appears (I
think) in her 1999 essay “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of
Conscious Experience, of ‘Identity’ and What it’s Like to be ‘Black.’”28 In this essay
Wynter thinks through how Fanon’s understanding of selfhood disrupts a
teleologically biocentric, and fundamentally anti-black, understanding of the human,
and how his writings open up the entangled workings of physiology and narrative.
While Wynter explores these entanglements in most of her writings—she writes,
often, that humans are hybrid beings, simultaneously bios and mythois—“Towards
the Sociogenic Principle” offers a sustained discussion of the ways in which practices
of racism and anti-blackness are narratively connected to the physiological and
neurobiological sciences. This is to say that the larger symbolic belief system (what
we might call our Eurocentric origin stories or cosmogonies, whether theological or
Darwinian or both) of which anti-blackness is a part, is constitutive of, not separate
from, the naturally scientific (what we might call flesh and blood and brain) aspects

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of humanness. We reflexly experience the knowledge system we are part of.
Remember, too, this belief system is lawlikely instituted: how we know our selves
and each other, how we believe in, how we reflexly respond to the world around us,
functions to stably reproduce the existing order; we navigate that order as though it is
natural and outside of our selves and outside our story-making abilities…but it is we
who make the world what it is, it is we who believe in, desperately, (and thus
naturalize) the prevailing biocentric belief system.29 However, this world-making only
occurs within and against the constraints of our current biocentric order.
The entanglements Wynter explores do not situate the human on a biocentric
frame (which is one of natural selection wherein some people are more evolved than
others, some people are more human than others, some people are closer to humanity
than others; where the sciences are neutral and stories and poetics are not neutral,
and so on). In Wynter’s formulation of the human, an extension of and mashing-up of
Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we are biologic-storytellers. We did not, to give an
obvious example, evolve from prelinguistic to linguistic beings; humans have always
been storytellers. In the long conversation in On Being Human as Praxis, she thinks
about this in relation to the markings in Blombos Cave—clearly written 77,000-year-
old linguistic communications scribed by humans.30 The conceptual leap Wynter
offers calls into question our entire order of being: the crude and longstanding
commitment to the biocentric belief system that naturalizes black people as
unevolved and less-than-human is totally undone if humans are not absolutely
sutured to an evolutionary apes-to-Aryan system of knowledge. The science of the
word thus underlines two overlapping analytics: the deep connections between
narrative and neurobiology and physiology (reflexly); the disruption of biocentric
systems of knowledge (we are not what they say we are).
Working with Wynter’s conceptualization of the science of the word, 808s
and other music inventions and reinventions evidence and enunciate black life. The
practice of loving, desperately, the unspeakability of music, is found, in part, in our
neurobiological and physiological and intellectual response to that music and music
makers. Our neurobiological and physiological and intellectual response to the deep
boom, clap, blip, which is untracked and everywhere and seeping into us and
emanating outward and beckoning friendships and starting fights and teaching and
storying and moving and keeping a beat (offbeat) and heartbreak. The science of the
word imagines a different beginning from which to think through black music and
technologies as well as other analytical questions. It is a total refusal of objecthood (as
our black origin story, as our archive, as our future, more heartbreak, “the suffocating
reification,” Fanon wrote) and, therefore, provides a pathway to imagine black life as
human cosmogony:
I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the
power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the
cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but

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eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the
crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.31
Wreckage.
It has been argued that music shapes and moves and repairs our
neurosystem.32 With music, memory and language and words are built and rebuilt.33
With music, neurons are strengthened and reattached. With music. I have argued
elsewhere, working with Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis, that the connections and
wires and threads, between music and self and environment and others, not only
conceptually subverts plantocratic and white supremacist (market) systems, but they
also provide a way to track black life as livingness (and thus outside narratives of
dysselection).34 More specifically, music, music making, music sharing, music
dancing, music jumping, music singing—the act of loving music deeply, the act of
feeling and loving music intensely—is one way black communities physiologically and
neurobiologically navigate racist worlds. I do not think there is specificity of or to
black neurobiologies and physiologies. I am not suggesting that. But I do think that
the conditions of being black—the experience and living memory of the abyss, to
borrow from Édouard Glissant—has opened up attachments to musical narratives-
genealogies-sounds that we should pay attention to.35 For me, this is a radical
reinvention of the self and our embodied knowledge! It is humanizing. So, if music
shapes and moves and repairs our brains and bones and blood and nerves, if the
boom of the TR-808 breaks our heart and jumps and moves us as we love music
deeply and intensely, is this not a kind of neurophysiological resistance, refusal, or
fugitivity within the praxis of Black life, at least fleetingly? What do we learn from and
about each other in these moments of heartbreak and love? What do we pass on,
what do we keep to ourselves, in order to practice black livingness in a world that
refuses black life? How do we tell each other this feeling might be or is forever? Do
we tell each other heartbreak might be forever? Is pain forever?36 How do we share
fugitivity and waywardness?
With all of this in mind what we want to notice is not solely the consequences
of violence—the fucked up predatory acts and stunningly quiet (as I see it) wreckage
of violation experienced by those violated. The consequences and wreckage matter,
deeply. But we must also ask ourselves, at the same time, without throwing that
wreckage in the bin, under what conditions does human life become victim-wreckage
and, as well, how do we tell this story by centralizing the ways in which our present
system of knowledge rewards—physiologically! Socially!—violation. What is it about
our colonial plantocratic system of knowledge that enacts violation as an articulation
of black masculinity (not black men, black masculinity), and how does this interface
with black masculinity’s ungendering in relation to white supremacy? And how, in
this wreckage that is, in fact, black life, do we find enunciations of humanity and the

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unmet promises of freedom. Heartbreak is not, then, a signifier of racial oppression or
love lost. It is not a noun. Heartbreak is an aesthetic-physiological practice. It is
sorrow song. It untangles that violence, it does not describe violence for profit.
Because in order even begin to do justice to this physio-aesthetic praxis, to Black life,
it must exceed and unsettle the accumulative logic of cis-heteropatriarchal racial
capitalism.
We have to ask ourselves: how do we want to know this—sexual violence,
racist sexual violence—differently and in a way that does not replicate the violence.
This is what I want to get to. This is very hard for me. I don’t know. I still feel the
alibis piling up. How do we tell the story outside of the splash of sexual violence (and
thus anti-blackness), since summoning the violence encountered by Black folks is so
often bullied into doing the psychic, physiological, and affective dirty work for white
supremacy? Whenever there is some type of crisis around “intimate” violences in
particular, Black folks are summoned as ciphers through which that labor is
accomplished without it having to affect the actual structures of white supremacy.
Instead of confronting the many violences, sexual and otherwise, white men and
women committed against Black female persons (“high crimes against the flesh,”
Spillers calls it), the broken and torn black person, lynched, stands in as
representative-knowable-enclosed-locked-down violence. Rather than reproducing
the violence or accumulatively enumerating it, we seek to “tell a story about degraded
matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate, but instead ventures
toward another mode of writing…,” other modes of being, other modes of living in
and living with.37 Living on.
We Don’t Have Much of a Relationship Now.
Robyn Rihanna Fenty embodies a number of admirable qualities as a

performer and public figure, however, none are as “savage” and awe-inspiring as the
way she navigated the public scrutiny after Chris Brown brutalized her within an inch
of her life in 2009 and the photos of her badly bruised and swollen face and body
were leaked to TMZ by the LAPD.38 Fenty was 21 at the time. She shouldn’t have had
to do this. Like a shhhh: eviscerated silence. Fenty refused again and again to become
the proper and respectable poster child for victims of intimate partner violence, even
though she was continually vilified as a “crazy Island woman” and confronted with
her violated past and the images thereof as incontrovertible proof. In other words, the
mainstream media demanded that she publicly provide the affective labor of being a
violated Black woman by performing victimhood in very specific ways that would
vilify Brown; she did neither. Fenty’s broken face and her broken heart—violence and
violation => violation as violence, and vice versa—did not drive the invasive media
queries and publicity. Rather, as we know and is so often the case, her (awful, hurtful)

