We Never/Land: Shifting Perspectives on Social Death Through Music, Affect, and Adventure

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Afro-pessimist theorists Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and Orlando Patterson argue that Black people exist in a state of social death, defined as the condition of enslavement or lack of personhood. This project investigates the application of social death, specifically how the abstraction of the theory creates a disjunction with the everyday. I argue that regardless of the critical analysis Afro-pessimism invites, it does not fully reckon with the affective experience of Black people today. I wrote and produced Never/Land, an interactive album, in order to explore the affect of social death and its impact on my Black consciousness. By bringing awareness to the suffering that I experience as a result of the legacy of enslavement, I found that social death is an opportunity for new possibilities of Black life. Ultimately, Black people must mourn the death of the social in order to find a world capacious enough to hold the simultaneity of life and death. From social death emerged the archive of Never/Land, a documentation of beautiful things found by those in bondage.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 14, 2021

Author	Smith, Angel Marie
Primary advisor	Robinson, Aileen Kaye
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, African and African American Studies Program

Subject	social death
Subject	affect
Subject	race theory
Subject	black consciousness
Subject	music
Subject	afropessimism
Subject	African and African American Studies
Subject	Institute for Diversity in the Arts
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Title Never/Land (Interactive Album)
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/sc543fz7799

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).

Preferred Citation: Smith, Angel Marie. Advised by Robinson, Aileen Kaye. (2021). We Never/Land: Shifting Perspectives on Social Death Through Music, Affect, and Adventure. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/sc543fz7799

Undergraduate Honors Theses in African and African American Studies, Stanford University

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