CMAC Lecture: R&B Music and Critical Fabulation in the Now

Alexander G. Weheliye, PhD
Thursday, March 17th, 2022 4:30 – 6:00 PM
Franklin Humanities Institute, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (Bay 4, C105)

Good Days: R&B Music and Critical Fabulation in the Now

As a genre with complex aesthetic and political parameters as well historical lineages and sedimentations, contemporary R&B sonically chronicles and theorizes the beautiful and communicative fluctuating contours of Black interior life, interpersonal relationships, and erotics under protracted genocidal conditions. This talk hears current R&B music as an enfleshed archive of Black queer life. In doing so, recent R&B music becomes a major site for critical fabulation in the present, a concept/method that has heretofore been deployed primarily in relation to the past.