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story of violence served as an occasion to discuss the larger problem of intimate
partner violence, and, of course, to prove the pathology of Black folks and Black life.
Violation.
Fenty has, instead, addressed the thorny complexities of the imbrication of
sexuality and violence through her music and music videos (“Man Down,” “S&M,”
“Love on the Brain,” and “Bitch Better Have My Money” are only the most
prominent). Retrospectively, Fenty said the following about her relationship with
Brown after she was violently violated:
[I thought] maybe I’m one of those people built to handle shit like this. Maybe I’m the
person who’s almost the guardian angel to this person, to be there when they’re not
strong enough, when they’re not understanding the world, when they just need
someone to encourage them in a positive way and say the right thing. [I thought I
could change him,] a hundred percent. I was very protective of him. I felt that people
didn’t understand him. Even after…But you know, you realize after a while that in that
situation you’re the enemy. You want the best for them, but if you remind them of
their failures, or if you remind them of bad moments in their life, or even if you say
I’m willing to put up with something, they think less of you — because they know you
don’t deserve what they’re going to give. And if you put up with it, maybe you are
agreeing that you [deserve] this, and that’s when I finally had to say, ‘Uh-oh, I was
stupid thinking I was built for this.’ Sometimes you just have to walk away. [Now,] I
don’t hate him. I will care about him until the day I die. We’re not friends, but it’s not
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like we’re enemies. We don’t have much of a relationship now.
Slowly jumping from believing that she was “one of those people built to handle shit
like this” to realizing that she “was stupid thinking I was built for this,” Fenty refuses
being (and thus cannot be) conscripted into the longstanding narrative of the Black-
super-woman-machine, who feels no pain, who does all the care work, who labors on
behalf of everyone except herself. Instead, she implicitly states, “I can never be your
robot.” She sits with and lives on and with the heartbreak, moving on but never
completely leaving the scene. Sorry. At this time, we are no longer accepting repair
jobs. Heart/////Break. Over the years Fenty has emphasized both her own heartbreak
and her heartbreak over the way Brown, someone she loved, was rendered monstrous
by the mainstream media. Her insights and struggles are meaningful, especially
considering how white men—the Afflecks and the Polanskis and the rest—who
exhibit similar violent behavior in a range of their heterosexual relationships, are
seldom treated the same way. Bringin’ on the heartbreak, I repeat softly under my
breath: she shouldn’t have had to do this, she really shouldn’t…. Are you ready to be
heartbroken?40
In 2010 there was a huge poster in the halls of my department at Queen’s
University. The huge poster was of Fenty’s broken face. After seeing the poster the
first time, I did not return to it; Fenty remained in my pathway but I did not look at
the poster or read the text that narrated and explained her brokenness. Other posters

23
about “Gender Studies,” such as indigenous activism, fat shaming, queer cultures,
Muslim women and feminism, accompanied the Fenty poster. The posters were part
of a big class project wherein, from my understanding, the students pick a
topic related to the course, highlight important images and ideas about that topic,
and place all this information on a huge poster. My knowledge of poster assignments
and projects comes from the discipline of geography. The Association of American
Geographers has poster guidelines that the posters in the hallway, in my view,
emulated: posters make a unified, coherent statement; materials, both textual and
visual, should be of professional quality and be clearly legible from a distance of four
feet (4’); text should be limited to brief statements; graphic materials will be displayed
on a 4’ x 8’ poster board (landscape-oriented only). The only poster that depicted
black women featured Fenty’s damaged, bashed in face. Fenty’s encasing and
entombment in the hallway poster serve as synecdoches of these broader currents,
since her public image is wedded to violence and violation, we and she are not
allowed to forget, there’s no reprieve from this ongoing heartbreak. What gets lost in
the shuffle is the labor of heartbreak that the poster and Fenty are forced to perform,
all without her consent.41 As quiet as it’s kept, we continue living, regardless of
whether we found love in hopeful place or not, intensely feeling the thumping boom
of heartbreak (flesh encasing that hollow organ, un-flee-ing. Jump.).
The chorus of Fenty’s “We Found Love” repeats the following line over and
over: “We found love in a hopeless place.”42 The bass drum does not appear until one
minute and eight seconds—zeroes, ones, and eights—into the song, and its booming
entry is preceded by crescendo of cascading keyboards as well as a drum roll, so
central to House music. All these factors combined generate intense sonic tension so
that the arrival of the bass drum registers as both like relief and like punishment. In
this way, the structure of “We Found Love” approximates finding love: the flowing
discharge of endorphins and resulting euphoria but also evokes the violence of being
thumped by the beat in a hopeless place. Heart/////Break. Add to this Fenty’s voice,
which remains almost impassive, displaying a “cool affect” that sounds like it is
resisting the booming rush of the song structure/instrumentation. It is as if Fenty’s
vocalizing is physically/physiologically refusing the unacknowledged care work
demanded from the Black female voice in popular music. The track’s music video
features scenes from a volatile heterosexual intimate relationship in which the lovers
are portrayed by Fenty and a model/actor (Dudley O’Shaughnessy, who has an
uncanny resemblance to Chris Brown). In addition to the unmistakable timbre of
Fenty’s voice, the alarm bells, the central keyboard riff—which resembles a siren—
and the stark contrast between Fenty’s vocals and music on this track amplify the joy
and the heartbreak of living, continuing to exist and subsist. I was always struck by
the following line: “Feel the heartbeat in my mind.” Does this mean that the
neurological system emulates, synthesizes the beat of the heart, the thump of the
bass?43 Is it a heartbeat of pleasure (we found love; living) or the throb of pain
(hopeless place, fear, trauma)? Most like likely it’s both, mixed and engineered at

24
different volumes and intensities, depending on the time of day, not overcoming but
surviving, living with, breathing in, subsisting through. Boom, like an 808.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has observed how young Black female fans of Beyoncé
relate to Fenty in the aftermath of the visible violence she experienced. She writes:
I’m not certain they really hate Rihanna, or find joy in her hurt — instead I think what
they really hate is that Rihanna knows firsthand, like so many women and girls, and
perhaps like so many of them, that being violently hit by a man doesn’t ever feel like a
kiss. It feels the opposite. It is a humiliation that is impossible to forget. So what I
think the Hive hates about Rihanna is that there is no fun, no fantasy in that kind of
knowledge of womanhood, just a reflection of the real but all-too-often silent life they
44
too must wade through as young women of color in America.
These reactions to Fenty underscore yet another layer, dimension, facet of the labor
demanded of her: transcending, overcoming violence, violation and heartbreak. The
way Fenty was treated in the aftermath of her brutal violation—Chris Brown’s assault,
the leaking of the photos by the police, and the way she was treated by the media—
forms a part of ungendering, given that Black women are thought to be inured to
pain, deserving of violence, and thus not qualified for protection in the same way as
white women. As Beth Richie writes:
Black women in vulnerable positions within disadvantaged communities fall so far

from the gaze that is now sympathetic to some women who experience violence that
they have virtually no right to safety, protections, or redress when they are victimized.
At best, they are relegated to the status of undeserving. More often, those Black
women with the least privilege, who live in the most dangerous situations, are
45
criminalized instead of being protected or supported.
But care work is still violently expected, injuriously demanded. There is a beautiful
and heartbreaking part in the 2014 film Girlhood (Bande de filles) that centers around
Fenty’s song “Diamonds” that highlights the joy and pain of Black livingness.46 While
much of the film adopts an anthropological lens on the Black life of French teenage
girls, residing on the outskirts of Paris, this scene imagines a momentary and clearly
limited instant of free livingness. With her new friends Lady, Adiatou and Fily, the
film’s protagonist, Marieme, rents a hotel room in Paris so that they can escape for a
night the strictures of anti-Black racism, misogynoirI, family, work, and school that
govern their lives. At one point during the evening, Lady, Adiatou and Fily begin
listening, dancing, and lip-syncing to Fenty’s song, while Marieme sits on the bed and
watches them. Marieme then joins the other three girls, as they all joyously dance,
embrace each other, and mime the words: “Shine bright like a diamond/Shining
bright like a diamond/We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky.”47 The scene is
bathed in gorgeous blue light, which serves to heighten the boom and rush of
pleasure of the moment, and to visually distinguish it from the heartbreak of the

