Research Statement

Research Questions

‘There Are Other Worlds’ quotes Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms and Amiri Baraka’s poem, ‘Ka’Ba.’ Wilderson argues that the world of the human is structured by the positioning of blackness as socially dead (2010). In this sense, blackness indexes an antagonism with that world, a radical negativity that tends toward what Frantz Fanon proposed as ‘the end of the world’ (1970). Amiri Baraka’s ‘Ka’Ba’ identifies the spatial constraints that are imposed on black life: ‘A closed window looks down / on a dirty courtyard’ (2017). However, Baraka’s poem asserts that black voices and sounds defy the dimensionality and ‘physics’ of these constraints, demonstrating otherworldly movements. These ‘sonic’ movements produce a more capacious scale of possibility: ‘black people / call across or scream and walk across / defying physics in the stream of their will.’ Blackness, in Baraka’s poem, suggests alternative worlds that are distinctly ‘full of sound.’ This idea recalls Sun Ra’s discussion, in Space is the Place (1974), of sonic worlds that deviate from Earth’s sounds of ‘guns… violence.’

‘There Are Other Worlds’ works with the slippage between video essays and music videos to imagine black worlds against the forces that render such worlds impossible. It remixes images from music videos that depict black bodies in various states of encumbrance, suspension, and flight. Rather than adhering to the videos’ original music, I use two jazz songs to shape the rhythm and visual narrative of the essay. Those songs are Sun Ra’s ‘There Are Other Worlds (Nobody Told You Of)’ (1978) and Miles Davis’s ‘Rated X’ (1974).

Concerns about music video form, black music, and transformative works shape my research questions. How does music work with and through images to render feelings of heft and levity? How might one imagine black worlds in the unresolved tension between these feelings? What is the relationship between ‘remix’ aesthetics, and other transformative approaches, and videographic criticism? And how might black music and expressivity productively blur these distinctions?

Context

I developed a first draft of ‘There Are Other Worlds’ as a participant in the Middlebury Sound & Image Scholarship in Summer 2025. The selection of music videos that I ‘sampled’ in this project is inspired by the structure of several chapters in a monograph I am developing (which, tentatively, shares its title with this video essay). In the essay, I make frequent visual references to Vince Staples’ ‘Lift Me Up,’ Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright,’ and Michael Kiwanuka’s ‘I’m a Black Man in a White World.’ While these videos share themes of ascension and flight, they register the aspirational overtones of these images against a sense of ‘heaviness’ that imposes black bodies.

In his book, Being Property Once Myself, Joshua Bennett describes black male bodies as bearing a certain ‘heaviness,’ or a ‘haunting presence that doubles as a kind of beauty but also prevents something like flight or a legible form of social mobility’ (2020). Such heaviness resonates in the mid-air suspension of ‘Lift Me Up,’ in which the body’s vertical tilt remains perilously stagnant, or in the rotations of the camera that disorient the scene of police violence in ‘Alright.’ Several of the cited audiovisual works, such as Until the Quiet Comes and ‘Alright,’ are set in Watts and Compton. They also evoke the ghettocentric images, across film and music video, which have rendered these locations and others as fatalistic spaces of black male bodies in crisis. Alternatively, ‘There Are Other Worlds’ amplifies the fantastical moments of sonic expressivity in the cited music videos. These ‘sonic bodies’ intervene in familiar repetitions of black encumbrance and death.

This copresence of violent constraint and otherworldly release is integral to the essay. My intervention, alongside the music videos, is to highlight surreal moments that rupture the real and representational forces that have produce black male embodiment as heavy. In my writing, I extend these ideas to works by black women and queer artists, such as Tierra Whack (whose video, “Mumbo Jumbo,” is referenced here), fka twigs (‘cellophane’), and Devonté Hynes (‘Jewelry’), among others.

Methods

I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the piece, but I drew extensively on my experience with sample-based hip hop production in FL Studio. I found affinities between beat-making and the editing software, which I tried to imbue into the rhythm and feel of the essay. 

