COM 4332-002: Studies in New Media (Fall 2021) - 3 credit hours Final Paper Option (20 points) DUE: Thursday, December 9, 11:59pm on Canvas Instructions: You will develop your midterm essay into a paper of 7–10 pages in length, revising your thesis as necessary to make an original argument based on your media analysis. Your analysis must engage with relevant themes and materials from our course. To achieve this, you must substantively incorporate a minimum of 3 course readings (at least 1 must be from the second half of our course) and 3 course concepts (at least 1 must be from the second half of our course). You must also demonstrate revision to your midterm essay based on feedback you received from me. For this option, you may also conduct outside research as appropriate. Formatting: Essays must be written in 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, and have 1-inch margins on all sides. Essays must be written using complete and well-constructed sentences and paragraphs. Make sure that you thoroughly proofread for correct grammar, syntax, and citational practices. ***Be sure to include 1) a Citation Style Statement in your header indicating whether you use MLA, Chicago, or APA and 2) a Word Count Statement that identifies the words in the body of your essay. Do not include headers, titles, and works cited in your Word Count Statement.*** Important Information Regarding Citations and Plagiarism: Any instances that contain plagiarized passages or material (whether intentional or not and to include any language taken from course readings, outside materials, or your own writing from this or other courses except your midterm exam) will receive a zero and the possibility of a formal report filed with the university. All direct quotations (including short phrases of 2–3 words), definitions taken from online sources or dictionaries, and paraphrasing MUST be cited fully and appropriately. FOLLOW ALL STEPS TO RECEIVE FULL CREDIT. Rubric: Category Points Possible Appropriate use and formatting of in-text citations and works cited entries following MLA, APA, or Chicago Clear, well-developed thesis statement and argument throughout Substantively addresses feedback from the midterm exam throughout Style, organization, and grammar Substantive and thoughtful application of 3 course concepts (at least 1 from second half of semester) Substantive and thoughtful application of 3 course readings (at least 1 from second half of semester) TOTAL 2 2 3 3 5 5 20 Deductions: Citation Style Statement. Not including a citation style statement will result in a deduction of .5 points from your overall grade. Word Count Statement: Not including an accurate word count will result in a deduction of .5 points from your overall grade. I will also deduct a letter grade for every 100 words below the 750-word minimum. “Works Cited” Page: Not including a “Works Cited” page will result in the deduction of 1 point from your overall grade. Formatting: Not submitting a double-spaced essay in 12-point Times New Roman font with 1-inch margins will result in a deduction of .5 points from your overall grade. Late Policy: As indicated in the syllabus, late submissions will receive a deduction of half a letter grade per day late, to begin accruing as soon as the deadline has passed. Contact me regarding any extenuating circumstances. 1 Repellent Fence Analysis (APA Citation Style) Megan Urbealis Florida Atlantic University COM4332: Studies in New Media Dr. Andrea Miller November 7th 2021 2 Repellent Fence Analysis (APA Citation Style) Introduction The Repellent Fence is a social project involving collaboration among individuals, communities, and organizations to raise awareness on the dehumanization of polarization constructs of nationalism. Dialogue concerning borders should instead focus on the respect of indigeneity. The goal of the project is to use borderlands to recognize the values of indigenous people and acknowledge the experience of people in the diaspora. As stated by the project's originators, "The center point of the Repellent Fence is the geographic location that was chosen. It is the most densely fortified militarized zone of the Western Hemisphere" (Postcommodity, 2015). The border region and the ever-present military and surveillance systems artificially divide the people, cultures, and communities. The project is part of a more extensive public campaign. Cultural Fantasy The surrounding discourse borders are driven by an increase in the rise of unhealthy nationalism. As a result, indigenous communities' sovereignty and cultural significance are overlooked by the erection of dehumanizing barriers and promoting the polarization of cultures. According to Loft and Swanson (2014), human and cultural violence are among the issues that lead to the erection of borders, which negate the cultural significance of indigenous communities. Repellent Fence makes an effort to recognize indigenous communities and peoples and how they are interwoven into the immigration crisis of the Americas. The immigration crisis plays a critical role in cultural conflicts, especially when cultural integration becomes a problem once the immigrants have settled in the U.S (Loft & Swanson, 2014). 3 The cultural fantasy envisioned by Repellent Fences flaunts the idea that the integration of cultural heritage into society and the acceptance of all cultures should be present in many aspects of society. This effort is reflected in the attempts made towards recognizing the cultural significance of indigenous people and ensuring that cultural relevance is reserved amidst an issue that is politically charged. In its core ideas, Repellent Fence wants a world where the characters and cultures of people and communities are also reflected in the world around them. The promotion of cultural relativism is central to the ideas that are represented by Repellent Fence (Postcommodity, 2015). For instance, the colors and iconography of the balloons that make the fence constitute an indigenous semiotic system that shows indigenous people's interconnectedness in the Western Hemisphere. A study by Blake (2011) investigated the influence of culture on movements in the 70s and 80s. These movements were brought to life by the cultural adaptation that they had adopted. Representational Strategy The plight of indigenous people is often given less attention, and there is minimal representation. Repellent Fence aims to bring more attention to the plight of indigenous communities, many of which have been forgotten when it comes to political, economic, or cultural discourse. Even the project's maturation took over eight years, and there were some issues involved with the project, such as the lack of adequate resources. The group also had to search from community to community to find a community willing to have the Repellent Fence be used for shifting bi-national discourse away from homeland security, drug cartels, and neoliberalism. Instead, the discussion should focus on improving the quality of life for these indigenous communities and addressing the effects of the border, such as the separation of families and the erosion of culture (Postcommodity, 2015). 4 Observably, having simple monuments built in the Tohono O'odham Nation, an indigenous community that has been divided in half by the border, as well as political and economic forces. These divisions are inconsiderate of the culture and sovereignty of indigenous people. As such, the cultural fantasy behind the Repellent Fence was to raise awareness about the indigenous people's social, cultural, and economic issues that have been left out of the discourse regarding the border (McClintock, 2009). In addition, the intention is to bring to light the point that the "immigrant crisis" is, in fact, a human rights crisis of the Western Hemisphere. However, the heavy presence of the military and the surveillance system makes it harder to gain entry into these communities and get the necessary information required for the adequate and accurate representation of the issues present in these communities (Postcommodity, 2015). Objectivity The making of Repellent Fence was with one objective; to raise awareness about the cultural heritage of indigenous people and introduce discourse surrounding the cultural issues and the quality of life of the indigenous people. The objectivity of the project remains well preserved in the artistic representation portrayed through the balloon fence. While many issues can be raised through the project, the project has mainly been focused on the cultural representation of the indigenous people. The focus is primarily on how the cultural erosion of the indigenous is perpetrated through the border, the military, and militia groups that pose a threat not only to the cultural heritage of indigenous people but also to their quality of life. Therefore, repellent Fence has managed to remain objective for all the period it has been active in the community (Postcommodity, 2015). (Word Count = 914 words.) 5 References Blake, A. M. (2011). Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio. American Quarterly, 63(3), 531–553. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41237565 Loft, S., & Swanson, K. (2014). Coded Territories. Amsterdam University Press. McClintock, A. (2009). Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Small Axe 13(1), 50-74. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/261519. Postcommodity. (2015, October 1). The Repellent Fence Story, as told by Postcommodity. Creative Capital. https://creative-capital.org/2015/10/01/repellent-fence/ Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio Author(s): Art M. Blake Source: American Quarterly , September 2011, Vol. 63, No. 3, Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (September 2011), pp. 531-553 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41237565 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41237565?