25
characters’ everyday lives, the specters of violence and violation. Finally, as the song
and scene move towards an ending, viewers not only hear Fenty’s voice on the
soundtrack but Lady, Adiatou, Marieme, and Fily singing along with the song’s
English language lyrics with audible French accents: “Feel the warmth, we’ll never die.
We’re like diamonds in the sky.” Living on.
LinnDrums.
Prince did not like Roland TR-808 drum machines. He preferred LinnDrum
machines.
“Flesh memory” can be linked to and interfaced with NourbeSe Philip’s
“bodymemory.” The flesh, though, does something different than the body
conceptually: it marks the specificity of Black human life in its entanglements with
the various forms of matter. Hortense Spillers distinguishes between body and flesh,
and, initially, for Spillers, the flesh was primarily the space of objecthood and the
abject. 48 In Habeas Viscus and Spillers’ more recent writings, the flesh emerges not as
a utopian zone or even an exclusively positive one, but as a realm of possibility, she
calls it empathy, for Black life that is not beholden to inclusion into the category of
the Man-as-human (to use Sylvia Wynter’s phrasing). So while the body remains an
elusive mirage, an unattainable abstraction for those situated in the shadows of
freedom, the flesh offers a liminal domain not beholden to inclusion in discourses and
institutions designed to kill us. The flesh rescued the TR-808 from obsolesce.
One way to understand Black culture’s relationship to technology is through
the way that especially Black music/sound humanizes by enfleshing supposedly
discrete, abstract, rigid, inhuman machines by making them usable in heretofore
nonexistent modalities, whether this is the turntable, the player piano, or the 808.49
Take the way that Brandy intonates the 808 on this particular track that she recorded
with Timbaland in 2011:
You hear me from a block away, I still got getaway

Baby can you hear me now, can you hear me now?
Baby can you hear me now, can you hear me now? 50
Not one of the many Internet lyric sites provides transcriptions of Brandy’s rhythmic
harmonic ad-libs: eeightt-ohh-eeightt—eeightt-eeightt, sung in her unmistakable
husky tone and reoccurring for the duration of the song; they only archive the
alphabetic words. Clearly, this is not the science of the word as imagined by Wynter’s
elaboration of Césaire—but it does allow us to think about the mechanics of voice
and how Brandy’s “eeightt-ohh-eeightt—eeightt-eeightt” parallels and is purposed for

26
non-linguistic beats. The tone of Brandy’s voice and her intonation are fundamental
to how the song works, how it achieves its effects in the flesh. It is also fundamental
to shifting the signification of the machine and envisioning what the machine can and
cannot do. Emulating the sensation of the TR-808, Brandy’s vocal apparatus, like
Blaque’s, undertakes the care work of humanizing the technology. This can be likened
to, but does not twin, how current mobile technologies become and are incorporated
into humanness via their use in Black popular music.51 Jayson Greene’s recent
commentary seems to willfully misunderstand Fenty’s use of Bajan Creole while also
pointing to her singing voice (known as “Rihanna Voice”) as technology: “Rihanna
Voice has become an industry-wide idea, a creative property like the Korg synth or
LinnDrum, that the quick-working line cooks of the pop industry daub onto tracks
like hot sauce from squeeze bottle” (emphases added).52 Comparing “Rihanna Voice”
to using hot sauce feeds too easily into the “crazy Island woman” trope mentioned
previously. Calling up other condiments in this context—soy sauce, mayonnaise,
whatever—would be wisecrack; these are inventions only ingested, seemingly, by
non-black people. The hot sauce squeeze bottle so perfectly recalls that crude
Fanonian moment (good eatin’, zone of non-being) by refusing Fanonian subtleties
(upsurge, we are not, actually, zones of non-being!). There are, too, altogether
different registers of analogy available by imagining the use of “Rihanna Voice” as
adding flecks of gold or glitter to the mix, for instance…or grasping for but not
reaching a kind of shimmering poetics. Shine bright like diamond. In addition,
besides conjuring histories of Black enslavement, the description of “Rihanna Voice”
as a “creative property” in the vein of LinnDrums and Korg synthesizers disregards
that the latter technologies are ownable and owned objects from which the Linn
Electronics and Korg corporations derive substantial pecuniary profit whereas Fenty
does not. Boom like an 808. Here, too, we take Black women’s creative imagining of
space—the beat, intention of Brandy’s eeightt-ohh-eeightt and “Rihanna Voice”—to
undo the supposedly empty and/or inhuman Black geographies of sound.53 In this
way, both spheres facilitate the imagining of the flesh or Black life “as cosmogony.”
(human + machines + human heart) x rhythm ó technology
Heartbreak.
Spreading fast and there’s no cure (and there’s no cure)

No need to run from heartache (It’s gonna get ya)
It’s gonna get you, get you for sure
(Everybody, everybody sing it, yeah)54

27
Openness and messiness and incompleteness are a pleasure, especially when
theorized alongside the inflexible and thick category of race, but it is awful and
painful to live open and undone. I had an exchange with two black poets about two
very different things. And these exchanges made me think about the many ideas I
have gathered to learn about race and theorize about race and live as racialized, in
day-to-day (scholarly and non-scholarly) contexts. These terms. I remember them
mostly from graduate school. They were sometimes coveted, sometimes rejected. But
they all sought to “destabilize” race and/or blackness. It goes something like this: race
is fluid and third space and liminal, and blackness is fragmented and unfinished and
on the threshold, and race is hybrid-on-the-border-messy and black is fractured,
incomplete, flexible. And I thought: it is painful and harmful to live like that, isn’t it?
It hurts to live always undone and unfinished. It is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking
even when the impossibility is joyful or you catch a glimpse of a life outside that
inflexible weight.
Afro-Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay writes about this perpetual state of
destabilized unbelonging in a poem from her 1993 collection, Other Lovers, entitled
“In my Country.” A video of Kay reading this and another poem provide context,
wherein Kay, who was adopted in the1950s by white Scottish parents, narrates several
stories of white people relaying to her that being Black and being Scottish are a
contradiction. For instance, a white woman asking her mother “Is that your
daughter?” and demanding to know from Kay: “Where do you come from?”55 As a
Black person in Scotland, Kay is an interloper, always already undone and unfinished:
a woman passed round me

in a slow watchful circle,
as if I were a superstition;
or the worst dregs of her imagination,
so when she finally spoke
her words spliced into bars
of an old wheel. A segment of air.
Where do you come from?
56
‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.
My former graduate student, Kara Melton, calls this “moving through.” She explores
black mobility as a kind of constrained possibility with “moving through”
underscoring the physical cost of navigating the geographies of racism and anti-
blackness.57 What is the physiological cost? Is the claim to or of “these parts” possible
for black people? What other geographic options are there? No return. Heartbreak.58

