since 1998

personal website: joe crawford. code. occasional comics. toy robots. bodysurfing. san diego. california. say hi.

Afrofuturism with Greg Tate

I went to a speech by Greg Tate in 2016. It was super cool. I apparently did not take notes.

October 18, 2016 6:30 – 9:30 PM
Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space

The UC San Diego Visual Arts Department, Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and Black Studies Project at UCSD are pleased to present a lecture by Greg Tate.

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate’s influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate’s resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.

It bums me out a great deal that I didn’t take notes on this. I did post some things.

I can’t find that ink in the 2016 notebooks I have.

Bad archivist!

I did tweet though:

Though I did tweet:

Tate got me turned onto things I’d not really considered before. Parliament Funkadelic for example. And Space is the Place by Sun Ra. And the fact that he name checked the then new #blacklivesmatter — “roaring sound in cyberspace” & the fact that he namechecked both William Gibson and William Burroughs put him squarely up my alley.

Tate died in 2021. Remember him.

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