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 531 Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio ArtM. Blake the mid-1970s, magazines from Newsweek to Car and Driver x.o Popular Electronics all carried full-page advertisements for various brands of citizens band (CB) radio equipment, promoting the eras craze for the simple two-way radio communications devices. Flipping through the pages of Ebony magazine in the same period, one might get the impression that CB was not part of black culture, that the fad had not hit black America. Popular movies of the day also depicted CB radio as the domain of white guys, mostly southerners, racing their cars or trucks across the United States in defiance of boneheaded sheriffs and cops. In fact, however, belying this inattention from manufacturers, advertisers, and Hollywood, CB radio had thrived in African American communities since the early 1960s. But African Americans used CB radio in a different manner and for different purposes than their white counterparts, and thereby created a system of mobility far removed from, and in opposition to, that of the white "good buddies" talking into their radios as they cruised America's roadways. This article argues that black CB use first developed in direct response to the racial politics of the postwar period, in particular, the years of struggle for meaningful desegregation and full citizenship. The emergence of a distinct black CB culture by the 1970s epitomizes how black use of CB, as a form of what I call "audiomobility," circumvented white prohibitions against black mobility and audibility, denied white assumptions of technical and verbal superiority, as well as internal black class politics around accent, vocabulary, and speech styles - about "sounding black." Black use of CB developed in the postwar period to counteract the immobilities produced by the specific circumstances of racism in the 1 960s and 1 970s. For example, black CB use responded to the technology's early adoption by the Ku Klux Klan in the south at the moment of segregation's faltering power, and worked in the 1 970s to counteract the use of CB as an organizing tool by northern opponents of school busing. From these origins, as an audiomobility network counteracting racism directly as well as indirectly, black CB evolved into an intraracial competitive arena, a ©201 1 The American Studies Association This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 532 I American Quarterly technocultural practice suited only to the audibly toughest competitors. Black CB s historical significance, despite its absence from scholarly studies until now, rests in its functioning as a nexus for, and challenge to, various histories: of the politics of black speech and oral culture; of the role of radio programming in the creation of black cultural identity; of race and technology. Black CB also shows how "community" and "identity" do not necessarily originate through direct contact and communication. As I show, its users built on an already existing black aural public sphere - rooted in black-interest radio, jive talk, and jazz and blues lyrics - and adapted CB technology to combine with that aural-oral sphere to connect geographically and socially diverse individuals. Black CB thus indirectly created a technologically mediated community based on perceived audible racial identity.1 Through "shooting skip" (communicating via CB over long distances), black CB created an audible black geography, offering a way to connect in real time, across cities and regions, black individuals and their localities - a networking opportunity especially important in the 1960s and 1970s when differences in regional cultures, practices, and histories of race and racism shaped black politics. The regional diversity of the audibly black voices and speech styles heard over CB radio confirmed to listeners the variety as well as the size of the black CB community and, by implication, of black America.2 Black CB signified a process of tuning in, with great skill, to an invisible disembodied shared blackness, a shared black sound, and a black technoculture. In a heavily commercial, corporate broadcasting context, black CB also signified the creation and demarcation of black radio space (black spectrum), the drowning out of the "white noise" of not only the dominant commercial culture but also of racism and segregation through distinctively black speech backed by necessarily self-sufficient black technical prowess. Black CB was a trickster act, cunningly and playfully "throwing" black voices freely back and forth across states, regions, the nation, and sometimes beyond - the radio hardware acting as ventriloquisms middleman. Unlike black bodies or even the words and actions of black political leaders, the immateriality of (black) sound eluded capture, control, or blockading. A technology used by whites in the civil rights and black power eras to enhance their security while enjoying their unrestricted mobility became, in the hands of blacks, a device that allowed them to throw off their physical and political immobility by mobilizing their sound, their voices, even while their bodies stayed unobtrusively in place.3 The field of sound studies has been relatively quiet about questions of race. When, why, and to whom might the audibility of race matter? As scholars of visual culture have argued, questions of the visual legibility of "identity" have This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 533 mattered most at times of cultural change when the previously stable visual markers of, say, gender, class, sexuality, or race became blurred. So too with questions of audible-sonic identification and its uncertainties. Mark Smith, whose attention to race is exceptional within sound studies scholarship, extensively documents in his book How Race Is Ma¿ie: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses the significance of all senses in the construction of race and the practice of racism in the southern United States from the antebellum period through the immediate postsegregation years after the Brown decision of 1954. Smith argues that examining the history of the southern racial sensorium shows that "it was no accident that the most vicious sensory stereotypes whites applied to blacks occurred when certainty in the identification of race was evaporating." Smith's skillful examination of the interplay of the histories of the senses and of race and racism buttresses my own arguments here that the racialization of CB radio technology requires us to consider the history of the audibility of race.4 Black involvement in CB radio was, by the CB craze of the mid-1970s, far more long-standing than that of most whites. As early as 1959, African American CB radio enthusiasts founded the Rooster Channel Jumpers, a CB radio users organization that established a nationwide network of black CB users. With official chapters in major American cities in the north, south, and east, a formal governance structure at every level, and blue and gold uni- forms for its members, the Rooster Channel Jumpers operated in the same manner as many popular postwar civil and fraternal organizations familiar to middle-class communities, and drew on the long-standing club tradition of the African American middle class. One can get an idea of the eventual size of the organization and the commitment of its members by noting that, in late June 1978, an estimated ten thousand African American CB radio enthusiasts gathered in Dallas, Texas, for the fifth annual convention of the Rooster Channel Jumpers. The keynote address, given by Dr. Berkeley Burrell, president of the National Business League (formerly the Negro Business League, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900), urged all black CBers to join together in a national black radio operators organization to promote the use of CB channels specifically for black economic organizing and mutual benefit. Although it seems Burrell never met that goal, since it may have seemed redundant given the strength of the Rooster Channel Jumpers, he continued to promote the idea that "nearly sixty percent of the Black population in this country can be reached through this powerful medium" and that "Black CB'ers can develop sufficient political clout to have a major impact on political and economic decisions that are routinely affecting their lives."5 Burrell's vision fit with some of the gains he and other business leaders had begun to wring from the This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 534 I American Quarterly federal government via President Richard Nixon's Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and other programs created in the wake of the urban crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But for many black CBers, even those at the Roosters convention, Burrell's vision clashed with their regular flouting of FCC regulations to achieve the distinct social and communications goals of black CB radio practice. Black CBers made CB radio exciting and significant for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s by using their radio equipment to communicate across long distances - an activity referred to in CB slang as "shooting skip" - what ham radio enthusiasts have always called "DX-ing." By shooting skip, black CB operators sent their signals much farther than the 150 miles permitted for the citizens band by FCC regulations. "Skip" is a naturally occurring phenomenon whereby radio signals bounce off the ionosphere and back down to earth at a distance far greater than the normal field of the transmitter. To talk long distance, CBers use a directional antenna to deliberately bounce their signal so that it lands hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Shooting skip successfully requires favorable atmospheric conditions, the skills and techni- cal know-how to build and use a directional (horizontal) antenna, luck, and patience. Base stations (home-based as opposed to mobile vehicle-based stations) running more power to boost their antennas signal often dominate the process, but not necessarily. Stories abound of big base stations being "cut off" by smaller stations or even by someone in a car who can make the most of the "conditions." By flouting FCC regulations limiting the signal distance of the CB radio service, African American CBers joined together via an invisible and mostly unsurveilled communications network. This network of users, partly because of the skill required to talk over long distances, then developed its internal elite practitioners who, by the mid-1970s, took over CB channel 6 as their domain and named it the "superbowl." The superbowl differs not just in sound but also in purpose to mainstream, mostly white, CB. Taking its name from what football enthusiasts see as the ultimate annual battle of champions - the Superbowl game between the years top-ranked NFL teams - which began in 1 967 and continues to shape football fan culture in the United States, the naming of the superbowl CB channel suggested it was the arena in which the best, most skilled, and toughest men would compete. No other CB channel bore such connotations. Superbowl enthusiasts do not call themselves "CBers" - they call themselves "superbowl operators" or "radio operators." Unlike white mainstream CBers, they do not focus on local, conversational exchanges with other CB enthusiasts. Instead, the superbowl works as an arena for not only shooting skip but also compet- This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 535 ing with other superbowl operators to reach a far-off third party. Who wins is determined not only through a technical contest to get one s signal heard but also through verbal dominance, and the ability to tease or insult the other operator(s) so effectively that they drop out of the exchange. Although readers may know of CB radio via its popular-culture representations, a brief background on its development seems necessary.6 Citizens band is a radio communications technology that provides free access to two-way radio communications, usually over relatively short distances, using channels set aside by the FCC, the U.S. government agency that (since the 1930s) has overseen and managed all forms of communications technologies - radio, television, telephone, and