Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

SO! Reads: Danielle Shlomit Sofer’s Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music

Distance, therefore, preserves a European austerity in recorded musical practices, and electroacoustic practice is no exception; it is perhaps even responsible for reinvigorating a colonial posterity in contemporary music as so many examples in this book follow this pattern–Danielle Shlomit Sofer, Sex Sounds, 14. 

Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music (MIT Press, 2022) by Danielle Shlomit Sofer brings a complex analysis for contemporary de-colonial, queer and feminist readers. This book did its best to sustain an argument diving into eleven case studies and strongly problematising the Western white cis gaze. Sofer offers readers a new perspective in both the history of music and the decolonisation of that history. 

In a moment when discussions of consent, censorship, pleasure, and surveillance are reshaping how we think about media, Sofer asks: What does sex sound like, and why does it matter? Their analysis cuts across high art and popular culture, from avant-garde compositions to pop music to porn, revealing how sonic expressions of sex are never neutral—they’re deeply entangled in gendered, racialized, and heteronormative structures. In doing so, Sex Sounds resonates with broader critical work on listening as a political act, aligning with ongoing conversations in sound studies about the ethics of hearing and the politics of voice, noise, and silence

The main focus of Sex Sounds is the historical loop of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Sofer writes from the perspective of a mixed-race, nonbinary Jewish scholar specializing in music theory and musicology. They argue that the way the Western world teaches music history involves hegemonic narratives. In other words,  the author’s impetus is to highlight the construction of mythological figures such as Pierre Schaeffer in France and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany who represent the canon of the Eurocentric music phenomena. 

Sex Sounds specifically follows the concept of  “Electrosexual Music,” defined by Sofer as electroacoustic Sound and Music interacting with sex and eroticism as socialized aesthetics. The issue of representation in music is a key research focus navigating questions such as: “How does music present sex acts and who enacts them? ” as well as: “how does a composer represent sexuality? How does a performer convey sexuality? And how does a listener interpret sexuality?” (xxiv & xxix). Moreover, Sofer traces: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii) as the result of white male privilege and the historical harm and violence this means (xiix & 271).

By exploring answers to these questions, Sofer successfully exposes how electroacoustic sexuality has historically operated as a constant presence in many music genres, as well as proving that music and sound did not begin in Europe nor belongs only to the Anglo-European provincial cosmos.  Sex Sounds gives visibility to peripheral voices ignored by the Eurocentric canon, arguing for a new history of music where countries such as Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Japan or Korea are central.  

Sofer further vivisects the meaning of sexual sounds as not only Eurocentric and colonial but patriarchal and sexist. What is the history behind sex sounds in the electroacoustic music field? Can we find liberation in sex sounds or have they only reproduced dominance? Which role do sex sounds play in the territories of otherness and racial representation? Are there examples where minoritized people have reclaimed their voice? Sex is part of our humanity. But how do sex sounds dehumanize female subjects? These are more of the fundamental questions Sofer responds to in this study. 

“Sin” image by Flickr User Derek Gavey CC BY 2.0


I aim, first and foremost, to show that electrosexual music is far representative a collection than the typically presented electroacoustic figures -supposedly disinterested, disembodied, and largely white cis men from Europe and North America –Sofer, Sex Sounds,(xvi). 

The time frame of the study ranges from 1950 until 2012, analysing four case studies. Sofer divides the book in two parts: Part I: “Electroacoustics of the Feminized Voice” and Part II: “Electrosexual Disturbance.” The first part contextualizes “electrosexual” music within the dominant cis white racial frame. The main argument is to demonstrate how many canonic electroacoustic works in the history of Western sound have sustained an ongoing dominance as a historical habit locating the male gaze at the center as well as instrumentalizing the ‘feminized voice’ as mere object of desire without personification and recognition as fundamental actor in the compositions. Under such a premise, Sofer vivisects sound works such as “Erotica” by the father of Musique Concretè Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry (1950-1951), Luc Ferrari’s “les danses organiques” (1973) and Robert Normandeu’s “Jeu de Langues” (2009), among other pieces. 

Luc Ferrrari’s work from 1973 is one of many examples in which Sofer makes evident the question of consent, since the women’s voices he includes were used in his work without their knowledge, a pattern of objectivation that mirrors structures of patriarchal domination. Sofer “defines and interrogates the assumed norms of electroacoustic sexual expression in works that represent women’s presumed sexual experience via masculinist heterosexual tropes, even when composed by women” (xivii-xiviii). Sofer emphasises the existence of  “distance” as a gendered trope in which women’s audible sexual pleasure is presented as “evidence” in the form of sexualized and racialized intramusical tropes. Philosophically speaking, this phenomena, Sofer argues, goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche and his understanding of the “women’s curious silence” (xxvii). In other words, a woman can be curious but must remain silent and in the shadows.  

This is the case in Schaeffer and Henry’s “Erotica” (1950-1951), one of the earliest colonial impetus to electrosexual music in which female voices are both present and erased, present in the recording but erased as subjects of sonic agency, since the composers did not credit the woman behind the voice recordings. She has no name nor authorship, but her sexualized voice is the main element in the composition. This paradox shows the issue of prioritising the ‘Western’ white European cis male gaze. This gaze uses women’s sexuality as a commerce where only the composer benefits from this use. This exposes the problem of labor and exploitation within electroacoustic practice historically dominated by white men. 

“Erotica” stands out for its sensual tension, abstract eroticism, and experimental use of the body as both subject and instrument. This work belongs to the hegemonic narrative of electroacoustic music with the use of sex sounds as aesthetic objects that insinuate erotic arousal as a construct of the male gaze. 

Through examples like “Erotica” Sofer strongly questions the exclusion of women as active agents of aesthetic sonic creation since: “electroacoustic spaces have long excluded women’s contributions as equal creators to men, who are more typically touted as composers and therefore compensated with prestige in the form of academic positions or board dominations” (xxxix). This book considers: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii). Here we navigate the questions of how something is presented, by whom, and with which profit or intention. In other words, how sounds: “are created, for what purposes, and in turn, how sounds are interpreted and understood” (xxxiii).These are problems rooted in both patriarchy and capitalism. 

This book is a strong contribution to decolonize the history of music as we know it, although the citations here could be richer, including studies by Rachel McCarthy (“Marking the ‘Unmarked’ Space: Gendered Vocal Construction in Female Electronic Artists” 2014),  Tara Rodgers (“Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography” 2015), and the work of Louise Marshall and Holly Ingleton, who used intersectional feminist frameworks to analyze the work of marginalized composers (including women of color) and the curatorial practices that shape electronic music history. Also, not to forget: Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988).

Embed from Getty Images

Musical artist Sylvester

I argue that, although many composers of color work in electronic music, the search term ‘electroacoustic’ remains exclusionary because of who declares themselves as an advocate of this music, and not necessarily in how their music is made–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xiv).

After a deep dive into the genealogy of the patriarchal practices in electroacoustic music understood as electrosexual works (hence: “Sex is only re-presented in music p. xxix), Sofer moves to the territory of feminist contra-narratives. In the second part of their study, Sofer offers sonic practices and concrete examples that: “break the electroacoustic mold either by consciously objecting to its narrow constraints or by emerging from, building on, and, in a sense, competing with a completely different historical trajectory” (xlvi). Contra-narratives from the racialized periphery and underground landscapes appear in this book as case studies to hold the argument and expand the homocentric and patriarchal telos found even in the sonic archives as well as the Western theoretical corpus. These ‘Others’ reclaim their voices going a step further and gaining recognition. 

After examining examples of racialisation and objectification, Sofer selects some case studies from 1975 to 2013 in the second chapter of this section titled: “Electrosexual Disturbance.”  In this section, Sofer also points to new forms of exclusion and instrumentalisation via “racial othering,” specifically in the context of popular music such as Disco where we find an emphasis on the feminized voice. Disco, as a genre rooted in Black, queer, and marginalized communities, inherently grappled with racial and gendered dynamics. Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) exemplifies this tension.

The track’s erotic vocal performance (23 simulated orgasms over 16 minutes) became emblematic of the hypersexualization of Black women in popular music. Summer’s persona as the “first lady of love” reinforced stereotypes of Black female sexuality as inherently exotic or excessive, a trope traced to racist and sexist historical narratives. Simultaneously, disco provided a space for liberation: Black and LGBTQ+ artists like Summer, Sylvester, and Gloria Gaynor used the genre to assert agency over their identities and bodies, challenging mainstream exclusion. The tropes of sex and race are a paradoxical combination bringing both oppression as well as liberation. 

