Feenin

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye argues that rhythm and blues has remained at the center of Black life since the late 1970s. He pushes back against the common view, found in both popular commentary and scholarship, that the genre has faded and died. Instead, he treats R&B as a living space where Black thought and experience keep taking shape, and as an essential record of the present.

The book examines the technologies that produce and reproduce music, including auto-tune and the physical qualities of the BlackFem singing voice. Weheliye also covers the rise of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit after disco, and how Prince and David Bowie engaged with appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s. Other chapters look at the BlackFem voice as a store of Black knowledge, at how contemporary R&B artists have drawn attention to Black Lives Matter, and at what vocal distortion devices like the vocoder reveal about the place of Black music in debates over humanism and posthumanism.

Across these discussions, Weheliye uses R&B as a way to think about Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.