now cable, satellite, and the Internet. Although the FCC initially offered citizens band radio to the American public in 1948, CB was not feasible for mass use until 1958 when the FCC assigned twenty-three channels for the service. The FCC intended CB to provide a way for motorists or isolated workers to contact their homes, their coworkers, or emergency personnel in times of need. It also offered a cheap, simple form of mobile- to-base and mobile- to-mobile communication for businesses reliant on deliveries or other out-of-office activity. The CB radio service was designed for brief vocal exchanges, not for personal conversations like those conducted over the telephone or in person.7 Long-distance truck drivers accounted for about one-third of CB users before the CB radio craze of the mid-1970s.8 CB radios quickly achieved mass popularity in the United States during the mid-1970s as a direct result of the publicity surrounding the December 1973_january 1974 independent truckers' strike that followed the 1973-1974 OPEC oil embargo. News media reported how truckers used CB radios to contact each other and to form illegal convoys, disrupting traffic or blocking highways, or to share information about police and highway patrol activity, or about gas stations with available fuel.9 Sales of CB radio sets grew from 2 million in 1974 to a peak of approximately 10 million in 1976. But by 1978 CB radio sales had dropped abruptly, signaling that, for most Americans, the CB craze had definitely waned.10 Market saturation and, by 1978, the congestion of CB channels by large numbers of users contributed to the decline of the CB fad. During the 1970s, popular and consumer culture quickly picked up on the CB fad. A wave of CB-related movies, television shows, and songs became popular in the United States between approximately 1974 and 1978. However, in contrast to its image in popular culture as the tool of rebellious trucker culture, working- and lower-middle-class white men driving ordinary passenger cars formed CBs largest market in the 1970s. By 1977 drivers of passenger vehicles outnumbered truckers as CB users by about five to one.11 This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 536 I American Quarterly Moreover, among its majority white users, CB operated not as a rebels weapon but as a technology of white rescue.12 The period of CB's greatest popularity was also one dominated by fears of black working-class mobility. A growing automobile-centered urban-suburban infrastructure shaped the American postwar urban landscape, which itself produced fears of black mobility after the urban riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Such fears echoed a larger national concern about keeping the generally whiter suburbs "safe" from the generally poorer, more black, inner cities. By the 1970s, freeways, beltways, and highways connected the outer- and inner-city areas of large U.S. metropolitan areas. An August 1976 New York Times article referred to a recent FBI report showing a 10 percent increase from the previous year in serious crime in suburbs nationwide. Apparently, suburbanites believed that "inner-city minority resident[s] who journey out of the city to find more affluent victims" had caused the problems. Statements from various police authorities supported the suburbanites' fears, suggesting that roadways connecting downtown areas to suburbs might become criminal conduits. For example, the article quoted Daryl F. Gates, then an assistant police chief in Los Angeles, as stating "anyone can jump in a car, get on the freeway, rob a house and be back in the inner city in an hour."13 Given American dependence on roadways, especially in metropolitan areas, newspaper stories about crime and violence on the freeways and beltways exacerbated a broad-based urban anxiety at play in the postwar American city. The race riots in U.S. cities during the 1960s firmly connected race, the city, crime, and violence in the minds of most Americans. During the same decade, larger postwar changes such as economic restructuring, urban renewal, and the growth of suburbs lent credence to the status of American cities as zones of crime and fear. By the late 1970s many white Americans had developed a heightened fear of crime against both person and property; CB radios seemed an ideal technological solution for these fears, especially during times of apparent isolation as a driver on the roadway. From the perspective of African Americans, the late 1960s and the early 1970s posed a far greater threat to person and property given the rate of physical and verbal violent challenges to anyone associated with the civil rights movement. After the Watts riot of August 1965 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968, the situation of urban blacks only worsened and white opposition hardened as black nationalist and black power groups developed a more powerful presence in the movement for black civil rights.14 Given the overwhelming domination by the mid-1970s of most CB channels by white users, and the charged racial-political context of that and the This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 537 preceding decade, it is not surprising to hear accounts of African Americans experiencing racism on CB channels. One current superbowl user, whose on- air "handle," or CB nickname, is "Prime Minister," whose involvement goes back to the mid-1970s when he was twelve years old, says he has heard stories from older men involved in black CB, suggesting that the distinctive slang and style of black CB evolved partly as a defense against over-the-air racism: When African American operators finally found somewhere they could talk to one another, they were constantly harassed by ... they used to call them "appliance operators." . . . They were primarily southern guys, and ... I remember being a kid listening to Maestro talking in skip and here comes one of these appliance operators, he's from Mississippi, he cuts off the guy Maestros talking to in Texas, and he just goes on this racist rant, and you can hear Maestro going, "Look man, we left, we're not on your frequency, we came here, we're having fun," and this guy just, "You son of a bitch black bastard blah blah blah."15 As far back as the late 1 960s, and certainly by the mid- 1 970s, as a result of racism on CB channels, increasing numbers of black CBers simply opted to gather on two underused channels in the CB range and thus hoped to avoid harassment by white CBers: channel 5 became the place for local talk; channel 6 became reserved for skip - for talking over long distances. By the early 1 970s, channel 6 had become known as "the superbowl," and its purpose, sound, and style came to define African American CB. Historical traces of the superbowl and its participants are almost nonexistent. My research on the topic started from a single mention of the term "superbowl" in a 1976 Ebony article titled "10-4, Bro.'" Current participants in the "bowl" form the main "archive" for this sonic subculture and possess any existing artifacts or ephemera related to its history. Since much of the activity of the superbowl, and the supporting technology, breaks FCC regulations, users have no publications or retail outlets that would make their activities easier to document. Superbowl operators are also understandably wary of sharing some aspects of their activities with outsiders. "Most blacks use a different kind of lingo" on CB radio, the author of the Ebony article recounted, referring to what one could hear on channel 6. The article quoted a black CB radio user from St. Louis as saying, "If you can't talk the soul bro' talk, then you dont need to be on the superbowl."16 But the article did not elaborate on how this channel differed from regular CB channels or on what the "soul bro' talk" actually sounded like. Perhaps readers of Ebony m 1976 were presumed to know what soul bro' talk sounded like. Referencing soul bro' talk carried a specific cultural and political weight by 1 976. To the mostly middle-class African American readers oí Ebony magazine, This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 538 I American Quarterly that talk might not have been a style of speaking they engaged in, but it might have been a style they once adopted or aspired to, or one they objected to, depending on their political position concerning black identity and culture as manifested through black vernacular speech. The politics of "sounding black" and using "black" language stretched back more than a century by 1976, but the closest roots of the superbowl sound and style can be found in the development of black radio in the 1940s and 1950s. Through the 1960s the emergence of black nationalism and the assertion of "black pride" provided encouragement for African Americans to deploy more overtly and publically the type of black speech that had, until then, mostly remained spoken and heard only within black communities. The superbowls racial exclusivity, its distinctive slang and verbal style, link it to the histories and controversies, inside and outside the African American community, about sounding black - a debate about distinctive black speech styles, black accents, and vernaculars going back to the late nineteenth century.17 Since emancipation, if not before, blacks who wanted to advance socially or educationally within the black community, and certainly those who wished to achieve any degree of social mobility among whites, learned to assimilate their speech style and their voices - to make an effort to "sound white."18 What white sounded like depended on locality - local white accents, speechways, and vocabulary. And sounding white usually involved sounding middle class - sonic assimilation has always been as much about class as about race.19 Through the 1970s, during the peak of CB s popularity among blacks and whites, some articles in the black press criticized the sound of blacks on CB radio. A 1976 article in the Chicago Defender used a spoofed conversation between the author and an imagined old friend to compare the style and spoken content of black men on CB in the Chicago area to the sound and content of the characters on The Amos V Andy Show, the radio and then TV show famous for promoting the supposed comedie value of uneducated black men. As the article s author, Bob Dixon, pointed out to his imagined interlocutor, The Amos 'riAndy ShowhdÀ been banned from the airwaves after pressure from black civil rights groups such as the NAACP. But the other man reminds him of how, when they were younger, living in the small town of Cairo, Illinois, they used to gather around the radio to listen to The Amos V Andy Show. Then he adds: "You and I can hear that A & A talk and dialect any evening we choose - right here in Chicago!" The man then gives an example of what he means, reproducing what he says he hears when he tunes into blacks on CB radio in Chicago: This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 539 "Cornhusker - calling Cornhusker. Dis is Chicken Plucker. Do you read me?" "Dass a tenfoe, Chicken Plucker. I reads you well, ovah?" "Say, you got all de