In Digital Music Videos, Steven Shaviro notes that music videos layer images in non-hierarchical ways that are both polyrhythmic and ‘polyoptical’ (2017). This suggests that images are often layered in music videos without the strictures of narrative, akin to the layering of voices and frequency shelves in a sound mix. Accordingly, I used sonic effects (filtering, reverb, delay), visual layers (superimpositions, dissolves), and rhythmical editing to fold the ‘sampled’ music videos images into a highly compressed, polyrhythmic, and videographic ‘world.’

‘There Are Other Worlds’ uses two songs to divide the essay into two parts. Section One layers the text of Amiri Baraka’s “Ka’Ba” against music video images (‘CAKE,’ ‘Element.,’ ‘Alright,’ and Until the Quiet Comes). I scored this section with Sun Ra’s ‘There are Other Worlds.’ I had worked with this song as a sample in a music project, and I felt that its angular bassline, mysterious vocals, and consistent beat would provide a strong basis for the rhythmical experience of the essay. I used a hi-pass filter to extract Sun Ra’s whispers, which restate the title of the piece at the conclusion of this first section. Against an image drawn from ‘I’m a Black Man in a White World,’ I used an automated low-pass filter to gradually isolate the bass and represent, through sonics, the ascension of the levitating body.

Section Two combines text from Frank Wilderson’s book alongside Miles Davis’s ‘Rated X.’ Teo Macero, the song’s producer, frequently ‘drops’ the song’s propulsive breakbeat to accentuate Davis’s organ chords. The rhythmical locomotion and ‘dropping’ of resonated with the physics and violence of the juxtapositions in this section. This sound, which was recorded during Davis’s years of working with funk and electronic sounds, also anticipates the experimental hip hop sonics of artists like Shabazz Palaces and Flying Lotus, who I reference heavily in this section.

The essay ends with a shot from Quelle Chris’s ‘Alive Ain’t Always Living’ (2022), its original sound muted. My intention was to create a silent interval in which the dynamics of levity, encumbrance, and rhythm could continue to resonate visually. This muted image still carries what Tina Campt might describe as ‘felt sound’ (2017). My position is that the densely layered sounds of ‘Rated X,’ and its expression in the essay’s visual layers, continue to resonate within this silence. As such, silence provides an occasion for reflection. It also demonstrates the anticipatory effects of rhythm in ways that might not be possible in a conventional essay.

Outcomes

In his video essay, ‘Music Video Space,’ Matthias Bonde Korsgaard emphasizes the audiovisuality of space in music videos, or the way in which they ‘typically create a visual space on the basis of a preexisting piece of music that already suggests a certain sense of space through sound. This observation informs the composition of ‘Music Video Space,’ which organizes music videos into different types of spaces while retaining fragments of their original music to track their specificities.

While I am similarly using videographic methods to discuss multiple videos, ‘There Are Other Worlds’ sharply deviates from the original sonic material. Instead, the essay approaches the aesthetics of music video, its sonic spaces and the stress points of movement and sound, as a medium for ‘black worldbuilding.’ The idea was to recut the videos and channel the framework of the essay through black music, akin to what Arthur Jafa proposes as ‘black visual intonation’ (1998). 

While this approach disrupts the audiovisuality that is at the crux of music video analysis, the essay emphasizes the blackness of the medium and the black spaces it can imagine. I was inspired by Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, and Gabriel Moses, artists whose work mixes documentary filmmaking, critical archiving, and music video form. These artists also recut existing materials, including footage from music videos. The essay is also conversant with scholarship on ‘remix’ and practice research, such as Francesca Coppa’s study of ‘vidding’ (2022) and the discussion, via Corey Creekmur et al, of remixes in ‘Remix and Videographic Criticism’ (2017). 

Impact

In ‘The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video,’ Alesandra Raengo and Lauren Cramer describe the work of Alan Ferguson, Kahlil Joseph, and Jenn Nkiru as ‘black art’ that sometimes works in a manner akin to ‘essay films’ and ‘digging in the crates,’ in a hip hop context. This essay thinks through the sampling logic of black music video, while also commenting on the critical work that the cited music videos are doing in their original contexts. The essay works across Afrofuturist and Afropessimist formulations—a discussion that Tavia Nyong’o explores through the notion of ‘counter-speculation’ in the recent book, Black Apocalypse. ‘There Are Other Worlds’ suggests rhythm and embodiment as a way of attuning to presently inaudible and ‘unsounded’ rhythms. 