Sofer argues that Summers was commercially recognized but her figure as a composer was destroyed, creating consequently a hierarchy of labor. She was acknowledged for her amazing sexualized voice and performance on stage, but not recognized as a musician or equal to music producers. Here we see the practice of epistemological discrimination and extreme racial sexualisation. On the positive side, Summer became the Black Queen idol for gay liberation. Nevertheless, she remained as the sexualized and racial voice of the seventies.    

Sofer also presents the case of ex-sex worker, sex-educator and radical ecosex-activist Annie Sprinkle collaborating in a post-porn art video with the legendary Texan and lesbian composer Pauline Oliveros. For Sprinkle and Oliveros, Sofer offers a different phenomena at work, since both queer-women/Lesbian-women collaborated from the point of feminist independence and sexual liberation coming together for educational purposes.

‘Sluts & Goddesses (1992)’ promotional image, courtesy of streaming service, MUBI

Sluts & Goddesses (1992) is a porn film with an Oliveros soundtrack, produced by radical women– with only women–in a self-determined frame. The movie offers an example of collaboration moving from avantgarde sound composition expertise to trashy whoring and interracial lesbian power. This example was rare, but inspiring for the coming generations.  Two lesbian Titans united for electrosexual disturbance from the feminist gaze, Sprinkle and Oliveros were a duo that broke silence.

This book revisits the acousmatic in its electronic manifestations to examine and interrogate sexual and sexualized assumptions underwriting electroacoustic musical philosophies.–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xxi)

Sofer’s Sex Sounds enters into a vital and still-emerging conversation about how sound—particularly sonic expressions of sex and eroticism—shapes, disrupts, and reinscribes power. At a time when sonic studies increasingly reckon with embodiment, affect, and intimacy, Sofer brings a feminist and queer critique to the center of how we listen to, interpret, and culturally regulate the sounds of sex. Their book invites us to reconsider not only what we hear in erotic audio, but how we’ve been taught—socially, politically, morally—to hear it.

This book doesn’t just fill a gap—it pushes the field toward a more nuanced, bodily-aware mode of scholarship. For SO! readers, Sex Sounds offers both a provocation and a methodology: it challenges us to hear differently, to ask how power works not only through what is seen or said, but through what is moaned, whispered, muffled, or made to be heard too loudly.

—

Featured Image: “Stamen,” by Flickr User Sharonolk, CC BY 2.0

—

Verónica Mota Galindo is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Berlin, where they study philosophy at the Freie Universität. Their work goes beyond the academic sphere, blending sound art, critical epistemology, and community engagement to make complex philosophical ideas accessible to broader audiences. As a dedicated educator and sound artist, Mota Galindo bridges the gap between academic research and lived material experience, inviting others to explore the transformative power of critical thought and creative expression. Committed to bringing philosophy to life outside traditional boundaries, they inspire new ways of thinking aimed at emancipation of the human and non-human for collective survival.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

Into the Woods: A Brief History of Wood Paneling on Synthesizers*–Tara Rodgers

Ritual, Noise, and the Cut-up: The Art of Tara Transitory—Justyna Stasiowska 

SO! Reads: Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin –Enikő Deptuch Vághy 

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

SO! Reads: Danielle Shlomit Sofer’s Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music

Distance, therefore, preserves a European austerity in recorded musical practices, and electroacoustic practice is no exception; it is perhaps even responsible for reinvigorating a colonial posterity in contemporary music as so many examples in this book follow this pattern–Danielle Shlomit Sofer, Sex Sounds, 14. 

Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music (MIT Press, 2022) by Danielle Shlomit Sofer brings a complex analysis for contemporary de-colonial, queer and feminist readers. This book did its best to sustain an argument diving into eleven case studies and strongly problematising the Western white cis gaze. Sofer offers readers a new perspective in both the history of music and the decolonisation of that history. 

In a moment when discussions of consent, censorship, pleasure, and surveillance are reshaping how we think about media, Sofer asks: What does sex sound like, and why does it matter? Their analysis cuts across high art and popular culture, from avant-garde compositions to pop music to porn, revealing how sonic expressions of sex are never neutral—they’re deeply entangled in gendered, racialized, and heteronormative structures. In doing so, Sex Sounds resonates with broader critical work on listening as a political act, aligning with ongoing conversations in sound studies about the ethics of hearing and the politics of voice, noise, and silence

The main focus of Sex Sounds is the historical loop of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Sofer writes from the perspective of a mixed-race, nonbinary Jewish scholar specializing in music theory and musicology. They argue that the way the Western world teaches music history involves hegemonic narratives. In other words,  the author’s impetus is to highlight the construction of mythological figures such as Pierre Schaeffer in France and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany who represent the canon of the Eurocentric music phenomena. 

Sex Sounds specifically follows the concept of  “Electrosexual Music,” defined by Sofer as electroacoustic Sound and Music interacting with sex and eroticism as socialized aesthetics. The issue of representation in music is a key research focus navigating questions such as: “How does music present sex acts and who enacts them? ” as well as: “how does a composer represent sexuality? How does a performer convey sexuality? And how does a listener interpret sexuality?” (xxiv & xxix). Moreover, Sofer traces: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii) as the result of white male privilege and the historical harm and violence this means (xiix & 271).

By exploring answers to these questions, Sofer successfully exposes how electroacoustic sexuality has historically operated as a constant presence in many music genres, as well as proving that music and sound did not begin in Europe nor belongs only to the Anglo-European provincial cosmos.  Sex Sounds gives visibility to peripheral voices ignored by the Eurocentric canon, arguing for a new history of music where countries such as Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Japan or Korea are central.  

Sofer further vivisects the meaning of sexual sounds as not only Eurocentric and colonial but patriarchal and sexist. What is the history behind sex sounds in the electroacoustic music field? Can we find liberation in sex sounds or have they only reproduced dominance? Which role do sex sounds play in the territories of otherness and racial representation? Are there examples where minoritized people have reclaimed their voice? Sex is part of our humanity. But how do sex sounds dehumanize female subjects? These are more of the fundamental questions Sofer responds to in this study. 

“Sin” image by Flickr User Derek Gavey CC BY 2.0


I aim, first and foremost, to show that electrosexual music is far representative a collection than the typically presented electroacoustic figures -supposedly disinterested, disembodied, and largely white cis men from Europe and North America –Sofer, Sex Sounds,(xvi). 

The time frame of the study ranges from 1950 until 2012, analysing four case studies. Sofer divides the book in two parts: Part I: “Electroacoustics of the Feminized Voice” and Part II: “Electrosexual Disturbance.” The first part contextualizes “electrosexual” music within the dominant cis white racial frame. The main argument is to demonstrate how many canonic electroacoustic works in the history of Western sound have sustained an ongoing dominance as a historical habit locating the male gaze at the center as well as instrumentalizing the ‘feminized voice’ as mere object of desire without personification and recognition as fundamental actor in the compositions. Under such a premise, Sofer vivisects sound works such as “Erotica” by the father of Musique Concretè Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry (1950-1951), Luc Ferrari’s “les danses organiques” (1973) and Robert Normandeu’s “Jeu de Langues” (2009), among other pieces. 

Luc Ferrrari’s work from 1973 is one of many examples in which Sofer makes evident the question of consent, since the women’s voices he includes were used in his work without their knowledge, a pattern of objectivation that mirrors structures of patriarchal domination. Sofer “defines and interrogates the assumed norms of electroacoustic sexual expression in works that represent women’s presumed sexual experience via masculinist heterosexual tropes, even when composed by women” (xivii-xiviii). Sofer emphasises the existence of  “distance” as a gendered trope in which women’s audible sexual pleasure is presented as “evidence” in the form of sexualized and racialized intramusical tropes. Philosophically speaking, this phenomena, Sofer argues, goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche and his understanding of the “women’s curious silence” (xxvii). In other words, a woman can be curious but must remain silent and in the shadows.  

This is the case in Schaeffer and Henry’s “Erotica” (1950-1951), one of the earliest colonial impetus to electrosexual music in which female voices are both present and erased, present in the recording but erased as subjects of sonic agency, since the composers did not credit the woman behind the voice recordings. She has no name nor authorship, but her sexualized voice is the main element in the composition. This paradox shows the issue of prioritising the ‘Western’ white European cis male gaze. This gaze uses women’s sexuality as a commerce where only the composer benefits from this use. This exposes the problem of labor and exploitation within electroacoustic practice historically dominated by white men. 

“Erotica” stands out for its sensual tension, abstract eroticism, and experimental use of the body as both subject and instrument. This work belongs to the hegemonic narrative of electroacoustic music with the use of sex sounds as aesthetic objects that insinuate erotic arousal as a construct of the male gaze. 