28
Eeightt
The flesh is struggle for me. Why is that? Spillers and Wynter are very different in
Spillers gave us the flesh newly. The flesh terms of their modes of thought, how
in her well-known and well-cited im- they think and write; though, they both
portant essay, “Mama’s Baby,” is an undo love long complexly interlaced sen-
doing of the captive (enslaved) tences. What first connected their oeu-
body. Reading that essay, I remember vres for me were their considerations of
thinking, unlike the body, flesh “does” Black Studies, which for very different
something outside of captivity, outside reasons departed from most, if not all
the terms of plantocratic commodifica- other analyses of this anti-disciplinary
tion. This is memory work for me, as I “field.”59 Both thinkers are acutely
have only recently read work on Spillers, attuned the histories of Black Studies in
rather than Spillers herself (perhaps I am the university and Spillers’ question
a heretic for not returning, just as I am a about the status and scope of object of
heretic for not adoring James Baldwin— study in Black Studies was answered for
who I respect but do not adore). Of me by Wynter’s insistence on making the
course, you explore the work of flesh and human—both the countless different
enfleshment deeply in Habeas. I am not forms of heart/////break caused by Man
afraid to share that I struggled with this and the coeval existence of other genres
book; it was difficult for me to teach, to of the human in Black life—the focal
be very specific, and I had some difficulty point of Black thinking and action. This is
connecting Wynter to Spillers (my con- why I started my discussion of Wynter
fession is that perhaps my overinvest- and Spillers in Habeas Viscus with their
ment in the former has displaced the theorizations of Black studies rather than
latter). That aside, I keep thinking about other parts of their theoretical apparat-
the flesh that encases the body and, as uses. Wynter’s discussion of the flesh is
well, what is at stake in understanding not the same as Spillers’s, and my reading
the body and flesh as, analytically and of the flesh departs from both their inter-
theoretically, connectedly disconnected. I pretations, even as it builds on them.
guess I worry about privileging the flesh. More specially, the flesh exemplifies, for
When I read Wynter on flesh, I connect it me, the science of the word, because of
to ritual and rites—gendered storytelling its invocation of biology and the founda-
practices that reify humanity in genre tional mythologies of the Abrahamic reli-
specific terms. So the flesh is marked by gions, specifically their enmeshment in
knowledge, yet it is not, in its entirety, the annals of colonialism and thus in so-
knowledge itself. Instead, Wynter asks ciogenic inscriptions of particular modes
(me) how flesh has been folded into pre- of humanness. Wynter writes about it in
vailing systems of knowledge terms of the bifurcation between the
(29rivy29ateing Spillers’ inventions) as it fallen flesh and redeemed spirit that ini-
elicits a purely biocentric system as the tially marks the difference between the
fiction through which a new worldview celibate clergy “as the embodiment of the

29
must be engendered. The flesh, then, tells Spirit” and the non-celibate laity “as the
a story, but it must not be the story. I embodiment of the Fallen Flesh” during
want more praxis, and I am uncertain the the European Middle Ages.60 Later this
flesh can provide that praxis outside of master code transmutes into “rea-
the biocentric codes that render it so son/sensuality, rationality/irrationality in
richly meaningful. I have come to despise the reoccupied place of the matrix code
the body, as an analytical site—and I am of Redeemed Spirit/Fallen Flesh…thus
repeatedly disappointed and terrified be- creating “the new ‘idea of order’ on whose
cause it is always present in my refusal. I basis the coloniality of being, enacted by
do not think the flesh and the body are the dynamics of the relation between
the same, but I keep seeing bodies Man—overrepresented as the generic,
thrown everywhere, all over the page, ostensibly supracultural human—and its
without anything in them, not even eyes subjugated Human Others (i.e., Indians
or throats or muscles or blood or bones, and Negroes).”61 For Spillers the diver-
just empty bags of flesh. No hearts! gence between body and flesh represents
Heartless! Too many times analyses of “the central [distinction] between captive
the body, the black body, replicate that and liberated subject-positions” in the
singular Fanonian crisis (look, look, look! aftermath of the Middle Passage and
Look at blackness! Look! LOOK!) without plantation slavery in the Americas.62 She
using the lens he begins Black Skin with also adds the dimension of ungendering
(our genetic and social development are to the concept of the flesh, writing “this
shaped by prevailing systems of materialized scene of unprotected female
knowledge, beside ontogeny and phylog- flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’—of-
eny stands sociogeny, black-skin-white- fers a praxis and a theory; text for living
masks, there is no singularity). This is and for dying.”63 Finally, “the flesh”
why your discussion of intonation mat- moves us away from debates about “de-
ters to me, a lot—because intonation is humanization” and all the insufferable
not just the enunciation and performance body blah-blah-blah in academic dis-
of “look!”; intonation (“look!”) is reflexly course. The flesh is not merely inert vio-
felt (heartbreak) (which is not exactly af- lated matter but praxis incarnate. In sev-
fect, is it, but can be studied as such?) eral writings, Wynter uses flesh in this
Fanon centers the biologic without way, describing hybrid bios-mythois hu-
30rivyleging it as the only way to be or manness as theory made flesh, for in-
know or live black. Reading him with stance, when she writes: “The positive
Wynter allows us to notice how he does verbal meanings attributed to their re-
something really fantastic with the social spective modes of kind are alchemically
production of race precisely because he transformed into living flesh, as its mem-
does not lean on biology (skin) to wholly bers all reflexly subjectively experience
understand blackness, but rather themselves, in the mimetically desirable,
understands sociogeny as constituting because opiate- rewarded, placebo terms
and thus relational to the biological story of that mode of symbolic life prescribed

30
of our skin. This, for me, provides a by the storytelling code.”64 For me the
different way of thinking about race and term flesh conjures mattering move-
blackness, because the body in itself, by ments in Black that resolutely defy the
itself, (heartless), cannot sustain Fanon’s purely biocentric, precisely because of its
and Wynter’s nuanced worldviews. We complicated histories. At the same time,
can thus demand a different humanity flesh provides openings for different
that is already here, relational to but not formings and matterings beyond both
of the prevailing biocentric order… black Man and to some extent the human. My
life is the praxis of refusing such an order. work continues to center the ungendered
Heart-full and heartbroken. Look! Blap. flesh of Black life as praxis. Living in, liv-
Squonk. ing with. Boom.
Maybe one way to think race or Blackness is that it functions by making the biologic
reflexly real in the domain of social production: Blackness enfleshes social produc-
tion; Black life socializes the biologic outside the terms of dysselection. Trying to
make it real but compared to what?65
So, we are talking about relationality, and how extra-human devices and
intense narratives of love allow us to notice what is beautifully human about those
who have never been free. This sense of being, in relation to technologies—including
technologies that are bound up in unpleasant stories, like the TR-808—adds a layer to
what we know about black humanity. What we know, really well, is dehumanizing
objecthood and innovative resistance and the complex navigation of the structural,
gendered, colonial, plantocratic workings of racial capitalism. What extra-human
devices and narratives expose is an analytical pathway that is in articulation with
black humanity; that is, a lens or a framework or a worldview that is cognizant of, but
does not seek results or answers that are beholden to either oppression or resistance.
Put slightly differently, these extra-human devices and narratives expose navigation
without dwelling on its oppression-resistance poles, they expose what kind of
mechanisms and schemas and sounds and instruments (musical and not) help make
this world navigable for those who are, in most instances, disciplined and surveyed
and always imagined as static-in-place (look!). These extra-human devices are succor.
Mark Campbell discusses these kinds of possibilities through his work on turntables
and mix tapes.66 He argues, really beautifully, how the found objects and
technologies, which inform and enhance black cultural production and music
making, provide us with new ways of narrating humanity. This account does not split
the 808s from the performer, it does not deny the disappointing and repurposed and
sometimes awful and brutal history of 808s, it does not focus on the empty “body”
that is manipulating or repurposing or playing the 808s. Instead this narration of
humanity understands these moments, people, histories, beats, disappointments, as
co-instituting each other which, in turn, reframes blackness outside existing calcified
and superfluous and normative white supremacist guidelines (measured vis-à-vis
Man-as-human). With this, we have to ask, how is the navigation made and how does

