#marlo david

The rising specter of the post-human as a theoretical model to explain and analyze past and future black Atlantic experience is connected to the advent of "post-soul" or "post-black" aesthetics, through which contemporary artists and writers strategically reject blackness as a unitary subject position. While the post-human has been a useful intervention into humanist discourse, Weheliye suggests that this shift leaves aspects of black expression on the critical dust heap. In other words, as cultural criticism spirals out into a post-whatever cosmos and challenges to blackness receive larger audience, we will find ourselves in a future in which it becomes less attractive to engage with black cultural products that fail to abandon humanist claims. In this landscape, R&B becomes a relic of a bygone era. It is your analog television when everything goes digital in 2009. It is an artifact of the Old Ways Of Thinking.

Neo-soul is not dead. It is thriving precisely because black artists like Badu liberate themselves from genre labels, assert individual subjectivities, and complicate the meanings of blackness and black music.