Through examples like “Erotica” Sofer strongly questions the exclusion of women as active agents of aesthetic sonic creation since: “electroacoustic spaces have long excluded women’s contributions as equal creators to men, who are more typically touted as composers and therefore compensated with prestige in the form of academic positions or board dominations” (xxxix). This book considers: “the threats of representation, namely exploitation and objectification” (xxxvii). Here we navigate the questions of how something is presented, by whom, and with which profit or intention. In other words, how sounds: “are created, for what purposes, and in turn, how sounds are interpreted and understood” (xxxiii).These are problems rooted in both patriarchy and capitalism. 

This book is a strong contribution to decolonize the history of music as we know it, although the citations here could be richer, including studies by Rachel McCarthy (“Marking the ‘Unmarked’ Space: Gendered Vocal Construction in Female Electronic Artists” 2014),  Tara Rodgers (“Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography” 2015), and the work of Louise Marshall and Holly Ingleton, who used intersectional feminist frameworks to analyze the work of marginalized composers (including women of color) and the curatorial practices that shape electronic music history. Also, not to forget: Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988).

Embed from Getty Images

Musical artist Sylvester

I argue that, although many composers of color work in electronic music, the search term ‘electroacoustic’ remains exclusionary because of who declares themselves as an advocate of this music, and not necessarily in how their music is made–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xiv).

After a deep dive into the genealogy of the patriarchal practices in electroacoustic music understood as electrosexual works (hence: “Sex is only re-presented in music p. xxix), Sofer moves to the territory of feminist contra-narratives. In the second part of their study, Sofer offers sonic practices and concrete examples that: “break the electroacoustic mold either by consciously objecting to its narrow constraints or by emerging from, building on, and, in a sense, competing with a completely different historical trajectory” (xlvi). Contra-narratives from the racialized periphery and underground landscapes appear in this book as case studies to hold the argument and expand the homocentric and patriarchal telos found even in the sonic archives as well as the Western theoretical corpus. These ‘Others’ reclaim their voices going a step further and gaining recognition. 

After examining examples of racialisation and objectification, Sofer selects some case studies from 1975 to 2013 in the second chapter of this section titled: “Electrosexual Disturbance.”  In this section, Sofer also points to new forms of exclusion and instrumentalisation via “racial othering,” specifically in the context of popular music such as Disco where we find an emphasis on the feminized voice. Disco, as a genre rooted in Black, queer, and marginalized communities, inherently grappled with racial and gendered dynamics. Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) exemplifies this tension.

The track’s erotic vocal performance (23 simulated orgasms over 16 minutes) became emblematic of the hypersexualization of Black women in popular music. Summer’s persona as the “first lady of love” reinforced stereotypes of Black female sexuality as inherently exotic or excessive, a trope traced to racist and sexist historical narratives. Simultaneously, disco provided a space for liberation: Black and LGBTQ+ artists like Summer, Sylvester, and Gloria Gaynor used the genre to assert agency over their identities and bodies, challenging mainstream exclusion. The tropes of sex and race are a paradoxical combination bringing both oppression as well as liberation. 

Sofer argues that Summers was commercially recognized but her figure as a composer was destroyed, creating consequently a hierarchy of labor. She was acknowledged for her amazing sexualized voice and performance on stage, but not recognized as a musician or equal to music producers. Here we see the practice of epistemological discrimination and extreme racial sexualisation. On the positive side, Summer became the Black Queen idol for gay liberation. Nevertheless, she remained as the sexualized and racial voice of the seventies.    

Sofer also presents the case of ex-sex worker, sex-educator and radical ecosex-activist Annie Sprinkle collaborating in a post-porn art video with the legendary Texan and lesbian composer Pauline Oliveros. For Sprinkle and Oliveros, Sofer offers a different phenomena at work, since both queer-women/Lesbian-women collaborated from the point of feminist independence and sexual liberation coming together for educational purposes.

‘Sluts & Goddesses (1992)’ promotional image, courtesy of streaming service, MUBI

Sluts & Goddesses (1992) is a porn film with an Oliveros soundtrack, produced by radical women– with only women–in a self-determined frame. The movie offers an example of collaboration moving from avantgarde sound composition expertise to trashy whoring and interracial lesbian power. This example was rare, but inspiring for the coming generations.  Two lesbian Titans united for electrosexual disturbance from the feminist gaze, Sprinkle and Oliveros were a duo that broke silence.

This book revisits the acousmatic in its electronic manifestations to examine and interrogate sexual and sexualized assumptions underwriting electroacoustic musical philosophies.–Sofer, Sex Sounds, (xxi)

Sofer’s Sex Sounds enters into a vital and still-emerging conversation about how sound—particularly sonic expressions of sex and eroticism—shapes, disrupts, and reinscribes power. At a time when sonic studies increasingly reckon with embodiment, affect, and intimacy, Sofer brings a feminist and queer critique to the center of how we listen to, interpret, and culturally regulate the sounds of sex. Their book invites us to reconsider not only what we hear in erotic audio, but how we’ve been taught—socially, politically, morally—to hear it.

This book doesn’t just fill a gap—it pushes the field toward a more nuanced, bodily-aware mode of scholarship. For SO! readers, Sex Sounds offers both a provocation and a methodology: it challenges us to hear differently, to ask how power works not only through what is seen or said, but through what is moaned, whispered, muffled, or made to be heard too loudly.

—

Featured Image: “Stamen,” by Flickr User Sharonolk, CC BY 2.0

—

Verónica Mota Galindo is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Berlin, where they study philosophy at the Freie Universität. Their work goes beyond the academic sphere, blending sound art, critical epistemology, and community engagement to make complex philosophical ideas accessible to broader audiences. As a dedicated educator and sound artist, Mota Galindo bridges the gap between academic research and lived material experience, inviting others to explore the transformative power of critical thought and creative expression. Committed to bringing philosophy to life outside traditional boundaries, they inspire new ways of thinking aimed at emancipation of the human and non-human for collective survival.

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

Into the Woods: A Brief History of Wood Paneling on Synthesizers*–Tara Rodgers

Ritual, Noise, and the Cut-up: The Art of Tara Transitory—Justyna Stasiowska 

SO! Reads: Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin –Enikő Deptuch Vághy 

Simon Bowie

Rhumsiki, 8 – Varia

Revue de la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Maroua

Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF, cliquez ici (à venir).

Rhumsiki est une revue scientifique pluridisciplinaire publiée par la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines et Sociales (FALSH) de l’Université de Maroua, au Cameroun. À l’image du site emblématique dont elle porte le nom – symbole de richesse culturelle, d’altérité et de confluence entre traditions et modernité – la revue Rhumsiki entend être un carrefour intellectuel ouvert à la diversité des regards, des disciplines et des problématiques qui traversent les sociétés humaines.

Elle accueille des contributions originales en sciences humaines et sociales, notamment en histoire, géographie, sociologie, anthropologie, psychologie, lettres, langues, arts, philosophie, sciences de l’éducation, science politique, et domaines connexes. Les articles proposés peuvent prendre la forme de recherches empiriques, d’analyses théoriques, de notes de lecture critiques ou encore de réflexions méthodologiques.

Rhumsiki se donne pour ambition de valoriser les travaux portant sur l’Afrique en général, et le Sahel en particulier, tout en s’ouvrant à des perspectives comparées et globales. La revue s’adresse aux chercheur·euse·s, enseignant·e·s, doctorant·e·s, professionnel·le·s du développement et à tous ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à la compréhension fine des dynamiques sociales, culturelles, politiques et économiques du monde contemporain.

Liste des contributeurs et contributrices : DOLLO MANDANDI, Éric Achille NKO’O BEKONO, Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA, GONDEU LADIBA, Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU, Joseph BOMDA, Mahamat MEY MAHAMAT, Mbiah Anny Flore TCHOUTA, Rachel ASTA MÉRÉ, Remy DZOU TSANGA, Théophile KALBE YAMO, WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE et ZAKINET DANGBET.