31
the navigation feel? How does the succor offer relief or joy or sadness or heartbreak or
anger or the intensely beautiful, physiologically? This is, for me, a mathematics of
black humanity that already is; or the arithmetic of Black life that will have been.
We gon keep it bumpin while the 808 is jumpin’ 67
Wicked Mathematics.
You + me’s not just arithmetic

it’s wicked mathematics
the combinations we could do
would make your maths look like ABC68
In some ways we are splitting and overlapping racial processes (enfleshment

and navigation) in order to work out how extra-human technologies figure into black
life and humanity. I have been working with mathematics and other number systems
to try and think through these kinds of tensions and analytical difficulties.
Mathematics is, for me, an unfamiliar system of knowledge. I am not a
mathematician, but I am curious about how practices of categorization are not
always, for the unfree, equated with knowable classificatory systems that capture and
seal off their abjection. Mathematics underwrites multiple strands of Cartesian logics
and positivism, and, in terms of time and place, the practice of slavery is situated
firmly amidst European empiricism, various kinds of human and non-human data
collection, and matters of fact. In many ways, mathematics enumerates
commodification and dispossession through accounting and making black fact. As
noted above, the economy of black objecthood is long studied and theorized. My
question is, how do we think outside that system, if only transitorily, to draw
attention to black life? How has the practice of counting numbers—not even
mathematics, per se—fooled us into replicating black objecthood by rewarding
(academic and otherwise) systems of accumulation? Here we can stack up a whole
bunch of numbers: middle passage ledgers, the lashes and the cotton bails, counted
the uncountable Black trans-sex-worker deaths, the ten or sixty or seven men and
boys shot in the back in March 2014, the seven thousand, in 1998, women with broken
faces, the red records. Why are we only noticing those accounts that cannot bear
black life (the ledger)? We must, of course. We must unforget these numbers. But we
also know, for example, that the field of mathematics is vast (algebra, calculus,
geometry, logic, computation, graph theory, chaos theory, statistics, and much much
more), so why attach black history and black experience and black bodies and black
flesh only to a plantocratic accounting system that denies these other ways of
knowing numbers? This is not, then, about refuting mathematics; it is about

32
imagining black life from the perspective of struggle. For me, the science of the word
uses and dwells on that accounting system as a way to explode knowable
mathematical solutions (noticing the hugeness of this system of knowledge and
numbers, infinities and pi, the irresolvable), insisting that the word (poetics,
narrative) is implicit to that how we count what we count (we are responsible for, we
make and adore, the accounts and the accounting). At the same time, the science of
the word interrupts that system by noticing how sometimes it cannot capture other
ways of poetic relational knowing; the science of the word thus seeks out the ways
black people have understood themselves in numerical and mathematical ways that
are not so easily sutured to plantocratic and colonial accounting systems.69 Black life
and love are not something you can have, but something you do and can never get.
This returns me to the 808s or the LinnDrum machines or eeightt-ohh-
eeightt/eeightt-eeightt: here are mathematics—measured and unmeasured bam,
drop, eeightt—that reveal a new or different register of black life (I hope!): That,
perhaps, is wicked mathematics.
Wicked mathematics. Trying to calculate the incalculable, that which cannot
be captured by or in the sociogenic code of Man, but discloses and creates human life
as Black life. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra come to mind in terms
of “wicked mathematics,” since they all use mathematics, numbers, calculations,
tabulations, charts, tables with and against the master-codes of Man. Of course, on
the other side, stand slave ship registers, or school teacher’s ledger in Morrison’s
Beloved, which lists in different columns the animal and human characteristics of the
enslaved.70 And numbers are different from mathematics but they co-constitute one
another to make meaning, to tell the story, to bend or calcify how we know the world.
Du Bois and Wells-Barnett both deployed numbers to show how Black Life in the late
19th-century US was constituted by economic, political, sexual, and physical violence.
In her autobiography, Wells-Barnett states that she uses “the statistics of lynching [to]
prove that according to the charges given, not one-third of the men and women
lynched are charged with assaults on white women, and brand that statement as a
falsehood invented by the lynchers to justify acts of cruelty and outrage.”71 While
we’ve now come to realize the futility of this particular numbers game, which is why
there’s still the need to show that Black lives matter via the incessant cumulative
enumeration of Black deaths, there is a inventiveness and enfleshed livingness to
Wells-Barnett’s and Du Bois’s mathematics.72
Outside biocentric ledgers and coloniality, there is also the long tradition
playing the numbers in Afro-diasporic and other communities (Italian lotto, policy,
bolita, playing the bug, and so on). In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois writes:
“Gambling goes on almost openly in the slum sections and occasions, perhaps, more
quarreling and crime than any other single cause…” He then goes on to quote at
length an article from the Public Ledger:

33
Hundreds of poor people every day place upon the infatuating lottery money that had
better be spent for food and clothing. They actually deny themselves the necessaries
of life to gamble away their meagre income with small chance of getting any return….
Many children go hungry and with insufficient clothing as a result of policy
playing…The policy evil is, to my mind, the very worst that exists in our large cities as
73
affecting the poorer classes of people.
Clearly, these numbers perturb Du Bois, but he also states in another context: “history
writes itself in figures and diagrams,” for which one needs numbers, for sure. Such a
shame Du Bois could not see the history being written in the numeric playing of the
bug. Or is the playing the bug in the system, the conjuring of other a-systems, maybe
they’re eeightt-ohh-eeightt—eeightt-eeightt wedged between Black Life as world-
mattering and Black Life as world(de)forming? Racial capitalism draws a line between
sorting and playing, accounting and gambling, the (ledger) books and the
(scoreboard) books. The numbers are inhabited; mathematics provides a method that
determines the outcome. Heart/////Break.
Cardiomyopathy.
Something’s Jumpin’ in your Shirt.74
I read somewhere that you can die from heartbreak. You can die of a broken
heart. Heartbreak can lead to depression, mental health struggles, and heart disease
just as they can and do often produce irreparable heart////break. The American Heart
Association calls this “broken heart syndrome.”75
Broken heart syndrome can lead to severe, short-term heart muscle failure.
Broken heart syndrome is usually treatable.
The most common signs and symptoms of broken heart syndrome are chest pain and
shortness of breath. You can experience these things even if you have no history of heart
disease.
In broken heart syndrome, a part of your heart temporarily enlarges and doesn’t pump
well, while the rest of your heart functions normally or with even more forceful
contractions.
I have always known we could die from a broken heart. We may not go the way of all
flesh by and through and because of heartbreak. We may just die a little—those
moments when our heart doesn’t pump well, the shortness of breath, the constricted,
stifling circuits of chest pain. I realized, too, I cannot sufficiently work through
contradictory workings of love and anticipatory loss and so I get stuck, mid-
heartbreak. My heart keeps breaking, over and over, every single day. I can only