ribs an' trimmins for de week-end, Ole Buddy, or is you still not going out dere wid us? Ovah?" "Uh, ten-foe Plucker; well, I dunno effen I kin make it dis week-end. My ole lady might hafta go someplace and she won't try to drive de car. Kin I git a ten-foe on dat?"20 In producing this imagined CB conversation, Dixon mocks southern black vernacular speech. He associates the two men, inhabitants of one of the nations major cities, and arguably the most significant "black metropolis," with black rural life by giving them handles associated with menial agricultural labor - plucking chickens and husking corn. He has the participants discuss their plans for a weekend that involves not the commercial entertainments of the metropolis but a casual get-together involving southern food favorites such as "ribs an' trimmins." And he throws in the possibility that Cornhusker s apparently unsophisticated and killjoy wife, because of her refusal to drive the car, may derail the men's plans for such simple pleasures.21 In all, this and other articles voiced long-standing criticisms reportedly made by middle- and upper-middle-class blacks of working-class blacks: that the voices and speech styles of working-class blacks, and their vocal and social behaviors, brought discredit to the black community as a whole. James Grossman and Davarian Baldwin have documented the articulation of such tensions in Chicago when, on the arrival of poorer, rural blacks from the southern states during the first "great migration" immediately after World War 1 , the "old settlers" struggled to find ways to assimilate and incorporate the new black population into the urban northern world they had made for themselves. As Baldwin in particular shows, the tensions between the old settlers and the newer migrants did not involve a straightforward class struggle. Much of the vibrancy of the new "black metropolis" came from the commercial and mass entertainments, leisure activities, and styles of dress and self-expression emanating from the working-class neighborhoods of the newer migrants. To form the black metropolis they desired, the old settler "New Negroes" of Chicago had to adapt their tastes and their version of a progressive black modernity to include such styles and pleasures, or risk historical (and racial) irrelevance.22 So when, in the 1970s, Dixon and other gatekeepers of black middle-class identity heard the sounds of black CB radio, they heard the sounds of another migration - an unchecked migration of working-class black voices across the city, in and out of class-bound neighborhoods and cliques, and spreading out across state lines via the relatively free public airwaves. The sound of black dialect and black slang moving so freely through the airwaves via CB may have alarmed middle-class commentators like Dixon, This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 540 I American Quarterly but by 1976 this was simply a new venue for such voices, though one much less controlled than anything heard before. The sound of black voices on the radio speaking in what the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has called a "blaccent," and using a vocabulary similar to those used by their mass black listenership, had grown rapidly since the 1940s.23 William Barlow documented the development of black radio and the politics of sounding black in his now-classic work Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Barlow shows how, starting in the 1940s, as radio programming directed at a black audience spread out across the United States and beyond the larger urban centers, radio stations hired more black DJs and gradually "allowed" them to sound less white by permitting the use of local black slang and speaking styles. Those black DJs of the 1940s and 1950s made race audible in ways that began to liberate sounding black from its earlier supposedly negative connotations of low-class status and lack of education, and to link it with the black mobility wrought by participation in, and value to, a mass commercial economy. Radio was big business by the 1940s, and the black mass audience an increasingly recognized demographic for the advertisers who underwrote American broadcasting.24 Barlows examples include Al Benson, known by his nickname "Old Swingmaster," who started his broadcasting career as the Reverend Arthur Leaner with a gospel radio program on station WGES in Chicago. By the late 1940s Benson had shifted into his secular Swingmaster persona, enjoying over eight hours of airtime per day on WJJD as well as WGES. Like many of his listeners, the Mississippi-born Benson spoke with a southern accent, used black slang, and played the popular "race records" of the day.25 The next step forward in the specifically black sound of late 1940s radio came when black DJs used the "rhyming" and "signifying" traditions of black oral performative culture. Barlow defines signifying as "the art of humorous verbal warfare in which the combatants employ a range of devices - from ridicule to cockiness - in order to humiliate their adversaries and enhance their own status." A participants power is further enhanced, his performance made more impressive, with his ability to rhyme his sentences.26 According to Barlow, the first DJs to introduce rhyming and signifying into their radio performances were Holmes "Daddy-O-Daylie" Bailey in Chicago and Lavada "Doctor Hep Cat" Durst in Austin, Texas. As I discuss below, the most impressive voices on the superbowl gained prestige and respect largely by also deploying "humorous verbal warfare."27 The growth in the popularity of black DJs and the recognition of a growing black consumer market led to the development of "black appeal" stations radio stations that committed entire broadcast schedules to programming by This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 541 and for African Americans.28 Station WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee, led the way as the first black appeal radio station, though its owners were white.29 WDIAs influence grew markedly in 1954 when the station got permission to increase its power to 50,000 watts. Such power, and its geographic location, meant that the stations programming reached approximately 10 percent of the nations African American population, heard from southern Missouri all the way through the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf of Mexico.30 The timing of the stations power boost of course integrated its sound into the black communities of the south most engaged in struggles over desegregation and voting rights. On WERD, in Atlanta, the nations first black-owned radio station from its establishment in October 1949, Jack Gibson (a.k.a. "Jack the Rapper") continued the more confidently vernacular trend of postwar black radio initiated by Benson, Bailey, and Durst. Gibson, a DJ and community activist, started his career in Chicago and then moved to Atlanta. Gibson became famous for using rhyming vernacular on the air. He founded a monthly trade publication for black radio and, in 1977, launched an annual radio and music festival named "Jack the Rapper Black Family Affair Convention."31 The black DJs of the postwar period created cultural and commercial capital from sounding black, and forged connections with the growing cadre of black musicians, producers, and black-owned record companies who provided the foundation for the late twentieth-century vibrant black music scene, as well as the verbal style roots of hip-hop and rap.32 The men who became active in black CB and later on the superbowl, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, some of whom are still active on the bowl today, grew up not only in the dying days of The Amos 'ri Andy Show, as sug- gested by the Dixon Chicago Defender article quoted above, they also grew up in the era of black-appeal radio stations and the growth of black-oriented radio programming, both musical and otherwise. Those men, some now in their seventies, born just before or during World War II, had access during their teenage years to the voices of black-sounding black DJs throughout the south as well as in the major urban centers of the north. They came into full adulthood as the civil rights movement faced the challenges of black nation- alism and black power, and the sounds of political blackness encompassed a sonic and stylistic spectrum from the church-based oratory and cadences of Martin Luther King to the snappier rhythms of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, to the clipped urban jive and Marxist-Leninist staccato of Huey Newton. The superbowls slang (different from mainstream CB slang), in addition to a particular verbal style, has created, since the bowls inception in the 1970s, an almost exclusively black communications zone, just as the predominance This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 542 I American Quarterly of white speech styles and the use of phrases and accents from the white south helped keep mainstream CB in the 1970s almost exclusively white.33 The racial exclusivity of mainstream CB, although not usually explicitly stated, created the desire among African American CBers for what became the superbowl. Explaining the impact of a black CB channel for its participants and creators in the 1960s and early 1970s, superbowl aficionado Prime Minister told me: There were guys that were talking in the sixties . . . they predate the bowl being the bowl. They were trying to find somewhere they could fit. And when I listen to them tell the stories it's awesome . . . You hear Big Motor going, "Yeah, I remember one day I came to channel 6 . . . and I heard a guy and said 'god, he sounds like a black guy.'" You . . . hear him say that and . . . that's like . . . starting humanity and crossing another human.34 Prime Ministers statement, with its image of two people, each thinking they were alone in the world, accidentally finding each other through the racial audibility of a radio channel, conveys what he has heard from older bowl operators to be the intense surprise, excitement, pleasure, and cultural importance of discovering the possibility of African American contact via CB radio, especially that taking place over the long distances made possible by the phenomenon of skip. Prime Ministers anecdote is especially interesting since, in the 1960s, African Americans were not necessarily isolated demographically or even technologically given the existence of a well-established black press in many parts of the United States, as well as national and local radio broadcast networks and, for many living in urban areas, the affordability of telephone service. But clearly "finding" one another audibly via CB still held particular power for African American men using that technology. Their apparent sense of isolation, perhaps truly felt only after the fact, in the moment of skip contact, and the superbowl as thus a remedy for that condition, suggests there was something else at stake beyond simple contact. When the U.S. government set aside the bandwidth for CB radio in 1948, it broke open a tiny part of the closely guarded and heavy