***

ISSN : 2312-766X

206 pages
Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell
Date de publication : 2025

***

Table des matières

Comité scientifique, équipe de rédaction et de relecture

1. Approche sociohistorique de la question de l’éducation en milieu nomade au Tchad : de 1940 à nos jours

ZAKINET DANGBET; GONDEU LADIBA; et Mahamat MEY MAHAMAT

2. Archéologie et développement local dans la région de l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun à l’ère de la décentralisation

Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU

3. Constantes et mutations en littérature orale africaine. Tracé de frontières entre oralité rurale et oralité urbaine en contexte camerounais

Théophile KALBE YAMO

4. Frontière chronologique et méthodologique dans la pensée archéologique et historique

Remy DZOU TSANGA

5. Démotivation, transmotivation et souffrance identitaire dans les discours des professionnel·les de l’orientation-conseil au Cameroun

Joseph BOMDA et Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA

6. Crises sociopolitiques et flux migratoires transfrontaliers des populations centrafricaines vers le sud du Tchad (1966 à 2019)

DOLLO MANDANDI

7. Proximité sociale communicationnelle et attention prêtée au message en milieu organisationnel

Mbiah Anny Flore TCHOUTA

8. Esthétique corporelle traditionnelle de la femme guiziga (Nord-Cameroun) : formes, fonctions et valeurs

WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE et Rachel ASTA MÉRÉ

9. L’arabe dans le contexte de la professionnalisation des enseignements au Cameroun

Éric Achille NKO’O BEKONO

À propos des Éditions science et bien commun

Simon Bowie

Rhumsiki, 9 – Regards pluriels sur la frontière à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun

Revue de la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Maroua

Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF, cliquez ici (à venir).

Ce numéro spécial, issu des Grands programmes de recherche de la Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Maroua, interroge la complexité des frontières à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun, région sahélienne marquée par le terrorisme islamiste et des dynamiques transfrontalières multiformes. Réunies sous le thème « Regards pluriels sur la frontière à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun », les contributions explorent les représentations, les usages et les tensions qui structurent ces marges. Au-delà des tracés administratifs, les frontières apparaissent comme des zones de contact, d’échanges, de conflits et de résilience. Elles révèlent des ambivalences profondes, à la fois héritées de la colonisation et réactualisées par les crises sécuritaires, de Boko Haram à la grande criminalité transfrontalière. Ces études, nourries de perspectives plurielles, offrent des clés pour comprendre comment ces marges influencent la vie des populations et les circulations dans le bassin du Lac Tchad. Malgré la violence et l’instabilité, les personnes, les biens et les plantes continuent à circuler entre le Cameroun, le Nigeria et le Tchad, rappelant le caractère mouvant et négocié de la frontière. En définitive, ce numéro propose une lecture nuancée de la frontière comme fait social total : imposée et contestée, fragile et persistante, violente et vitale.

Liste des contributeurs et contributrices : Aimé Raoul SUMO TAYO, Crépin WOWÉ, GIGLA GARAKCHEME, Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA, HAMADOU, Jean GORMO, Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU, Jeremie DIYE, Joël MBRING, Joseph WOUDAMMIKÉ, MAHAMAT ABBA OUSMAN, NDJIDDA ALI, OUSMANOU ABDOU, Paul Basile Odilon NYET, Samuel KAMOUGNANA et WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE.

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ISSN : 2312-766X

294 pages
Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell
Date de publication : 2025

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Table des matières

Comité scientifique, équipe de rédaction et de relecture

Présentation. Regards pluriels sur la frontière à l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun

I. Frontière disruptive : le défi sécuritaire

1. Porosité des frontières, afflux des réfugié·e·s nigérian·e·s, des déplacé·e·s internes/retourné·e·s et la lutte contre la poliomyélite dans la région de l’Extrême-Nord Cameroun (2013-2019)
Joseph WOUDAMMIKÉ

2. Évanescence des frontières et extension du terrorisme au Cameroun : le cas de Boko Haram aux abords du lac Tchad et des Monts Mandara
Aimé Raoul SUMO TAYO

3. L’extension de la menace terroriste Boko Haram dans les monts Mandara (Cameroun/Nigeria)
GIGLA GARAKCHEME

4. Territoires frontaliers et sécurisation du pipeline Tchad-Cameroun : entre enjeux national et transnational
Joël MBRING

5. Insécurité transfrontalière et résilience socioéconomique des éleveurs bovins à l’Extrême-Nord Cameroun : entre reconversion, sédentarisation et reconstruction identitaire
Paul Basile Odilon NYET et OUSMANOU ABDOU

6. La résolution endogène des conflits fonciers par les communautés des monts Mandara de l’Extrême-Nord Cameroun
Jeremie DIYE

7. Jeu de données sur les stéréotypes et la stigmatisation des réfugié·e·s, déplacé·e·s et accueillants de la crise transfrontalière Boko Haram
Gilbert Willy TIO BABENA et WARAYANSSA MAWOUNE

II. Frontière ficelante : les opportunités économiques et sociales

8. L’idée de frontière chez les peuples des monts Mandara du Nord-Cameroun
Samuel KAMOUGNANA

9. Frontière internationale, villes frontalières et coopération transfrontalière entre Yagoua et Bongor, de 1900 à 2018
NDJIDDA ALI

10. Milieux naturels et ancien culturescape au Nord-Cameroun : un regard d’archéologue
Jean-Marie DATOUANG DJOUSSOU

11. Frontières, barrières, limites dans l’architecture et le bâti dans l’imaginaire collectif des peuples de la plaine du Diamaré
HAMADOU

12. Cultures, échanges transfrontaliers et nouvelle perception de la frontière dans la vallée du Logone
MAHAMAT ABBA OUSMAN

13. Plantes et frontières au Nord-Cameroun
Jean GORMO

14. Frontières coloniales et revendications foncières entre les Toupouri du Tchad et du Cameroun de 1900 à 2020
Crépin WOWÉ

À propos des Éditions science et bien commun

Minor Compositions

Return to the 36 Enclosures

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 35 Return to the 36 Enclosures It’s summer and we’re feeling a bit lazy… so rather than record something new, for this episode we’re presenting a recording of a seminar discussion between Stefano Harney & Stevphen Shukaitis that occurred this May in London. It was part of an event organized by […]
Professor Deborah

How to Study Wikipedia’s Neutrality – According to Wikipedia

A platform is telling researchers how to study its neutrality and defining what and where researchers should look to evaluate it. If it was Google or Facebook we might be shocked. But it’s from Wikipedia, and so this move will undoubtedly go unnoticed by most. On Thursday this week, the Wikimedia Foundation’s research team sent a note to the Wikimedia research mailing list asking for feedback on their “Guidance for NPOV Research on Wikipedia” [1]. The Wikimedia Foundation is the US-based non-profit organisation that hosts Wikipedia and its sister projects in the Wikimedia stable of websites. The move follows increased threats against the public perception of Wikipedia’s neutrality e.g. by Elon Musk who has accused it of bias and a “leftward drift”, sometimes referring to it as “Wokepedia” [2]. And threats to its core operating principles (e.g. that may require the WMF to collect ages or real names of editors) as governments around the world move to regulate online platforms [3].

The draft guidelines advise us on how we should study Wikipedia’s neutrality, including where we should look. The authors write that “Wikipedia’s definition of neutrality and its importance are not well understood within the research community.” In response, they tell us Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia doesn’t necessarily mean “neutral content” but rather “neutral editing”. They also argue that editing for NPOV on Wikipedia “does not aim to resolve controversy but to reflect it”. There is only one way to reflect a controversy, apparently, and that is the neutral way. In this, they seem to be arguing that researchers should evaluate Wikipedia’s neutrality according to its own definition of neutrality – a definition that absolves the site, its contributors and the organisation that hosts it from any responsibility for the (very powerful) representations it produces.

The guidelines tell researchers what are the “most important” variables that shape neutrality on Wikipedia (and there we were thinking that which were the most important was an open research question). What is missing from this list is interesting… particularly the omission of the Wikimedia Foundation itself. In a separate section titled “The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation”, we are told that the Wikimedia Foundation “does not exercise day-to-day editorial control” of the project. The WMF is merely “a steward of Wikipedia, hosting technical infrastructure and supporting community self-governance.” As any researcher of social organisation will tell you, organisations that support knowledge production *always* shape what is represented – even when they aren’t doing the writing themselves.

From my own perspective as someone who has studied Wikipedia for 15 years and supported Wikipedia as an activist in the years prior to this, I’ve seen the myriad ways in which the Foundation influences what is represented on Wikipedia. To give just a few examples: the WMF determines how money flows to its chapters and to research, deciding which gaps are filled through grants and which are exposed through research. It is the only real body that can do demographic research on Wikipedia editors – something it hasn’t done for years (probably because it is worried that the overwhelming dominance of white men from North America and Western Europe would not have changed). Understanding who actually edits Wikipedia could trigger changes that prioritise a greater diversity of editors. The WMF decides what actions (if any) it will take against the Big Tech companies that use its data contrary to license obligations. It decides when it will lobby governments to encourage or oppose legislation. Recognising that the WMF employees don’t edit Wikipedia articles doesn’t preclude an understanding that it plays a role in deciding how subjects are represented and how those representations circulate in the wider information ecosystem.