Bibliography

Baraka, A., (1963) Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow.

Baraka, A., (1991) ‘Ka’Ba’. In: W.J. Harris, ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Bennett, J., (2020) Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard University Press.

Campt, T.M., (2017) Listening to Images. Duke University Press.

Coppa, F., (2022) Vidding: A History. University of Michigan Press.

Creekmur, C., Kohnen, M., McIntosh, J., Morimoto, L., Morrissey, K., Scott, S. and Stein, L., (2017) ‘Roundtable: Remix and Videographic Criticism.’ Cinema Journal, 56(4), pp.159–184.

Fanon, F., (1970) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Paladin.

Goodman, S., (2012) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jafa, A. (1998) ‘Black Visual Intonation,’ The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally New York: Columbia University Press.

Korsgaard, M.B., (2024) Music Video Space. [in]Transition, 11(1).

Nyong’o, T., (2025) Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World. Vol. 16. Oakland: University of California Press.

Raengo, A. and Cramer, L.M., (2020) ‘The Unruly Archives of Black Music Videos.’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 59(2), pp.138–144.

Shaviro, S., (2017) Digital Music Videos. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Wilderson III, F.B., (2010) Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

Media Cited

Alive Ain’t Always Living (Quelle Chris, Dominik Galleva & Clemens Niel Justina, 2022, USA)

Alright (Kendrick Lamar, Colin Tilley, 2015, USA)

CAKE (Shabazz Palaces, Hiro Murai, 2014, USA)

Coronus the Terminator (Flying Lotus, Young Replicant, 2015, USA)

Element (Kendrick Lamar, Jonas Lindstroem & The Little Homies, 2017, USA)

Get Up (clipping., Jonathan Snipes, 2014, USA)

I Heard (Young Fathers, Young Fathers, 2013, UK)

I’m a Black Man in a White World (Michael Kiwanuka, Hiro Murai, 2016, UK)

Lift Me Up (Vince Staples, David Helman & Dustin Lane, 2016, USA)

Meditate (Earthgang, Mac Grant, 2019, USA)

Mumbo Jumbo (Tierra Whack, Marco Prestini, 2017, USA)

Never Catch Me (Flying Lotus, Hiro Murai, 2014, USA)

Rated X (Miles Davis, 1975, USA)

Space is the Place (Sun Ra, John Coney, 1974, USA)

There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of) (Sun Ra, 1978, USA)

Until the Quiet Comes (Flying Lotus, Kahlil Joseph, 2012, USA)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement 

There Are Other Worlds is a thoughtful and visually compelling videographic work that powerfully explores Black experience through the interplay of sound, image, and movement. The piece succeeds in visualising Black bodies beyond the constraints of the material world, using floating visual elements, layered compositions, and superimpositions to evoke states of suspension, flight, and alternative modes of being. These techniques provide an effective visual grammar for the author’s conceptual concerns and strongly support the argument developed across both the video and the accompanying text.

The use of music is particularly successful. By replacing the original sonic material of the sampled music videos with Sun Ra’s There Are Other Worlds (Nobody Told You Of) and Miles Davis’s Rated X, the work reorients the viewer’s affective experience, creating a rhythmical structure that allows the theoretical texts of Baraka and Wilderson to resonate in new ways. This approach foregrounds the author’s interest in the aesthetic language of Black music videos and demonstrates how sonic and visual forms together articulate the textures of Black life, including its tensions between levity and weight, encumbrance and release.

The final silent image is especially striking. By muting the last shot, the work invites the viewer to consider how sound lingers as embodied resonance, a notion that aligns with Tina Campt’s concept of “felt sound.” This creates a thoughtful closing gesture that links the videographic form to the author’s broader conceptual framing around rhythm, anticipation, and Black sonic possibility.

The accompanying text is well-articulated and provides a strong theoretical grounding, situating the audiovisual strategies within discourses of Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, sampling, and videographic criticism. The discussion of method particularly the connection between hip hop beat-making and the rhythmical impetus of videographic editing is insightful and enriches the work’s contribution to conversations about remix practices and critical making.