commercialized American broadcast spectrum. The Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 had secured American broadcasting as the preserve of com- mercial corporate networks, removing the possibility that U.S. broadcasting would go the way of the United Kingdom or Canada, nations that established state-supported and (at first) commercial-free radio (and later television) broadcasting. Those U.S. legislative acts privatized and commodified the public spectrum and squeezed out all but a very few opportunities for the American public to have access to the public airwaves as users; the vast majority of the This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 543 public lost that access and were consigned to the passive role of "listeners," consumers of the commercial broadcasters' advertising-based product.35 It had not always been so. Between 1906 and 1917, after the development of crystal radio sets, and before U.S. involvement in World War I when the government asked amateur radio operators to suspend their broadcasts, diverse voices and other sounds populated the American airwaves.36 Tuning your radio dial could bring you the sounds of many other Americans, using their crystal radio sets in their homes to send out Morse code signals, music, and (by about 1915) their voices. The world of amateur radio - what became known as "ham" radio - was active and extensive. Such users never anticipated in those early days that they would be so soon banned from their role as broadcasters, restricted to the weakest part of the spectrum, and prevented from broadcasting content such as music, news, and sports - the most popular content, which commercial broadcasters wanted to reserve for themselves. Organized through national organizations such as the Radio League of America and the American Radio Relay League (which is still in existence), these amateurs called their world of radio "citizen radio."37 Citizens' virtual expulsion from the airwaves, starting in the 1920s, makes it all the more extraordinary that the FCC decided in 1948 to set aside spectrum for the new "citizens band" radio channels.38 By 1948 privately owned broadcasting corporations (CBS, ABC, and NBC) controlled the nations airwaves. In 1958, with twenty-three channels newly available on the citizens band, the service became usable by the American public. CB radio could be used and operated by anyone - one did not need the tuning skills of the ham radio aficionados, and ready-to-use CB radio sets, for installation in one's vehicle or home, rapidly became available in electronics stores across the nation. The timing of the availability of citizens band radio forms a crucial part of the story of its politicization and racialization. CB radio became available for mass use in 1958, just as the mainstream civil rights movement regularly captured headlines across the United States, and right before that movement began to shift toward a more "direct action" approach, with the emergence of sit-ins as a strategy to desegregate lunch counters (which began in Kansas in July and in Oklahoma in September 1958, but gained prominent attention in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960) and the freedom rides in the summer of 1961. The coincidence of the availability of the CB radio service, the mass production and marketing of the technology, and the rise of the civil rights and later black power movements led to the rapid adoption of the technology by citizen groups on both sides of the desegregation and civil rights debates. Ac- This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 544 I American Quarterly cording to an article in the Washington Post, the Ku Klux Klan began using CB radio in 1961. Klansmen used their radios to better organize their racial terror activities by reporting to each other on the whereabouts of law enforce- ment or of their latest targets. This report initiated a series of articles in the Washington Postín 1965 and 1966 revealing the extensive use of CB by the Ku Klux Klan and the FCC s erTorts to prevent such usage. In May 1965, as the House Un-American Activities Committee prepared to begin hearings on Klan activities, the Washington Posten a lengthy article on the modern "third" Klan, detailing the Klans long history and how it had recently become more active in the face of increased black efforts for civil rights.39 Picking up on the coverage, the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, in his "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column, wrote an article about the KKK s use of CB radio. "The public," Pearson wrote, "would be surprised to know . . . that Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans, is licensed to operate on a special citizens radio wavelength. He was given the license by the Federal Communications Commission ... at the same time . . . the Justice Department had placed earlier Klan organizations on the subversive list along with the Communist Party." Pearson added that the Klan held several CB licenses, "all under front names, such as the Alabama Rescue Service' of Tuscaloosa."40 After Pearsons article, the FCC chair E. William Henry initiated an investigation into the possible illegal use of CB radio by the Klan.41 As the HUAC hearings into the KKK continued through 1966, other stories appeared in the Washington Post reporting more detailed accounts of how the Klan used CB radio to organize attacks on individual African Americans or on civil rights organizations.42 Representative Edwin E. Willis, the chair of HUAC, proposed legislation in June 1966, toward the end of the HUAC hearings on the Klan, which sought to curb the Klan's ability to organize and commit terroristic acts. The bill included a proposal to outlaw the use of CB radios, walkie-talkies, and telephones in the commission of federal crimes or in an effort to prevent the detection of such crimes.43 In response to Klan activity and to other forms of racist harassment, blacks organizing for civil rights and freedoms also began using CB radio. For example, the African American organization Deacons for Defense and Justice, started in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in the summer of 1964 to provide armed protection to local blacks and to civil rights workers from the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) based in the area, used CB radios to ensure a rapid response to any apparent or real threat. The Deacons carried their CB radios alongside their guns as part of an effective system of defense.44 This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 545 Blacks' use of CB radio to counter white racism helped "turn hegemony on its head," to quote George Lipsitz, an act connected to long African American political tradition, rooted in strategies such as the acts of resistance to slavery documented in the work of George Rawick and Eugene Genovese and discussed by other scholars of race and ethnicity who have analyzed the counterhegemonic political strategies that have helped build political movements and embolden their actors or observers.45 The use of CB radio to facilitate grassroots social and political movements takes us to the questions of citizenship and "the public" at the heart of the meaning of CB radio. Scholarship over the last twenty years on the public sphere has contested and reformulated notions of "publics" and "counterpublics," informed by issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The idea of a "counterpublic" is useful to this examination of the meaning of black CB radio use as it helps connect us with these questions of "citizenship" lurking within the nomenclature, establishment, and political deployment of CB radio. The participants in the bourgeois public sphere were "citizens," members of the civil society produced by the conversations and circulating texts of the public sphere. To be part of a public implies that one is recognized by others as a citizen, as an individual whose rights to speak and to listen cannot be dismissed. Use of radio technology to access the public airwaves via a service provided to the nation's citizens by the federal government encompassed the construction of a public via the concept of citizenship and those citizens' constitutional right to speech - no matter the content of that speech. This idea of the relation between a public and citizenship is especially im- portant when we look at electronic communications after 1945. The rapid, and early, privatization of the public airwaves in the United States has meant historically that electronic communications have been mostly unavailable to citizens seeking forms of mass communication to use as tools in disseminating the "speech" fundamental to creating and maintaining a "public sphere." However, the establishment of the "citizens band" radio service soon after the end of World War II created a small, public noncommercial space in the otherwise almost entirely privatized public space of broadcast spectrum in the United States. The access to, and use of, that service implied (and initially required) citizenship. Until 1978 the right to use CB radio depended on possession of a license obtained from the FCC. The license application form was simple, asking only for name and address, how many units the applicant wished to run, and if the applicant was a U.S. citizen. Therefore, to participate in the public sphere of CB radio meant laying claim to, and gaining recognition as This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 546 I American Quarterly possessing, citizenship and specifically the right of a citizen to speak and to be heard. Your citizenship was your qualification. What marks the parallel worlds of white and black CB as public versus counterpublic is based not only on the political economy of race in the postwar United States but also on the manner (and meaning) of how those two publics, those two citizen groupings, made use of CB's distinct communications technology to achieve different versions of audiomobility. The rhetoric of CB radio in its heyday of the 1970s was replete with populist claims to "freedom" and "free expression" - the rights fundamental to the classical (white, male, bourgeois) liberal subject, the historical participant in the Habermasian public sphere and, the record shows, the main participant in Americas mid-1970s CB radio craze. African Americans, in the 1960s and 1970s, still fighting for legal and quotidian recognition as full equal citizens, comprised what Nancy Fraser and others have called a "counterpublic."46 Fraser wrote, in her now-classic Social Text article, "the relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual. Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech. Bourgeois publics, in turn, excoriated these alternatives and deliberately sought to block broader participation."47 As public and counterpublic, first-class citizen and second-class citizen, white and black CBers laid claim to the public sphere of the radio spectrum; whites did so to tweak their relationship to law and order, and to seek mutual protection on the public roadways; blacks did so to circumvent the law (of a federal government that had, at minimum, failed them) and the limits placed on their mobility by white citizens. As with other "counterpublics," that formed by black CBers was not a universal public sphere. Like white CB, the superbowl operated with de facto exclusivity, aimed at connecting and creating a black citizen public able to master the necessary technological, linguistic, and temperamental skills. Like white CB, the superbowl created a specifically aural public sphere and counterpublic based on racial identity. The assertion and promotion of audible racial difference offers a counterargument to established notions of the construction of racial difference that rely on visuality. African American CBers interviewed for this article asserted that they participated in the super- bowl because they experienced racism on CB channels used by the majority white demographic of CB radio channels. Clearly, therefore, both blacks and whites "heard" race - and listened for it. This sensory perception formed a crucial aspect to the popularity and use of this technology in the postsegregation United States. This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 547 We should recall here Prime Minister's reference to the older superbowl operator Maestro s account of his emotional epiphany on suddenly audibly encountering another black man on CB radio in the 1960s. In such moments, Maestro, and others like him, experienced a crucial shift in their relationship to those normally regarded as "strangers." CB radio, for both blacks and whites, transformed strangers into allies, members of a defined public, a community. This shift forms an essential aspect of the formation of a public (and therefore a counterpublic). As Michael Warner has written, in reference to the formation of publics and counterpublics: Publics orient us to strangers in a different way. They are no longer merely people-whom- one-does-not-yet-know; rather, it can be said that an environment of strangerhood is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being. Where otherwise strangers need to be placed on a path to commonality, in modern forms strangerhood is the necessary medium of commonality. The modern social imaginary does not make sense without strangers. A nation, market, or public in which everyone could be known personally would be no nation, market, or public at all.48 He adds: "The development of forms that mediate the intimate theater of stranger-relationality must surely be one of the most significant dimensions of modern history, though the story of this transformation in the meaning of the stranger has been told only in fragments."49 For African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, audibly black unknown others were heard not as strangers but as potential friends and allies - at a time of intense racialized violence and danger. For whites, that same transformation of "stranger" into "good buddy," a trustworthy ally on the public roadway, formed the necessary underpinning of the cultural and political work of CB for that demographic in the 1970s - a period when fear and suspicion of strangers ran high, especially in urban-suburban areas.50 While both CB publics, black and white, shared that important stranger-toally transformation in their uses of CB radio, black use of CB radio continued to evolve beyond that point, whereas most white users of CB during its mid- 1970s heyday dropped the hobby as the airwaves became too crowded and too filled with interference. Black CB, having established an audible racial community whose audiomobility directly opposed the immobilities of racism and segregation, could then address its internal culture. The emergence of the superbowl on channel 6 represented the achievement of a confident black CB culture, one less focused on issues of self-defense or basic community building. The skills necessary to build and operate a powerful station with a directional antenna to shoot skip created a hierarchy within black CB. The superbowl This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 548 I American Quarterly evolved as an arena in which technological skills combined with vocal style and verbal power to face offin an ongoing championship of audible blackness. In the competitive arena of the superbowl, the most popular and respected operators are not only those who can shoot skip to get their "beam" (signal) across a long distance to a specific area or operator but, more significantly, those whose talking style is most impressive, most domineering. Superbowl talk is based on "dissing" the person with whom one is competing to get one's signal picked up by another person. The two or more operators "fighting" from different parts of the United States to reach, say, an operator in another region, not only compete via the power of their signal, their skill in directing and tuning it, and dealing with weather conditions but also in their deployment of well-delivered insults, threats, and ridicule directed at each other as they compete to reach the distant operator in the triangle of communication. Each tries to so successfully "diss" the other that his competitor cannot verbally "one up" him, causing the other to bow out of the contest. Such verbal skills must be combined with the technical skills to dominate the transmission - to cut off or at least drown out one's competitor. Then as now, superbowl operators who can dominate others in a seemingly effortless manner garner particular admiration. A powerful signal combined with the audible evocation of a confident masculine authority has built the reputation of operators such as 766, Nationwide 1000, Crack Carter, and others. Prime Minister refers to this dominant style and how he learned to appreciate it. As he says, "The style I kind of try to adhere to is 'shock and awe.'" He learned this style in the 1970s from an operator in California called Yellow Jacket, about whom he says "if CB were a true family he'd be my dad, ... he taught me a whole lot, especially about style and talking." Prime described to me, in audible detail, the superbowl exchange through which, under Yellow Jacket's guidance, he first heard the style he later aimed to emulate.51 Documenting superbowl battles secures the proof of who beat whom - who, by whatever means, "won" on any particular occasion. On the bowl, one of the three (or more) people involved in competing to reach a particular operator will often record the exchange. These recordings are known in superbowl slang as "Watergates" - a nickname dating the origins of this aspect of the superbowl to the mid-1970s when President Nixon's taping system in the Oval Office documented his paranoid power games and ultimately provided proof of his guilt in the Watergate conspiracy. The superbowl instruction to "let the gate roll" means to roll the tape or to start recording. At the large meetings of bowl operators, known as "breaks" or "shoot outs," participants spend a lot of time listening to "Watergates" of particu- This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 549 larly entertaining exchanges. Here is a short clip from a Watergate of three operators trying to reach Outlaw 187, an operator in New Jersey.52 Not only are the three operators (Crack Carter in Texas, and 444 and Bricklayer, both located in Mississippi) trying to reach 187, they are each trying to dominate the transmission so as to push the others out. The references to "conditions" and to "Mother Nature" indicate the atmospheric conditions they are trying to use; in addition, Outlaw 187 relates messages that he is asked to pass on to one or another of the competing operators, since CB radio requires an on-off transmission - after one person has talked that person must get off the channel to listen. In superbowl slang, the passing of messages back and forth among competing operators is called "passing a five" or "flipping nickels," and forms the basis of the teasing or insulting exchange. It also allows the operator passing the fives to ratchet up the tension between the other operators by giving their own emphasis to the message they convey. Operators often possess many Watergates, some of them dating back years, and these are prized examples of the best of superbowl culture and form an important archive for the next phase of this research. To hear black CB s audiomobility requires listening to the 1960s and 1970s as a multitrack recording on which one has layered samples from spoken-word radicals such as The Watts Prophets and The Last Poets, some Martin Luther King, Malcolm X's "stop singin' and start swingin'" speech, Huey Newton intoning "The Black Panther Party calls for," the echoing vocals of Jesse Jackson MCing Wattstax in 1972, Muhammad Ali boasting, James Brown in Zaire, old recordings of early black DJs from Chicago and Atlanta, and then an instrument track underneath some superbowl Watergates. One can hear the latter segment of that imagined mix on Prime Minister's unreleased track "No Excuses on the Bowl."53 The fifteen-minute track describes the workings and the spirit of the superbowl, warning against any whining or timidity. The bowl, Prime Minister makes clear, is like a verbal boxing match: if you enter the ring, you had better be prepared to compete as well as to win or lose on any given occasion. The competitive, domineering style builds on the audible presence African American men established during the post- 1945 struggle for desegregation and meaningful black citizenship. Based on deliberately misusing the federal CB radio service to create an audible black national community, black CB thus resisted the restrictions placed on black physical mobility by white citizens and by the government; the superbowl also built on the diversification of black culture made possible by a parallel resistance to class-based attempts to limit black speech styles and their public dissemination. This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 550 I American Quarterly Notes Thanks are due to the many people who have helped me develop this article: for research assistance my thanks to Whitney Kemble, Stephen Broomer, Abigail Godfrey; to SSHRC for research funding; to the organizing committee of the 2009 Radio Conference held at York University, Toronto, for accepting the first version of this research for presentation; thanks to Elspeth Brown for literally encouraging me; profound thanks to Prime Minister; thanks also to Crack Carter, Mr. Easy Rider Sr., and everyone else I met in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Labor Day weekend, 2009. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for American Quarterly for so many helpful suggestions for improvement. Because some of the activities or technologies used in contemporary superbowl activities may violate FCC regulations, some technological and personal details (such as legal names) related to current participants have been omitted from this article. 