Finally, the guidelines are also prescriptive in defining what researchers’ responsibilities are. Not surprisingly, our responsibilities are to the Wikipedia and Wikimedia community who “must” have research shared with them in order for research about Wikipedia’s neutrality to have impact. We are told to “Always share back with the Wikimedia research community” and are provided with a  list of places, events and forums where we should tell editors about our research. In conclusion, we’re told that we must always “communicate in ways that strengthen Wikipedia”.

“As a rule of thumb, we recommend that when communicating about your research you ask yourself the question “Will this communication make Wikipedia weaker or stronger?” Critiques are valued but ideally are paired with constructive recommendations, are replicable, leave space for feedback from Wikimedians, and do not overstate conclusions.”

There is no room for those who think perhaps that Wikipedia is too dominant, that it is too close to Big Tech and American interests to play such an important role in stewarding public knowledge for all the world. Nor for those whose research aims to serve the public rather than Wikipedia editors, those of us who choose rather to educate the public when, how and why Wikipedia fails to live up to its promise of neutrality and the neutrality we have mistakenly come to expect from it. I know that this request for feedback from the WMF will not raise an eyebrow in public discourse about the project and that will be the sign that we have put too much expectation in Wikipedia’s perfection, perhaps because if Wikipedia is found wanting, if the “last best place on the internet” [4] has failed, then the whole project has failed. But for me, it is not a failure that Wikipedia is not neutral. The failure is in the dominance of an institution that is so emboldened by its supposed moral superiority that it can tell us – those who are tasked with holding this supposedly public resource – to account what the limits of that accounting should be.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Guidance_for_NPOV_Research_on_Wikipedia
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/elon-musk-also-has-a-problem-with-wikipedia
[3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedia-test/
[4] https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-online-encyclopedia-best-place-internet/

(legacy-tribute-revival posting of INC’s 2010 Critical Point of View network)

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

“Just for a Few Hours, We Was Free”: The Blues and Mapping Freedom in Sinners (2025)

In the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler has a vampire story to tell. But before he can begin, he needs to tell another story—a blues one. Sinners opens with a voiceover thesis statement performed by Wunmi Mosaku (who plays Annie in the film—more on her below) about the work the blues can do, then rambles the narrative through and around 1932 Clarksdale, eventually settling into a juke joint outside of town. Here, the blues story builds to a frenzied climax, ultimately conjuring the vampires propelling the film’s second half. It’s those vampires that most immediately register as cinematic spectacle, but Coogler’s impetus to film in IMAX and leverage all of his professional relationships for the movie wasn’t the monsters—it was to showcase the blues at a scale the music deserves. In Sinners, the blues takes center stage as a generative sonic practice, sound that creates space to be and to know in the crevices of the material world, providing passage between oppression and freedom, life and death, past and future, and good and evil.

I’m not exaggerating in calling the opening voiceover a thesis. In a movie where Coogler trusts his audience with a great deal of interpretation, he puts an incredibly fine point on the role that blues performs here. We’re told that some musicians—be they Irish, West African, Native American, or southern US Black—are so skilled that they can pierce the veil separating the living from the dead, and while this piercing can help heal a community, it can also attract a certain evil that wants to exploit this rupture. The narrator doesn’t say “It’s the blues!” but the next visual information we get is that it’s Clarksdale, MS, in 1932, and an injured, blood-soaked Sammie (Miles Caton) is stumbling into his father’s church, clutching what’s left of the neck of a guitar. No one in Sinners says the word “crossroads,” but here we are, at the place where the blues meets the devil—where the end meets the beginning–and our young hero has a choice about which way he’s going to go.

A teenaged Black young man, Sammie, sits holding a guitar in the back seat of a convertible car, driven by two very stylish twin Black men in the front seat, named Delta Slim (left) and Stack (right).
Sammie picks up guitar in car with Delta Slim (left) and Stack [2:23], Screen Capture from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) by SO!

If Coogler doesn’t fully trust his audience to know what to do with the blues without being told, it’s likely due to decades of commercialized attempts to defang the genre that have filtered out 21st century listeners’ ability to hear most of what makes the blues potent.  Drawing on what Clyde Woods in Development Arrested (1998) has termed the “blues epistemology,” a blues way of knowing, B Brian Foster speaks with contemporary Black Clarksdalians in I Don’t Like the Blues (2020) to chart much of the current state of the blues. Pulling on one particular thread of Foster’s ethnography can help clarify what’s happening in Sinners, as he unpacks the many reasons why the blues don’t resonate quite like they used to.

In Woods’s framework, the blues is more than a musical genre; it’s a way of understanding and, crucially, reshaping one’s world. The blues, a genre arising in the late 19th century and reverberating through the 20th, functioned as epistemology in order to explore a way out from under plantation power after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. Woods chronicles centuries of “plantation power” in the Delta and how that power reconfigures itself over and again through different eras of US history, always with the goal of extracting labor and life from Black Mississippians. The blues pushed against the edge of what was considered possible and sought to imagine and create a world that was free—not just from plantation power but from all the logics that support it or would circumscribe Black self-determination and autonomy.  In I Don’t Like the Blues, Foster encapsulates the heart of blues epistemology with a flourish: “While many people hear the blues as performance and play, Black residents of Clarksdale knew it to be flesh and bone, a spirit in the dirt. Their blues was a conduit. A map. A method” (15-16). Throughout his book, Foster demonstrates that what the blues was is no longer what the blues is. One of those reasons is that resistance to plantation power (whether in the Delta or beyond) simply sounds different now, having worked its way through jazz and funk and soul and hip hop and trap. 

SO! screen capture of the time-bending dance scene in Sinners 1930s connecting blues and hip hop

In Sinners, Coogler starts by telling us what the blues could do, then he shows us that power in a climactic scene midway through the film, reminding his audience that a blues epistemology might not always sound the same, but it can still do the work of mapping out freedom. After the camera cuts away from Sammie at the crossroads in his church, we loop a bit back in time to meet Sammie’s cousins, the SmokeStack brothers (twins played by Michael B Jordan), who purchase the juke joint’s eventual location.  The first half of the movie follows the brothers as they split up and get the band—and hospitality crew—together to open the venue that night. Sammie is new to this life, but a deeply gifted bluesman, and he receives counsel along the way about what the music is and how it works. Once the juke is packed, the booze is flowing, and the dancefloor is sweating, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) invites Sammie to take the stage and tell the people who he is and where he’s from. What follows is an ambitious narrative and technical feat that pays off the opening voiceover.

Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy, launches into a song called “I Lied to You,” addressed to his minister father (played by Saul Williams). It’s a confession that he’ll take the blues over the church any day. His singing pierces the veil, and we witness a litany of musicians joining the space from the past, present, and future: an Afrofuturist rock guitarist, hip hop DJs, breakers, twerkers, a ballerina, a Zaouli dancer, and Beijing opera performers, among others. Weaving in and out of Sammie’s blues, the sounds of each of these musicians layer and feed back into the mix to create a densely ecstatic sequence. This is the community healing piece of the voiceover thesis. The performers joining from far-flung places and times connect to an ancestral lineage of creative self-determination that runs through the patrons of the juke joint (Bo and Grace—played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively—are Chinese shop owners helping out at the juke joint and the presumed source of the Beijing opera performers).

Sinners’s musical conjuring isn’t an academic article, but it does have some musicological points to make. Audiences encounter musical styles uprooted from specific times and places, all mingling around this blues moment in 1932 Clarksdale. Coogler structures the scene by stacking out-of-time sound and movement, emphasizing the potency of a blues epistemology while also acknowledging that the blues’s power is situational. In its time—post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow—the blues could call in and draw on the fullness of diasporic music-making and world-mapping. But at other times, and in other places—say, a 2025 music venue—the blues is less likely to ignite such a moment as it is to show up as a participant, arriving as one of many in the musical ancestry to support the veil-piercers of the day. This phenomenon is the “changing same” of Black music, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People: “consistent attitudes with changed contexts” that explain why the sound changes over time (153). In Sinners, the immediate context is a community of Mississippi sharecroppers who seek healing, and the blues widens the frame so that the juke joint revelers can connect to and draw strength from a broader, deeper community beyond the edges of their material world.

As “I Lied to You” mingles with sounds past and future, the camera moves through the juke in a counterclockwise motion, grounding the scene further in diasporic ancestral practices. In Slave Culture (1987), Sterling Stuckey traces elements of Bakongo burial ceremonies throughout the New World, focusing especially on the ring shout, a sacred ceremony practiced by enslaved people in the United States involving a shuffling circular dance accompanied by song. Consistent across these traditions is counterclockwise movement:

Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo of the circle quickening during the course of movement. The ring in which the Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America (12).

The counterclockwise circulation rehearses the life cycle, with the sun rising in the east (birth) and setting in the west (death), only to rise again (gesturing toward the connected nature of all life).