34
explain the feeling as cold air being shot through my upper chest. Freezing cold air
moving through my chest, day after day. It is not simply sorrow. It opens up, too, with
possibilities. Last summer, I woke up in the middle of the night with excruciating
pains in my chest. My first thought was: heart attack (family history, predisposition,
stress, and alla that) rather than heart/////break, because the purely physical is more
readily available as a diagnosis in a biocentric world. The throbbing aches got worse
whenever I tried to lay down. I waited to call the doctor’s office until the morning,
because I didn’t want to wake my sleeping daughters and subject them to the
potential heartbreak of having to worry about the health of their parent at such a
young age. After many hours of agony and speculation via numerous medical
websites, my physician confirmed to me that I was afflicted with was an acute case of
heartburn. Since heartburn is not a direct result of that particular hollow muscle, it
was always a mystery to me why it was called that in English. As consequence of
experiencing its painful boom so intensely in and around my heart, I finally
understood viscerally why this condition was named heartburn, and how it differed
from yet may be related to heart////break.
Can I get another take?
I wasn’t being honest in the last paragraph, taking an easy way out and not
truly resting with heart////break. My full armor was still on, it’s dazzling and
beautiful.76 My heartburn was related to heart///break. It has been almost ten years
now: Lawyers. Department of Children and Family Services. Police. Doctors. Custody
evaluators. Therapists. More lawyers. At some point, I am forced to justify to Them
why my experience of sexual violation/violence and my queerness do not make me an
unfit parent…Eviscerated silence. Boom. Heart////break.
This why I write and speak about ungendering/Blackqueerness and sexual
violence/violation in detached, hushed scholarly tonalities—armor on, decked out in
those gorgeously abstract gold fronts, like a shhh—, while knowing that I do so
because they mark the core of who I am. There I is, living in, living with.77 I try to strip
off the armor slowly, carefully but it’s difficult. The armor has merged with my
“natural” body, blanketing my flesh, enshrining my psyche, encasing that hollow
muscle. Fuck a cyborg, though, really. Boom…Like What?
Sitting on an airplane, I pause watching Moonlight for what must be the tenth
time; it reduces me to not just tears but abject bawling face and all the emotions
associated with it.78 As opposed to Mary J., I can’t even pretend that I’m not gon cry.79
Granted, I sob at many things: everything from Black Ink Crew, to Hortense Spillers’
sentences, to the worst manipulative Disney movies; and I still haven’t been able to
listen to Prince’s “Conditions of the Heart” or “Sometimes It Snows in April” since his
passing almost 18 months ago. Simply thinking about these songs brings tears to my
eyes. Still. And, while I have many intellectual reservations about Barry Jenkins’s film
and its reception, my critical shield washes away with blubbering, messy, tears
whenever I enter the world of this film. Undone every time, Moonlight hits me like
the full weight of twenty 808s; boooooom; heart////break. The film shatters my heart,

35
for myself, for all sensitive femme/feminine Black boys and splinters at a world so
intent on violently destroying our too-muchness, on paralyzing our wings, brutally
overseeing how our softness congeals into a tough, protective veneer. Where do you
go when your being is too much for this world? Where? Where is our love?
Though supremely frustrated that we do not see an adult version of the
Chiron played so brilliantly by Ashton Sanders in the second part of the film’s
triptych, I understand why the Trevante Rhodes’s Chiron in the third part must so
fiercely don his thick sheath of masculinity. For some of us it’s not protuberant
triceps and gold-plated grills but intricate theoretical vernaculars, themselves
extensions of necessary-for-survival-street-corner-verbal-dexterities, tumbling out our
mouths and dripping from our fingers, that are supposed enshrine us like intellectual
superpowers. Still the same function. We were never meant to survive into adulthood,
at least not as sensitive femme/feminine Black boys. How do you inhabit a universe,
where you can’t even be imagined utopically (like a grown Chiron portrayed by
Ashton Sanders), let alone tenderly, lovingly?
So, I began to weep for myself and all the Black boys like me, reflexly re-
collecting palpably, physically, physiologically, what it felt like, what it still sometimes
feels like to spend hours assembling and wedging into your armor just to walk down
the block, or to simply enter a room full of strangers, because something between
Infinity and Nothingness might pop off, sometimes a word, other times a look or a
slight bodily movement. I inspect my armor again, now roughly four decades old,
sensing that it has become a little too tight, a bit itchy, ripped there, chipped here,
and worn out all over. Living in, living with…heart/////break, possibilities, openings:
This is why you and I and we dance. We’ll go out to the floor.80
Loving intensely and then monumental loss. Loving quietly, consistently and
then booming hurt. We can also go the way of the flesh. We can die from a broken
heart. This is terrifying, particularly if understood in relation to the heartbreaking
history that underlies TR-808s. 808s break hearts. Boom. Jump. Succor. This is part of
what we want to understand and patiently learn. The long histories of racial violence,
the looming and real violations, the heart and the 808s, the mathematics and the
flesh, the science of the word—these are sites that may not ordinarily understood or
thought together, but when they are, they reveal black life and black livingness as
shifting locations enfleshed by the arteries of enduringly heartbreaking and joyful
routes and roots. The hollow muscular organ filled up.

36
v
Gratitude: Ray Zilli, Nick Mitchell, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Kris Manjapra, Demetrius
Eudell, and Simone Browne.
1 Kurt James Werner, Jonathan S. Abel, Julius O. Smith III, “A Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable,
Digital Model of the Roland TR-808 Bass Drum Circuit,” Conference Proceedings of the 17th International
Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-14), Erlangen, Germany, September 1-5, 2014: 1-8; On April 1,
2017, in the midst of writing this piece, Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of the Roland Corporation and Ace
Electronic Industries, died. Kakehashi developed the Roland TR-808, the Roland CR-78, MIDI (Musical
Instrument Digital Interface), and many other instrument technologies including the R1 Rhythm Ace
that, in part, underlies the TR-808.
2 Kurt James Werner, Jonathan S. Abel, Julius O. Smith III, “A Physically-Informed,” 1.
5 Vèvè A Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Conde’s Heremakhonon.” In Out of the
Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory. Trenton: Africa
World Press, 1990.
6
Kelly Rowland, “Like This,” from Ms. Kelly; Mya, “My Love Is Like Wo,” from Moodring; Something for the
People, “My Love is the Shhh!,” from This Time It’s Personal.
7 Maze ft. Frankie Beverly, “Joy and Pain,” from Joy and Pain.
8 Sparkle’s niece was one of the first girls to accuse Kelly of sexual abuse and Sparkle later testified against
Kelly during his 2008 trial for child pornography charges.
9
Kelly’s recorded output contains just as many, if not more, misogynist entries, for instance “Feelin’ on Yo
Booty” or “It Seems Like You’re Ready.” On the R. Kelly as pied piper and the Pied Piper legend see see:
Chris Heath, “Why R. Kelly Calls himself ‘the Pied Piper of R & B’,” in GQ, February 3, 2016:
http://www.gq.com/story/why-r-kelly-calls-himself-pied-piper.
10
Beth Richie shows how intimate households, communities, and the state often work in concert to create a
“violence matrix,” which consists of “physical assaults against women,” different forms of “sexual
aggression,” and emotional exploitation. Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s
Prison Nation. New York: New York University Press, 2012, 132-133.
11
Whitney Houston, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?,” from Whitney.
12
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “How We Make Black Girls Grow Up Too Fast,” New York Times, July 29,
2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/Sunday/how-we-make-black-girls-grow-up-too-
fast.html. See also: Jim DeRogatis, “R. Kelly Is Holding Women Against Their Will In A “Cult,” Parents
Told Police” BuzzFeed (July 17, 2017): https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimderogatis/parents-told-police-r-
kelly-is-keeping-women-in-a-cult?utm_term=.vnpb9kp5Y#.qa591lOqB.
13 Jessica Hopper, “Read the ‘Stomach-Churning’ Sexual Assault Accusations Against R. Kelly in Full.”
Village Voice (16 Dec. 2013).
14 Prince, “Computer Blue,” from Purple Rain.
15 Chris Heath, “The Confessions of R. Kelly” GQ Magazine, January 20, 2016 http://www.gq.com/story/r-
kelly-confessions. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization.” In Geographies of Global Change:
Remapping the World, edited by Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor, and Michael Watts, 261-274.
Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, 261. See also: Beth Richie, Arrested Justice.
16 “Slaves were the ghosts in the machine of kinship.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, 139.
17 Katherine McKittrick, “Fantastic/Still/Life: On Richard Iton (A Working Paper).” Contemporary Political
Theory (2015): 28; En Vogue, “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” from Funky Divas.
18 See http://www.mtv.com/news/1696376/natina-reed-blaque-dead/.