There are, however, two areas where the written component could be strengthened. First, while the author notes a specific focus on Black male bodies, the rationale for this emphasis could be made clearer. Given the long history of representing Black male corporeality in terms of vulnerability, spectacle, or excess, a brief explanation of why these bodies are central to this project would help situate the work within broader conversations about gendered Black representation and embodiment.

Second, the selection of musical and visual texts though compelling would benefit from slightly more explicit contextualisation. Clarifying why these particular music videos and tracks were chosen, and how they exemplify the method the author develops, would provide a stronger underpinning for the videographic choices and further articulate their cultural and aesthetic significance.

Overall, There Are Other Worlds is a sophisticated and affecting contribution to videographic scholarship. Its formal inventiveness, conceptual clarity, and commitment to exploring Black sonic and visual worlds make it a strong submission to Screenworks.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement 

There Are Other Worlds represents a sophisticated intersection of audiovisual practice and theoretical inquiry, offering a rigorous examination of Black ontologies through the lens of videographic remix. The submission excels in its ability to translate complex philosophical frameworks—specifically those concerning Afrofuturism and Afropessimism—into a tangible, rhythmic, and visually layered experience.

The strength of this work lies in its methodological transparency. By framing videographic editing as an extension of hip-hop’s "sampling" logic, the author elevates the act of cutting from a technical necessity to a primary argumentative tool. This is most evident in the following areas:

• The displacement of original audio in favor of compositions by Sun Ra and Miles Davis is a masterstroke of "critical listening." This substitution does more than set a mood; it forces a temporal shift that aligns the viewer with the theoretical provocations of Baraka and Wilderson III.

• The use of superimpositions and non-linear compositions effectively mirrors Shaviro’s concept of the "polyoptical." The work successfully avoids the trap of purely illustrative video by creating a dense, multi-track visual environment that functions with the complexity of a musical arrangement.

• The decision to conclude with a silent shot is a profound application of Tina Campt’s "felt sound." It serves as a necessary moment of reflection, allowing the preceding rhythmic intensity to resonate within the viewer’s own body.

The accompanying essay provides a robust intellectual scaffold, situating the video within a clear genealogy of Black musical aesthetics and media studies. The parallel drawn between the "beat-maker" and the "videographic scholar" is particularly compelling and offers a fresh perspective on the epistemological value of "making" as a form of critique. 

There is scope for the author to develop aspects of the written reflection in ways that would further strengthen the project’s conceptual framing. The submission notes that the videographic essay emerges from a longer‑term research trajectory, including a chapter in a forthcoming monograph (“Levitate”) and earlier development during the Middlebury Sound & Image Scholarship. Making this lineage more explicit in the written component would help to clarify how the videographic work functions in relation to the larger argument—whether as a condensation, an experiment in form, or a speculative extension of ideas still unfolding in print.

Relatedly, the invocation of Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological observation regarding the Black body’s “lost lightness of being,” while identified as an important conceptual touchstone, could productively be drawn into closer dialogue with the videographic form itself. A brief reflection on how Fanon’s insights operate implicitly through rhythm, suspension, or sonic manipulation—rather than through direct citation—would help to articulate how videographic scholarship can think with theory without necessarily illustrating it.

Finally, the rationale for the project’s emphasis on Black male embodiment could be deepened by more fully integrating the author’s stated inspirations, including specific music videos by Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Shabazz Palaces and Hiro Murai, as well as Joshua Bennett’s discussion of corporeal “heaviness” in Being Property Once Myself. Expanding on how these works and texts collectively inform the oscillation between levity and encumbrance, lightness and weight, would more clearly situate the project within ongoing conversations about gendered Black embodiment, while also acknowledging the broader archive of Black music video that underpins the author’s thinking.

Taken together, these developments would not require a shift in the project’s focus, but rather a more explicit articulation of its intellectual scaffolding, strengthening the connection between process, theory and videographic form.

There Are Other Worlds is a visually arresting and intellectually dense project. It successfully advocates for a mode of scholarship that is as much about rhythm and sensation as it is about text. Its formal precision and conceptual depth make it an excellent fit for publication, contributing significantly to the evolving landscape of audiovisual research.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response