Stuckey draws on Robert Farris Thompson to note that special emphasis on counterclockwise motion would happen in Bakongo rituals that superimposed a cross on the circular movement, where the horizontal line represented the division between the living (above) and the dead (below). Here is the dividing line of Sinners, then: an ancestral ceremony with a crossroads superimposed on it, a blues invocation where the audience is propelled counterclockwise through the circle of juke joint dancers, where the dead and not yet alive join in the festivities.

The theme of lineage and ancestry courses through Coogler’s work. On the personal level, this may play out as a boxer sparring with his late father’s legacy. On a larger scale, Coogler often traverses the land of the Great Migration and the sea of the Middle Passage, tying back together the threads left dangling by the terrorisms of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. For a people whose lineage was savagely untethered by their ancestors’ enslavers, the power of a blues epistemology comes from its ability to tap into traditions and rituals that couldn’t be fully severed, restoring the “oneness” of those engaged in the dance and fueling their ability to imagine and create a path to freedom.

There is the other part of the voiceover’s thesis statement, though. When you pierce the veil, evil seeks to charge through. As the “I Lied to You” sequence hits peak intensity, Coogler treats movie audiences to another visual effect that the blues performers cannot see but feel; the juke joint appears to spontaneously combust and its roof is on fire (the roof, the roof. . .). Coogler metaphorically lets the motherfucker burn, down to the concrete foundation supporting the people as they continue to dance. At the edge of the dusty parking lot, the movie’s villain—an Irish vampire named Remmick—watches lustily while flanked by his latest converts. He wants Sammie; particularly what Sammie knows how to do.

Because Remmick hive-minds with whomever he turns into a vampire, taking on their memories and abilities, if he can get at Sammie, he’ll be able to pierce the veil, too, and commune once again with his long lost ancestors. We could read Remmick’s drive as an allegory about cultural appropriation, a white man who wants to steal the blues, and certainly there’s an element of that at play. But the “Killmonger was right” corollary of Coogler films suggests that villains are often more complex than they may at first seem. In Sinners, there’s a mob of Klansmen that function as the more straightforward baddies, but Coogler isn’t interested in giving them much screen time. Yet he lingers with Remmick just as he did with Killmonger and Namor in his two Black Panther installments. In each of these cases, Coogler explores different experiences of what it’s like when the boot of Empire is on your neck. Remmick, coming from Britain’s first colony, speaks of his home being taken and of religion being forced on him. He seems to hold genuine disdain for the Klan and notes that he’s happy to turn them all to prey, not because he wants what they have but because they deserve a gruesome death. He plays and dances to the music of his ancestors with care and devotion. And he argues that what he has to offer—community with his coven, the power to overtake the plantation class, eternal life—is better than what Smoke, Stack, Sammie, and the rest of the juke joint patrons currently have.

SO! screen capture of Sinners showing Remmick, banjo-in-hand in front of vampires: Joan (left), Bert (right) [1:40]

No one living trusts Remmick—in fact, Annie (Mosaku), the heart, brain, and wisdom of the movie, specifically distrusts him even before he reveals his true vampiric nature. And Coogler doesn’t position Remmick to be perceived as “good” in any sense of the word, except at playing that banjo. But, like Killmonger and Namor, Remmick gets to be right about some things. It appears in flickers of concession on characters’ faces when Remmick tells them they live in a place where they’ll always have to fight to even try to be truly free. It appears again when the juke joint protectors melt a bit during Remmick & Co’s performance of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a glimmer of a thought of “wait, should we let them come inside and play this absolute bop??” (for detailed historical context for this song see Daphne Brooks’s “See My Face on the Other Side” [2017]). Coogler’s villains ultimately suffer defeat, but before they do, he makes sure audiences glimpse how they’ve suffered under Empire, offering an understanding of their destructive actions as born of unhealed generational trauma.

Piercing the veil is tricky work. Dangerous work. In The Long Emancipation (2021), Rinaldo Walcott notes that “much of what we have come to call Black culture is a mode of living life within, against, and beyond plantation logics” (20), not only a rejection of logics of oppression but also a practice of creating and nurturing something else. To set about finding knowledge and being, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human” is to set off into the not-fully-known, where one may encounter a variety of ideas and beings who won’t ultimately lead you to freedom but who may offer you something a little better than what you’ve got (Wynter, 2000 interview with David Scott, 136). Walcott calls this the difference between emancipation and actual freedom. While emancipation is often mistaken for freedom, Walcott argues that “postemancipation acts of Black life have been consistently interdicted, thereby preempting and often violently preventing Black life from authorizing its own desires for bodily autonomy” (105), preventing Black life from being free. 

In Sinners, Coogler shows us the way the blues could clear space for finding freedom, but none of the characters in the movie make it all the way there. It’s a movie situated in the long emancipation, where an imposed religion calls the blues the devil’s music, where plantation sharecropping and the Klan violently forestall Black freedom (but sometimes get what’s coming to them), and where various vampires carrying their own intergenerational trauma try to seduce Black people into accepting a different flavor of emancipation in place of the freedom the blues leads them toward. The map to freedom may not sound like the blues anymore, but Sinners reminds us the work isn’t done.

—

Featured images: Screen Capture by SO!: Sammie’s right hand clutching broken guitar neck, black cross in the background against white wall [2:10]

—

Justin Burton is a Professor of Music at Rider University, teaching primarily in the Music Production degree as well as in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford, 2018).

—

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

They Can Hear Us: Surveillance and Race in “A Quiet Place”–Justin Burton

Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin: Respectability and The Produced Voice in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”–Justin Burton

SO! Amplifies: The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club–Chelsea Adams

World Listening Day 2015: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s “Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]” (2015) #WLD2015

“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality — Aaron Carter-Ényì

Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson

Professor Kaitlynn Mendes

“Just for a Few Hours, We Was Free”: The Blues and Mapping Freedom in Sinners (2025)

A Black man's hand clutches a briken guitar neck, with a cross in the background on a white wall

In the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler has a vampire story to tell. But before he can begin, he needs to tell another story—a blues one. Sinners opens with a voiceover thesis statement performed by Wunmi Mosaku (who plays Annie in the film—more on her below) about the work the blues can do, then rambles the narrative through and around 1932 Clarksdale, eventually settling into a juke joint outside of town. Here, the blues story builds to a frenzied climax, ultimately conjuring the vampires propelling the film’s second half. It’s those vampires that most immediately register as cinematic spectacle, but Coogler’s impetus to film in IMAX and leverage all of his professional relationships for the movie wasn’t the monsters—it was to showcase the blues at a scale the music deserves. In Sinners, the blues takes center stage as a generative sonic practice, sound that creates space to be and to know in the crevices of the material world, providing passage between oppression and freedom, life and death, past and future, and good and evil.

I’m not exaggerating in calling the opening voiceover a thesis. In a movie where Coogler trusts his audience with a great deal of interpretation, he puts an incredibly fine point on the role that blues performs here. We’re told that some musicians—be they Irish, West African, Native American, or southern US Black—are so skilled that they can pierce the veil separating the living from the dead, and while this piercing can help heal a community, it can also attract a certain evil that wants to exploit this rupture. The narrator doesn’t say “It’s the blues!” but the next visual information we get is that it’s Clarksdale, MS, in 1932, and an injured, blood-soaked Sammie (Miles Caton) is stumbling into his father’s church, clutching what’s left of the neck of a guitar. No one in Sinners says the word “crossroads,” but here we are, at the place where the blues meets the devil—where the end meets the beginning–and our young hero has a choice about which way he’s going to go.

A teenaged Black young man, Sammie, sits holding a guitar in the back seat of a convertible car, driven by two very stylish twin Black men in the front seat, named Delta Slim (left) and Stack (right).
Sammie picks up guitar in car with Delta Slim (left) and Stack [2:23], Screen Capture from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) by SO!

If Coogler doesn’t fully trust his audience to know what to do with the blues without being told, it’s likely due to decades of commercialized attempts to defang the genre that have filtered out 21st century listeners’ ability to hear most of what makes the blues potent.  Drawing on what Clyde Woods in Development Arrested (1998) has termed the “blues epistemology,” a blues way of knowing, B Brian Foster speaks with contemporary Black Clarksdalians in I Don’t Like the Blues (2020) to chart much of the current state of the blues. Pulling on one particular thread of Foster’s ethnography can help clarify what’s happening in Sinners, as he unpacks the many reasons why the blues don’t resonate quite like they used to.