37
19 Sidney Madden, “Today in Hip-Hop: Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes Burns Down Andre Rison’s Mansion.” XXL 9
(June 2015).
20 “It scares me to feel this way,” Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” from Private Dancer
21 Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” Souls 18:1 (2016): 166-173.
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, “Where Is the Love?” In her 1978 essay that carries the same title as
this song, June Jordan writes: “as a Black feminist, I must ask myself: Where is the love? How is my own
lifework serving to end these tyrannies, these corrosions of sacred possibility?” June Jordan, Civil Wars:
Observations from the Front Lines of America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981.
22
Dan Rys, “Afrika Bambaataa Sexual Abuse Allegations: What’s Been Said, Disputed & What’s Next.”
Billboard Magazine (10 May 2016). http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7364592/afrika-
bambaataa-abuse-allegations.
23 David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985, 18. cf. Rinaldo Walcott,
“Black Men in Frocks: Sexing Race in a Gay Ghetto (Toronto).” In Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian
Cities, edited by Cheryl Teelucksingh, 121-134. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006.
24 See Jan Gaye and David Ritz. After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye. New York: Harper Collins, 2015.
25 cf. Dina Georgis, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013.
26 Kanye West, “RoboCop,” from 808s and Heartbreak.
27 Marlene NourbeSe Philip, “Dis Place: The Space Between.” In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and
Theory, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 287-
316. See also: Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 46-52.
28 Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience,
and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’” In National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America. Edited by
Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana. London; New York: Routledge, 2001, 30-66. See
also: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008
[1952] and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1972 [1955]. Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge.” In Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism
and the Caribbean, edited by Michael Richardson, 134-146. Translated by Michael Richardson and
Krzysztof Fijalkowski. New York: Verso, 1996 [1946].
29 See Sylvia Wynter, interview by David Scott. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with
Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 4:2 (2000): 119-207.
30 Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give
Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Ed. Katherine
McKittrick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015; 9-89.
31
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (119). On “suffocating reification” see pp. 89.
32 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2007; David J. Levitin, This is Your
Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Plume, 2007; Aniruddh D. Patel, Music, Language
and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
33 This is in contradistinction to “dysgraphia” (the inability to write due to brain damage or disorder,
deployed by Christina Sharpe) and “aphasia” (a communication disorder that results from damage to the
parts of the brain that contain language, a word deployed by Frank B. Wilderson III). Here, I think, Sylvia
Wynter’s science of the word is especially helpful. In my understanding, dysgraphia-aphasia are mobilized by
Sharpe and Wilderson as “literary” or “theoretical” terms that help them think about anti-blackness and
other forms of oppression. These terms help the authors tease out how some people cannot see or write or
imagine black humanity. These terms are applied to our existing biocentric system. These terms help the
authors make sense of black dehumanization. These terms help the authors work out how when some
folks see black, they can only enunciate it in relation to hegemonic white supremacist normative
conceptions of humanity. Yet both terms, dysgraphia and aphasia, carry the heavy clinical weight that is

38
paired with learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, and other neuroatypicalities. In addition to
the taxing weight laid on those who are cast, in these scholarly works, as neurologically damaged and
imperfect (disabled)—a move which refuses human-impairment as an alternative form of humanity—I
want to suggest that if they were informed in any way by Wynter’s framework they would have (perhaps)
shied away from deploying-and-emptying these terms. Or, alternatively and definitely more interestingly, the
authors may have understood these terms as simultaneously clinical-narrative. One cannot discount the
clinical underpinnings of these terms—no matter how hard one tries! So, what is at stake, for (black and
non-black) neuroatypical and non-neurotypical people, for (black and non-black) people with learning
disabilities, for neurotypical (black and non-black) people when brain dysfunction, symbolically, explains
racism or anti-blackness or the inability to “see” or “read” black “correctly”? What happens when
“illness” or “disorder” explains why we, or why they, hate? How are race and disability — impairment as
the embodiment of blackness or impairment as projection of anti-blackness—being analytically mobilized
to understand racial violence? And how do we grapple with the unsettling numbers, the math, the
accumulations, the reams of paper that read: black folks with impairments are more likely to be
incarcerated, murdered by police, and so on? What of the story of violence resulting in brain damage,
communication disorder, the inability to write? What Wynter taught me [Katherine] is that the
bifurcation of science and poetics is a kind of disciplined brutality. I have spent a lot of time thinking
about how the willful separation of the literary and the scientific does the work of colonial positivism—
suggesting, explicitly, that there are kinds and types of discreet knowledge while also hiving off ways of
knowing and being. So, dysgraphia-aphasia can never be simply symbolic or metaphoric or literary. They
are deeply clinical, and they are lived, too, as clinically-poetic narratives within our prevailing system of
knowledge that despises difference. If we trust Wynter’s formulation of bios-mythois [and I, Katherine,
do]—it means these terms are always bios-mythois. Just as the 808s cannot be dislodged from that awful
violence and be rendered “pure technology” and without history, the clinical-medical-neurological-and-
poetic contours of impairment and neuroatypicality-non-neurotypicality cannot be dislodged from
dysgraphia-aphasia. If this (a metaphorically impaired humanity) informs the analytical frame then,
theoretically, it risks reflexly reproducing a dehumanizing law-like logic wherein ability and
neurotypicality actualize what it means to be totally and fully human. This not only legitimizes biocentric
corporeal categories in hierarchical terms, it also fails to imagine relational struggles across a range of
corporeal and racial identifications. Singularity is required and Man-as-human restfully and stably
reproduces itself at the apex of this formulation. With this, the trope of the “disorder”—which is being
mobilized as a way to understand, say, racism or anti-blackness or scripts that degrade blackness—is
locked into a biocentric frame, with disability, neuroatypicality, illegibility, in fact, inadvertently
positioning the authors of the symbolic-literary dysgraphia-aphasia as normally and normatively able,
typical, legible, non-disordered! Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016; Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the
Political Trials of Black Insurgents.” InTensions Journal 5 (2011),
http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/frankbwildersoniiiarticle.pdf. See also: Sylvia Wynter
and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different
Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 9-89.
34 Katherine McKittrick, “Rebellion/Invention/Groove.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, 20
(2016): 79-91.
35
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997.
36 “No pain is forever.” Rihanna, “Hard,” feat. Young Jeezy, from Rated R.
37 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 7.
38 Much of our thoughts on Fenty were inspired by Alisa Bierria’s “’Where Them Bloggers At’: Reflections