In Woods’s framework, the blues is more than a musical genre; it’s a way of understanding and, crucially, reshaping one’s world. The blues, a genre arising in the late 19th century and reverberating through the 20th, functioned as epistemology in order to explore a way out from under plantation power after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. Woods chronicles centuries of “plantation power” in the Delta and how that power reconfigures itself over and again through different eras of US history, always with the goal of extracting labor and life from Black Mississippians. The blues pushed against the edge of what was considered possible and sought to imagine and create a world that was free—not just from plantation power but from all the logics that support it or would circumscribe Black self-determination and autonomy.  In I Don’t Like the Blues, Foster encapsulates the heart of blues epistemology with a flourish: “While many people hear the blues as performance and play, Black residents of Clarksdale knew it to be flesh and bone, a spirit in the dirt. Their blues was a conduit. A map. A method” (15-16). Throughout his book, Foster demonstrates that what the blues was is no longer what the blues is. One of those reasons is that resistance to plantation power (whether in the Delta or beyond) simply sounds different now, having worked its way through jazz and funk and soul and hip hop and trap. 

SO! screen capture of the time-bending dance scene in Sinners 1930s connecting blues and hip hop

In Sinners, Coogler starts by telling us what the blues could do, then he shows us that power in a climactic scene midway through the film, reminding his audience that a blues epistemology might not always sound the same, but it can still do the work of mapping out freedom. After the camera cuts away from Sammie at the crossroads in his church, we loop a bit back in time to meet Sammie’s cousins, the SmokeStack brothers (twins played by Michael B Jordan), who purchase the juke joint’s eventual location.  The first half of the movie follows the brothers as they split up and get the band—and hospitality crew—together to open the venue that night. Sammie is new to this life, but a deeply gifted bluesman, and he receives counsel along the way about what the music is and how it works. Once the juke is packed, the booze is flowing, and the dancefloor is sweating, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) invites Sammie to take the stage and tell the people who he is and where he’s from. What follows is an ambitious narrative and technical feat that pays off the opening voiceover.

Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy, launches into a song called “I Lied to You,” addressed to his minister father (played by Saul Williams). It’s a confession that he’ll take the blues over the church any day. His singing pierces the veil, and we witness a litany of musicians joining the space from the past, present, and future: an Afrofuturist rock guitarist, hip hop DJs, breakers, twerkers, a ballerina, a Zaouli dancer, and Beijing opera performers, among others. Weaving in and out of Sammie’s blues, the sounds of each of these musicians layer and feed back into the mix to create a densely ecstatic sequence. This is the community healing piece of the voiceover thesis. The performers joining from far-flung places and times connect to an ancestral lineage of creative self-determination that runs through the patrons of the juke joint (Bo and Grace—played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively—are Chinese shop owners helping out at the juke joint and the presumed source of the Beijing opera performers).

Sinners’s musical conjuring isn’t an academic article, but it does have some musicological points to make. Audiences encounter musical styles uprooted from specific times and places, all mingling around this blues moment in 1932 Clarksdale. Coogler structures the scene by stacking out-of-time sound and movement, emphasizing the potency of a blues epistemology while also acknowledging that the blues’s power is situational. In its time—post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow—the blues could call in and draw on the fullness of diasporic music-making and world-mapping. But at other times, and in other places—say, a 2025 music venue—the blues is less likely to ignite such a moment as it is to show up as a participant, arriving as one of many in the musical ancestry to support the veil-piercers of the day. This phenomenon is the “changing same” of Black music, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People: “consistent attitudes with changed contexts” that explain why the sound changes over time (153). In Sinners, the immediate context is a community of Mississippi sharecroppers who seek healing, and the blues widens the frame so that the juke joint revelers can connect to and draw strength from a broader, deeper community beyond the edges of their material world.

As “I Lied to You” mingles with sounds past and future, the camera moves through the juke in a counterclockwise motion, grounding the scene further in diasporic ancestral practices. In Slave Culture (1987), Sterling Stuckey traces elements of Bakongo burial ceremonies throughout the New World, focusing especially on the ring shout, a sacred ceremony practiced by enslaved people in the United States involving a shuffling circular dance accompanied by song. Consistent across these traditions is counterclockwise movement:

Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo of the circle quickening during the course of movement. The ring in which the Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America (12).

The counterclockwise circulation rehearses the life cycle, with the sun rising in the east (birth) and setting in the west (death), only to rise again (gesturing toward the connected nature of all life).

Stuckey draws on Robert Farris Thompson to note that special emphasis on counterclockwise motion would happen in Bakongo rituals that superimposed a cross on the circular movement, where the horizontal line represented the division between the living (above) and the dead (below). Here is the dividing line of Sinners, then: an ancestral ceremony with a crossroads superimposed on it, a blues invocation where the audience is propelled counterclockwise through the circle of juke joint dancers, where the dead and not yet alive join in the festivities.

The theme of lineage and ancestry courses through Coogler’s work. On the personal level, this may play out as a boxer sparring with his late father’s legacy. On a larger scale, Coogler often traverses the land of the Great Migration and the sea of the Middle Passage, tying back together the threads left dangling by the terrorisms of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. For a people whose lineage was savagely untethered by their ancestors’ enslavers, the power of a blues epistemology comes from its ability to tap into traditions and rituals that couldn’t be fully severed, restoring the “oneness” of those engaged in the dance and fueling their ability to imagine and create a path to freedom.

There is the other part of the voiceover’s thesis statement, though. When you pierce the veil, evil seeks to charge through. As the “I Lied to You” sequence hits peak intensity, Coogler treats movie audiences to another visual effect that the blues performers cannot see but feel; the juke joint appears to spontaneously combust and its roof is on fire (the roof, the roof. . .). Coogler metaphorically lets the motherfucker burn, down to the concrete foundation supporting the people as they continue to dance. At the edge of the dusty parking lot, the movie’s villain—an Irish vampire named Remmick—watches lustily while flanked by his latest converts. He wants Sammie; particularly what Sammie knows how to do.

Because Remmick hive-minds with whomever he turns into a vampire, taking on their memories and abilities, if he can get at Sammie, he’ll be able to pierce the veil, too, and commune once again with his long lost ancestors. We could read Remmick’s drive as an allegory about cultural appropriation, a white man who wants to steal the blues, and certainly there’s an element of that at play. But the “Killmonger was right” corollary of Coogler films suggests that villains are often more complex than they may at first seem. In Sinners, there’s a mob of Klansmen that function as the more straightforward baddies, but Coogler isn’t interested in giving them much screen time. Yet he lingers with Remmick just as he did with Killmonger and Namor in his two Black Panther installments. In each of these cases, Coogler explores different experiences of what it’s like when the boot of Empire is on your neck. Remmick, coming from Britain’s first colony, speaks of his home being taken and of religion being forced on him. He seems to hold genuine disdain for the Klan and notes that he’s happy to turn them all to prey, not because he wants what they have but because they deserve a gruesome death. He plays and dances to the music of his ancestors with care and devotion. And he argues that what he has to offer—community with his coven, the power to overtake the plantation class, eternal life—is better than what Smoke, Stack, Sammie, and the rest of the juke joint patrons currently have.

SO! screen capture of Sinners showing Remmick, banjo-in-hand in front of vampires: Joan (left), Bert (right) [1:40]

No one living trusts Remmick—in fact, Annie (Mosaku), the heart, brain, and wisdom of the movie, specifically distrusts him even before he reveals his true vampiric nature. And Coogler doesn’t position Remmick to be perceived as “good” in any sense of the word, except at playing that banjo. But, like Killmonger and Namor, Remmick gets to be right about some things. It appears in flickers of concession on characters’ faces when Remmick tells them they live in a place where they’ll always have to fight to even try to be truly free. It appears again when the juke joint protectors melt a bit during Remmick & Co’s performance of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a glimmer of a thought of “wait, should we let them come inside and play this absolute bop??” (for detailed historical context for this song see Daphne Brooks’s “See My Face on the Other Side” [2017]). Coogler’s villains ultimately suffer defeat, but before they do, he makes sure audiences glimpse how they’ve suffered under Empire, offering an understanding of their destructive actions as born of unhealed generational trauma.

Piercing the veil is tricky work. Dangerous work. In The Long Emancipation (2021), Rinaldo Walcott notes that “much of what we have come to call Black culture is a mode of living life within, against, and beyond plantation logics” (20), not only a rejection of logics of oppression but also a practice of creating and nurturing something else. To set about finding knowledge and being, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human” is to set off into the not-fully-known, where one may encounter a variety of ideas and beings who won’t ultimately lead you to freedom but who may offer you something a little better than what you’ve got (Wynter, 2000 interview with David Scott, 136). Walcott calls this the difference between emancipation and actual freedom. While emancipation is often mistaken for freedom, Walcott argues that “postemancipation acts of Black life have been consistently interdicted, thereby preempting and often violently preventing Black life from authorizing its own desires for bodily autonomy” (105), preventing Black life from being free. 

In Sinners, Coogler shows us the way the blues could clear space for finding freedom, but none of the characters in the movie make it all the way there. It’s a movie situated in the long emancipation, where an imposed religion calls the blues the devil’s music, where plantation sharecropping and the Klan violently forestall Black freedom (but sometimes get what’s coming to them), and where various vampires carrying their own intergenerational trauma try to seduce Black people into accepting a different flavor of emancipation in place of the freedom the blues leads them toward. The map to freedom may not sound like the blues anymore, but Sinners reminds us the work isn’t done.

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Featured images: Screen Capture by SO!: Sammie’s right hand clutching broken guitar neck, black cross in the background against white wall [2:10]

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Justin Burton is a Professor of Music at Rider University, teaching primarily in the Music Production degree as well as in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford, 2018).

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I, too, was Mouchette at 13 years old

I’m 13 and my best friend from primary school asks me if I have an account on Tumblr. I do, but I’m not sure if I want her to know. She broke the unspoken rule, you never share your blog with IRL friends, it’s taboo to talk about it. I hesitantly agree, and we exchange blogs. I take a look at her page. In her bio, there’s a quote from Forrest Gump: ‘Life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.’ Her reblogs consist of summer destinations, clean girls in bikinis, LA highways lined with palms, New York architecture, and Brandy Melville models. I scroll lower and lower and am becoming engulfed in shame. What is she gonna think of me when she sees my blog? Is she gonna think I’m crazy or unstable? I need to check my recently reblogged posts to determine how bad it is. I open my blog page. The difference between our visual aesthetics and personalities is imminent. I go through black and white analogue photos with depressing captions, graphic self-harm content, gifs from AHS Asylum, posts glorifying eating disorders, grunge fashion, soft animals lying on the grass, and nihilistic quotes from coming-of-age movies. I frantically scroll through my own blog as if seeing it for the first time, suddenly aware of how performative my pain looks when viewed through someone else’s eyes.

In the next couple of years, I will forget all about Tumblr, and I will slowly stop reblogging. I will migrate to different platforms with my peers, but fortunately never delete my account. My blog will patiently wait for me to return, but… so will the same feelings of shame and cringe, preserved with embarrassing clarity and waiting to reveal itself as an archive of my becoming.

The decision to slowly stop using Tumblr would, unexpectedly, come as a direct result of a certain motion. In 2018, the last year of Verizon’s and Yahoo!’s ownership of the platform, NSFW visual content was to be completely banned from the platform. After losing about 30% of the user traffic on the platform in response to a stricter content policy, the American media giant got rid of the site and sold it to Automattic for less than 0.3% of the purchase price. For a little while, it seemed like the platform had come full circle: being bought back by a company that is responsible for the blog service WordPress.com, seemed to promise the return to the simpler times: easily made, accessible blogs!! reunited communities!! unchanged, not-algorithm dictated dashboard!! chronological feed!! ….but, wait…not so fast….. slow down.. In February 2024, Automattic announced it would start selling its users’ data to OpenAI and Midjourney…… So much for the simpler times….

At 22 years old, I discovered mouchette.org while researching net art works for my thesis. The site, created by French artist Martine Neddam in 1996, mimics a teenage girl’s diary with deliberate naivety and whimsy: pink text, buzzing flies, stuffed animals, and a navigation menu that mimics early GeoCities pages. Yet, the content quickly subverts this childish innocence, with hyperlinks leading to the deepest curiosities of a seemingly pre-adolescent mind. From asking site visitors to physically connect through the cold surface of the screen, and asking strangers on the internet how to commit suicide, to suicide notes, and a forum where visitors share their struggles, jokes, experiences, and offers of help.

While exploring the domain of mouchette.org, I noticed myself getting lost in the same familiar feelings that, up until now, were intrinsic to scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard. The dark thoughts and desires displayed by the character of an almost 13-year-old being out in the open brought me back to the same feelings I had at 13.

 

What struck me was how precisely Neddam had anticipated the aesthetic and behavioral patterns that would later define Tumblr’s confessional culture. The site’s juxtaposition of girlish visuals with existential dread mirrored my own Tumblr experience. Whereas, of course, the difference was Mouchette’s website being a carefully constructed artwork, and our Tumblr blogs were most often unconscious, messy autofictions.

 

Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics helps explain Tumblr’s ecosystem of shared vulnerability. In The Female Complaint, Berlant argues that:

an intimate public is an achievement. Whether linked to women or other nondominant people, it flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.[1]

Tumblr operationalized this: the platform’s reblog function turned intimate, personal suffering into viral, communal texts. Every disturbing post wasn’t only a cry for help, but a template others could adapt. Notes under graphic self-harm posts functioned as a perverse metric of care, where visibility equaled validation. You learned to package your despair in aesthetically pleasing ways, to juxtapose frat party gifs with confessions about your eating disorder, to make your suffering palatable enough to be consumed by strangers. We weren’t expressing sadness, in reality, we were competing in what could only be called the Trauma Olympics, where visibility passed for validation and the most graphic posts received the most notes.

This tension between real pain and performed pain is where Mouchette becomes most illuminating. In an interview with Anett Dekker, Neddam describes the suicide forum of mouchette’s website as “a social space where people could communicate and help other people“. It’s striking how precisely this project anticipated the ecosystems of care we’d later build and use on Tumblr. Mouchette’s greatest insight wasn’t that people would perform care online, but that they’d do so more earnestly for a fictional character than platforms would ever let them do for each other. We built real support systems in Tumblr’s margins, but instead of making our troubles solvable, the platform turned them scrollable.

I feel like it is crucial when talking about Tumblr to include the Sad Girl Theory, since its roots are deeply interlinked with the platform. In 2014, artist and writer Audrey Wollen proposed a theory that female sadness should be looked at as an act of resistance against the hypermasculine system of domination,[2] rather than a performative, self-involved, passive action. In retrospect, I have trouble agreeing with Wollen’s theory. As opposed to stigmatized notions of sharing[3] your private business, especially on topics surrounding mental health, all the trauma posting I encountered in my years on Tumblr in some way felt liberating. This liberation and — as called by Wollen, resistance swiftly turned into another online aesthetic, which itself was tailored to capitalise on white, skinny, western middle-class girls and their pain, leaving no space for anyone who didn’t fit into those very confined categories.

(More on sad girl theory, read: Revisiting Sad Girl Sentiments)

Maybe what Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory misses is that our Tumblr years weren’t just about resistance or aesthetics – they were the messy work of digital adolescence. This was the evolution of drawing eyes and roses in middle school notebooks, translated for the platform age. Where we once filled margins with angsty song lyrics, we would reblog My Chemical Romance lyrics over grainy photos. The physical diary became an infinitely scrollable dashboard, but the impulse remained the same: to externalize the unbearable weight of teenage angst.

To conclude my reflection on my Tumblr archive, maybe what emerges isn’t just shame or nostalgia, but something more useful. A critical lens on how platforms mediate emotional development in the platform era. These archives matter not because they’re embarrassing or profound, but because they document what it means to come of age in systems that turn identity formation into engagement data.

I want to end this essay with a #hopecore message I found while perusing the suicide forum of mouchette.org. I am leaving you with a message from Loraen O. D. from the 10th of May 2010.

Live to love deary if nothing else. Pleasing to all and as addictive as a smile, love is all you need. All other emotion crumbles before it; they are neutralized in its wake. Love heals all woundsas they say. You suffer mearly from the lack of this emotion. A simple prescription of love once a day will remedy this childish desire for an end of yours. Open up to your anyone, hang out with that someone, share a smile with a stranger. Love is not a commodity in short supply, rather it is in low demand. It comes to those who look for it. My dear, find love and you will never forget it. Likewise it will never forget you. Find it in any form with anyone and when you have found it, cherish it. Go on; start now! Don’t wait. Get on the phone and talk to Julia, or got to Alex’s house. Head over to the local park and smile at people, talk about the weather or the world. Walk to your father, tell him you love him. Run to your mother, give her a hug. Theres no time to lose, only time to gain assuming the state your in. To start you off and to end my note I’d like to say: Good luck, have fun, and I Love You!

[1] Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2008, p. 8.

[2] https://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/28463/1/girls-are-finding-empowerment-through-internet-sadness

[3] Stigma imposed by previous generations, that inculcated the same conception in our (millenial, gen-z) generation.

Anielek Niemyjski is an Artistic Research graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Their research practice is centered around early net art works, alternative exhibition practices on the web and collective digital memory.