39
on Rihanna, Accountability, and Survivor Subjectivity.” Social Justice, 37:4; Nicole R. Fleetwood, “The
Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire.” African American Review 45:3 (2012): 419-435;
Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party. Los Angeles: Dominica Publishing, 2016; Chris Randle, “‘I Feel Like
Everything Shouldn’t Exist’: An Interview with Hannah Black.” Hazlitt (23 August 2016).
39
Alyssa Bailey, “Rihanna Talks Chris Brown, Staying Single, and Why She’s Not Having Casual Sex.” ELLE
(6 October 2015).
40 Mariah Carey, “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak,” from Charmbracelet, and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions,
“Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken,” from Rattlesnakes.
41
Similarly, in 2014 a surveillance video of Janay Rice being brutally beaten by her husband, football player
Ray Rice, in an elevator was made public by TMZ and circulated widely on social media.
42 Rihanna, “We Found Love,” from Talk That Talk.
43 cf. Prince, “Sex in the Summer,” on Emancipation. Several scientists and theorists have postulated that
humans can not only discern lower frequencies better than high ones, but that this is partially a
consequence of fetuses hearing the lower frequencies of the mother’s heartbeat and of her voice in utero,
which is crucial for early neural development. See Michael J. Hove, et al. “Superior Time Perception for
Lower Musical Pitch Explains Why Bass-Ranged Instruments Lay down Musical Rhythms.” Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 111:28 (2014): 10383-10388.
44 Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You: The BeyHive.” NPR.org: The Record Music
News from NPR (17 Mar. 2014).
45 Beth Richie, Arrested Justice, 21-22. Similarly, Bierria remarks: “Black women who are victims of violence
are not simply accused of bringing it upon themselves, they are dis-positioned as its perpetrator…
Seemingly, when black women are violated, their experiences of it and testimonies of resilience and
resistance are vulnerable to politics that define their actions as instigating the violence.” Bierria, 106
46 Though I’m not sure whether this is apocryphal or not, Fenty was so enamored with this scene that she
did not charge a licensing fee for the film’s use of “Diamonds” in its entirety, as is customary. This is
complicated by the fact that the director of the film is a white French woman, Céline Sciamma. I raise this
primarily to bring into focus the labor requested of Fenty in this context.
47 Rihanna, “Diamonds,” from Unapologetic.
48
Hortense J. Spillers, “‘Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe’: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White, and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 [1987], 203-229.
49 This is really different than the idea of “the cyborg” which is, for both of us, a figure that extends the
colonial project precisely because it seeks to dislodge itself from the flesh, denies practices of black and
non-black servitude, even if sutured to these enfleshments and embodied racial economies in abstract
refusal.
50
Timbaland, feat. Brandy “808”
51 Alexander G. Weheliye, “Rhythms of Relation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 2.
edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 361-379. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
52 Jayson Greene, “Is Rihanna the Most Influential Pop Singer of the Last Decade? Turn Your Ear a Certain
Way and You Can Hear Her Everywhere.” Pitchfork. While Fenty has spoken about feeling the need to
‘tone down’ using the inflections of her mother tongue, Bajan Creole, both in her singing and speech, it
bears mentioning that she has consistently recorded songs (“Dem Haters,” “Man Down,” etc.), beginning
with her 2005 debut single “Pon de Replay,” that have deployed Bajan Creole (and other Afro-Caribbean
intonations). Fenty has also collaborated with Caribbean artists such as Dwane Husbands and Vybz
Kartel
53 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 121-141.
54 New Edition, “N.E. Heartbreak,” from Heart Break.
55 Pamela Robertson-Pearce, “Jackie Kay,” In Person: 30 Poets, DVD format. London: Bloodaxe Books, 2008.
56 Jackie Kay, Other Lovers. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993, 24.

40
57 Kara Melton, ‘A Kind of Logic, A Kind of Dominant Logic’: Navigating Colonialism, Honoring Black Mobility, and
Thinking on Moving Through, MA Thesis, Queen’s University, 2016.
58 Katherine McKittrick, “Worn Out.” Southeastern Geographer 57:1 (2017): 96-100. See also: Dionne Brand, A
Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday, 2002.
59
Hortense J. Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date (1994).” In Black, White, and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 428-470. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Sylvia
Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our
Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In Not Only the
Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis Ricardo Gordon and Jane Anna
Gordon, 107-169. Boulder: Paradigm, 2006.
60 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After
Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003): 257-337; 278.
61 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 287-88.
62 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 206.
63 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 208. While Spillers highlights the specificity of the ungendering of Black women
here, a different part of the essay she refers to the “ungendering and defacing project of African persons.”
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 214.
64 Wynter and McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 34. Variations of this phrase also
appear in the following essays: Sylvia Wynter, “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The
Cinematic Text after Man;” “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth?’ Female Circumcision, Lost Origins,
and the Aculturalism of Feminist/Western Thought;” Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis—
Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto; “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a
Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity;” “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’:
Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” For access to Wynter’s articles and essays free of charge, please
mail a request to True Leap Press. *Our collective is recirculating scanned copies of articles for
educational purposes only.
65 Roberta Flack, “Compared to What?,” from First Take.
66 Mark V. Campbell, “Everything’s Connected: A Relationality Remix, A Praxis.” The CLR James Journal
20:1/2 (2014): 97-114.
67 Kelis, “Bossy,” from Kelis Was Here.
68 Nicolette, “Wicked Mathematics,” from Now is Early.
69 This also points to mathematics that are not fully sutured to colonial accounting systems—African fractals
or “anumeric” cultures, for example —which points to other ways of knowing. See: Mike Vuolo. “What
Happens When a Language Has No Numbers?” Slate (16 Oct. 2013); Misty Sol, “Hidden Figure: A
Meditation on Genius and the African Origin of Math.” Philadelphia Printworks (26 February 2017).
70 Toni Morrison, Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.
71 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972, 136.
72 W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Program for a Sociological Society.” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers. “A software bug is an error,
flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or
unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug.
73 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro. Philadelphia: Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, 1899,
265.
74
Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra, “Something’s Jumpin’ in Your Shirt.”
75 American Heart Association, “Is Broken Heart Syndrome Real?”
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/More/Cardiomyopathy/Is-Broken-Heart-Syndrome-
Real_UCM_448547_Article.jsp#.WNk5fv21vfY. See also: Iain M. Carey, Stephen DeWilde, Tess Harris,
Christina R. Victor, Derek G. Cook, “Increased Risk of Acute Cardiovascular Events After Partner

41
Bereavement: A Matched Cohort Study.” JAMA Internal Medicine 174:4 (2014): 598-605.
76 Dawn Richard, Armor On.
77 The Notorious B.I.G., “One More Chance (Remix).”
78 Moonlight. Barry Jenkins, dir. Lionsgate, 2016.
79
Mary J. Blige, “Not Gon’ Cry,” from Waiting to Exhale (Original Soundtrack Album).
80 Kanye West, “Paranoid,” from 808s and Heartbreak.

42

808S & Heartbreak: Katherine Mckittrick & Alexander G. Weheliye

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Image credit: Ray Zilli (2017)

808s & Heartbreak

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‘Cause I’ll be goin’ boom like an 808

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We Don’t Have Much of a Relationship Now.

Robyn Rihanna Fenty embodies a number of admirable qualities as a

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Black women in vulnerable positions within disadvantaged communities fall so far

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You hear me from a block away, I still got getaway

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(human + machines + human heart) x rhythm ó technology

Spreading fast and there’s no cure (and there’s no cure)

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a woman passed round me

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We gon keep it bumpin while the 808 is jumpin’ 67

You + me’s not just arithmetic

In some ways we are splitting and overlapping racial processes (enfleshment

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Something’s Jumpin’ in your Shirt.74

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