1 . The term "indirect orality" refers to forms of communication other than those that take place via direct face-to-face speech - the latter usually assumed necessary for the growth of a community. On "sounding black," see John Baugh, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); and Baugh, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2. On the formation and use of communications networks among a contemporaneous minority population, see Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 5, 6. 3. One set of examples comes from the school busing struggles in Boston and Louisville, where antibusing activists used CB radios to better target African American mobility as well as police attempts to control their protest actions. See "Police Battle Busing Foes Marching in South Boston," New York Times, February 16, 1976; "Boston Whites March in Busing Protest," New York Times, October 28, 1975; "Teen-Agers in Boston Toss Rocks and Bottles," New York Times, February 17, 1976; "Large Wallace Vote Reflects Depth of Antibusing Sentiment in Boston's Working-Class Neighborhoods," New York Times, March 8, 1976; "Blacks' Anger Rising in South Boston as Violence over Schools Spreads," New York Times, May 2, 1976; "School Buses in Louisville Will Carry Guards Today," New York Times, September 8, 1975. 4. Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 10. On race in sound studies, see also Gustavus Stadler, "Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity," and Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, "Splicing the Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York," both in Social Text, no. 102 (Spring 2010): 87-105, 35-58; See also the work of Dolores Inés Casillas on Spanish-language radio and its connection to the politics of race and immigration in the U.S. 5. "Rooster Channel Jumpers 1979," typescript manuscript, folder JJ, box 10, p. 1, Berkeley G. Burrell Papers, Mugar Library, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Dr. Berkeley Burrell, head of the Booker T. Washington Association as well as president of the National Business League, held strong connections in the 1 970s to the small but politically significant African American business and political elite wooed by President Nixon as part of his racially complicated domestic agenda. 6. Some of the following section was previously published in my article "An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s," in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 159-78. /. ťor a detailed account or tne r^A> s intentions regarding l>d radio, see Carolyn iviarvin and Quentin J. Schütze, "The First Thirty Years," special section, "CB in Perspective," Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 109. 8. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 54-55. 9. Magazine and newspaper articles about CB radio published at the height of national interest in CB, from 1975 to 1977, usually made reference to the recent introduction of the speed limit, the truckers' strike, and the use of CB to avoid police and highway patrol speed traps. See, for example, "The Bodacious New World of C.B.," Time, May 10, 1976, 78-79; "Citizens-Band Radio: Danger of Air Pollution?," U.S. News and World Report, March 7, 1977, 76-77; "Hey Good Buddy: CU Rates CB Radios," Consumer Reports 42, no. 10 (October 1977): 563; Brock Yates, "One Lap of America," Car and Driver, February 1975, 27-30, 75-77; "Nuisance or a Boon? The Spread of Citizens' Radios," This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 551 U.S. News and World Report, September 29, 1975, 26-28; William Jeanes, "Tuning in Justice on Your CB Radio Dial," Car and Driver, July 1975, 10. 10. Newspaper and magazine articles often commented on the rapidly rising sales of CB radio sets. See, for example, "The Newest Hobby: Kibitzing by Radio . . . ," Forbes, July 15, 1975, 16-17; J. D. Reed, "A Big 10-4 on the Call of the Wild," Sports Illustrated, March 29, 1976, 36-38, 47-48. 11. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Develooment, 1977), 60. 12. See Blake, "Audible Sense of Order." 13. Paul Delaney, "Suburbs Fighting Back as Crime Rises," New York Times, August 30, 1976. 14. On the history of the black power movement, see Peniel Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights- Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 15. Prime Minister, interview with author, March 2009. 16. Shawn D. Lewis, "10-4, Bro'," Ebony, October 1976, 120-22, 124, 126. 17. On the politics and history of black speech, see work by Geneva bmitherman, such as her book Talkin That Talk: African American Language and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), and work by John Baugh, such as Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). African Americans were not the only racialized minority to develop a distinctive slang as part of an assertive cultural response to racism and exclusion. Mexican American youths in the Los Angeles area in the 1 940s used a slang called "caló" that drew on Mexican Spanish, English, and African American hipster or jive expressions. For an excellent discussion oí caló, see Anthony Macias, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 87-89. 18. Smith, How Race Is Made, 25-26. 19. George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913), later reinterpreted for Broadway and Hollywood as the musical My Fair Lady, tells one tale of the cruelties and power of class and accent in an early twentieth-century British context. 20. Bob Dixon, "Are Amos and Andy Dead?," Chicago Defender, September 3, 1975, 21. See also The Falcon, "Smokie City CB News," Call and Post, May 1, 1976, 8B. 21. In addition to criticism of speech style and accents, and the use of dialect, other articles in the black press criticized the bad manners and selfish behavior of blacks on CB radio (implicitly worse than what was heard of white CBers). See, for example, Jim Cleaver, "The Frustrations of Blacks and Citizens Band Radio," Los Angeles Sentinel, March 24, 1977, A7. 22. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. chap. 5, "'Home People' and 'Old Settlers'"; Davarian Baldwin, Chicagos New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9-10, 16-17, 233-42. 23. Hear McWhorter discuss "blaccents" with Sarah Jones on Studio 360, October 1 6, 2009: http://www. studio360.org/episodes/2009/ 10/16. 24. Un the importance or an African American radio audience as consumers, see William H. Honan, "The New Sound of Radio," New York Times, December 3, 1967, 323. 25. William Barlow, VoiceOver: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 98-99. 26. Ibid., 104. Z/. 1 he loudest cultural echo heard through the superbowl is that of the much older African American verbal cultural form known as "the dozens." The cultural studies scholar Robin D. G. Kelley has argued that this verbal game has been much written about but much misinterpreted by white sociologists and anthropologists. What they miss, Kelley argues, is that the "goal of the dozens and related verbal games is deceptively simple: to get a laugh. The pleasure of the dozens is not the viciousness of the insult but the humor, the creative pun, the outrageous metaphor." The dozens, and the superbowl, demand that a participant be able to stand his (occasionally her) ground, talk and joke creatively in the moment, all improvised, while ready to listen and respond to competitors and deal with the presence of other listeners, who are skilled peers, not simply an audience. The verbal skills of the dozens and the superbowl can also be heard in rap "battles" in which two rap artists face off against each other, taking turns to creatively "diss" each other, the winner declared most often by the enthusiasm of the This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 552 I American Quarterly audience. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo Mamas DisFunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 34; and on the history of rap culture, see Tricia Roses classic Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. 1994). 55. 28. Barlow, Voice Oven 108. 29. The offices of Martin Luther King shared a building with WDIA. King would occasionally complain about the noise coming up from the radio station below. On the role of radio in the civil rights era, see Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). 30. On WDIAs development and significance, see the stations own website and their history section at http://www.am 1 070wdia.com/pages/history.html. 31. Barlow, Voice Over, 138. 32. On the history of the twentieth-century music industry, including the involvement of African American artists and producers, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 7. 33. See Blake, "Audible Sense of Order," 176. 34. Prime Minister, interview with author, March 2009. 35. Robert McChesney, Telecommunication, Mass Media, and Democracy - The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1 935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18-19, 26-28; Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922- 1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). The most recent scholarship on the history of the radio listener can be found in Elena Razlogova, The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 36. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 297. 37. Hilmes, Radio Voices-, and McChesney, Telecommunication, Mass Media, and Democracy. 38. Thomas R. Kennedy Jr., "New 2-Way Radio Ready for Public," New York Times, March 24, 1948, 27. 39. 40. 41. 42. Robert E. Baker, "3d Time Up for Hooded Bigots," Washington Post, May 16, 1965, El. Drew Pearson, "Klan Modernizes Its Terrorism," Washington Post, October 18, 1965, Bl 1. "FCC Probes Klan Short-Wave Radio," Washington Post, October 20, 1965, A2. See, for example, Richard Corrigan, "Klansmen Use Citizen Band Radios to Conduct Raids, Com- mittee Told," Washington Post, January 24, 1966, A3. 43. "Willis Plans Curb on Klan Activities; Bill Sets Penalties," Washington Post, June 15, 1966, A9. 44. Fred Powledge, "Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro an Unusual Town," New York Times, February 21, 1965, 52. 45. Lipsitz uses the phrase "turning hegemony on its head" in a few instances. See, for example, George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 192; and Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 170. The historiography on hegemony/counterhegemony is extensive and has its roots in the early- 1970s influence of European Marxism on American historians. The literature includes such major interventions as George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Com munity (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973); Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 997). My thinking about black CB s connection to histories of race and technology has been informed by Rose s Black Noise, as well as more recent scholarship on black technocultures and music, such as Alexander G. Weheliyes excellent Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), and the special issue "Technology and Black Music in the Americas" in the Journal oj the Society for American Music, volume 2, number 2 (2008). 46. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique oř Actually hxisting Democracy," Social Text 24.1 (1990): 56-80; Michael Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," Public Culture 14.1 (Winter 2002): 49-90. 47. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 61. This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Race, Technology, and CB Radio I 553 48 Warnpr. "Piihlirs япИ ("".niinrprniihlirs." S7_ 49. Tbid. SO RlaWp "AnrliWp Spncp of ОгНрг." 169-7Ч 51. To hear this part of my interview with Prime Minister, listen to the sound clip entitled "0 1 Prime Minister interview" on the website associated with this journal issue. 52. Listen to the sound clip entitled "02 Watergate clip" on the website associated with this journal issue 53. The track "No Excuses on the Bowl" can be found through a simple Internet search. But please be aware that the availability of the track does not necessarily imply that its creator(s) have granted permission for such dissemination or for the possible copyright infringement caused by Internet dissemination and downloading. This content downloaded from 76.109.164.202 on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:37:55 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Beatriz Santiago Muñoz A Universe of Fragile Mirrors [2016] http://shop.pamm.org/products/beatriz-santiago-munoz-a-universe-of-fragile-mirrors 7 Foreword Prefacio Franklin Sirmans 11 Introduction Introducción María Elena Ortiz Texts by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Textos por Beatriz Santiago Muñoz I am going to describe a ritual 29 Les voy a describir un ritual Future Cosmogony 79 Cosmogonía futura Nocturne 95 THEY SAY 111 ELLAS DICEN The Head Killed Everyone 125 La cabeza mató a todos A Natural History of One Frame of Film 137 Historia natural de un fotograma 197 Matrulla 161 Marché Salomon 175 Universal Copernican Mumbles Murmullos copernicales universales Francis McKee 205 Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema Ecología de prácticas en el cine posmilitar Javier Arbona 219 List of Works Lista de obras 225 Trustees Patronato 205 Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema Javier Arbona Ecología de prácticas en el cine posmilitar Javier Arbona In the last thirty seconds of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s videobased project, Post-Military Cinema (2014), the camera moves along a road and through fields of tall grasses. From there, it wanders into the uninhabited roads of the former Roosevelt Roads Navy base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, and then the film ends abruptly. Judging by the taxonomy of movements, someone on foot holds the camera, looking to and fro before crossing a lonely street. Most of the rest of the film, which spans eleven minutes in total, takes place within and around the concrete ruins of the abandoned movie theater where naval personnel used to spend their leisure time. The work draws its title from the mundane language of environmental planning discourse used to label parcels of land left by the military such as Roosevelt Roads, which the Navy closed in 2004.1 But no site in a colonized Puerto Rico can ever be “post” military; the harmful effects of militarization are a continuation of the military past, not an ending to it.2 What does the brief walking footage at the closing of the piece reveal about those military legacies of devastated landscapes? And more broadly, what sorts of political possibilities can come about from making art by engaging with a walking practice and in post-military conditions? It might help to discuss some of the work’s imagery. An enigma looms: How did the subject holding the camera get to the structure in the first place? The film begins with what could be interpreted as an awakening. Shot from the point of view of an unidentified subject, the initial moments suggest the first morning light coming in through the cracks of the abandoned building, as the subject begins to gradually take in the sounds of tree frogs. One obvious way to think about the film is to simply assume the work is a documentary, and that this roving subject is the embodiment of director En los últimos treinta segundos del proyecto de video de Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Post-Military Cinema (Cine posmilitar) (2014), la cámara se desplaza por una pista y a través de campos de hierba alta. De ahí, se adentra en las calles deshabitadas de la antigua base naval Roosevelt Roads en Ceiba, Puerto Rico, y luego la película termina de manera abrupta. Por la taxonomía de los movimientos, se deduce que alguien que anda a pie lleva la cámara en mano, mirando de un lado y luego del otro antes de cruzar una calle desolada. La mayor parte del resto de la película, que dura once minutos en total, se lleva a cabo dentro y alrededor de las ruinas de concreto de la sala de cine abandonada en la cual el personal naval pasaba sus ratos de ocio. El título de la obra se basa en el lenguaje mundano del discurso de planificación ambiental utilizado para etiquetar los terrenos dejados por los militares, como Roosevelt Roads, que la marina cerró en 2004.1 Pero ningún sitio en un Puerto Rico colonizado podrá llegar a ser considerado “pos-” militar; los efectos nocivos de la militarización son una continuación del pasado militar, no su fin.2 ¿Qué revela la breve parte peatonal al final de la película acerca de los legados militares de paisajes devastados? Y, de manera más amplia, ¿qué tipo de posibilidades políticas pueden surgir a partir de hacer arte utilizando una práctica de caminar y en condiciones posmilitares? Puede ser útil analizar la imaginería de la obra. Acecha un enigma: ¿Cómo es que la persona que lleva la cámara logró llegar a la estructura? La película empieza con lo que podría ser interpretado como un despertar. Filmados desde el punto de vista de un sujeto no identificado, los momentos iniciales sugieren la luz del amanecer que entra por las grietas del edificio abandonado, mientras que el sujeto empieza paulatinamente a absorber los sonidos de Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. But there are hints in the footage that suggest another way to think about the final scene of Post-Military Cinema. One of these ways is as an emergence. The key question is what exactly happens in those suggestive minutes between the first awakening and the final walk, other than a slow appreciation of the ruinous environment? Almost five minutes into the film, the camera captures a beekeeper wielding a fired-up smoker. For several minutes, the beekeeper uses fire to enchant the bees in the forest, generating an entrancing soundscape, as smoke permeates the tree canopy. Meanwhile, the subject through whose eyes the audience surveys the military landscape could be understood as something more-than-human—as though, perhaps, one of the bees or trees metamorphosed into a new being, or perhaps this being at the center of the film is also another military technology or biological experiment that comes (back) to life. Yet another possibility is to think of the subject as a hybridization of human and nature. The speculation can multiply further. But what these possible readings have in common is that this mysterious being is simply unidentifiable through the scientific lexicon we have to define living things. It is difficult, if not impossible (given the sound and visual evidence that the video provides), to separate this being from the living milieu itself.3 The more-than-human assemblage that Santiago Muñoz features is both a subject of the work, and also a material that constructs the work.4 Santiago Muñoz herself contends that she turns the entire military base into a chromatic and sonic instrument to project images and sound onto the cinema structure itself.5 Applying the notion of assemblage here, the cinema ruins are a way of making the base conditions not only palpable, but also a social formation that produces political significations in the world, including ones we might have overlooked by normalizing these significations through long-accepted social practices.6 She turns the everyday conditions of US militarization in Puerto Rico into something strange and uncommon, a word that could also be applied to shed light on the current political formula of the Puerto Rico “commonwealth.”7 The lens through which the audience sees the footage is Ecología cine posmilitar Ecologiesdeofprácticas Practicesen in el a Post-Military Cinema 206 los coquís (la rana arborícola nativa a Puerto Rico). Una manera obvia de interpretar la película es simplemente dar por hecho que es un documental y que el sujeto errante es la encarnación de la directora Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Pero hay indicios que sugieren otra forma de plantearse la escena final de Post-Military Cinema. Una sería verlo como un surgimiento. La pregunta clave es, ¿qué sucede exactamente en esos minutos sugestivos entre el primer despertar y la caminata final, además de una lenta apreciación del entorno en ruinas? A los casi cinco minutos, la cámara captura un apicultor con un ahumador encendido. Durante varios minutos, el apicultor usa el fuego para encantar a las abejas en el bosque, generando un paisaje sonoro fascinante, mientras que el humo invade las copas de los árboles. Mientras tanto, el sujeto a través de cuyos ojos el público ve el paisaje militar podría ser interpretado como algo más que humano, como si, quizás, una de las abejas o uno de los árboles se hubiese metamorfoseado en un nuevo ser, o tal vez este ser protagónico es otra tecnología militar o un experimento biológico que cobra (o vuelve) a la vida. Y todavía otra posibilidad es pensar en el sujeto como una hibridación del ser humano con la naturaleza. La especulación puede multiplicarse aún más. Pero lo que estas posibles lecturas tienen en común es que este ser misterioso simplemente no puede ser identificado con el léxico científico con el que contamos para definir los seres vivos. Es difícil, si no es que imposible (dado el sonido y la evidencia visual proporcionados por el video), separar a este ser del entorno vivo mismo.3 El ensamblado ‘más que humano’ que Santiago Muñoz presenta es tanto un sujeto de la obra como un material que la construye.4 Santiago Muñoz misma sostiene que transforma la base militar entera en un instrumento cromático y sónico para proyectar imágenes y sonidos en la estructura cinematográfica.5 Al aplicar aquí la noción del ensamblado, las ruinas de la sala de cine son una forma de hacer que las condiciones de la base no sólo sean palpables sino también sean una formación social que produce significaciones políticas en el mundo, incluidas algunas que posiblemente no hayamos notado al normalizar estas significaciones a través de prácticas sociales aceptadas 207 mysteriously disembodied, but at the same time, deeply entwined with its surroundings. Furthermore, if we assume a connection between film and audience, one might even consider that this mysterious being in the film exists purely to behave as a socio-natural limen through which the audience can access the space of the post-military landscape. The sounds of the forest, the suggestive sensory qualities of the beekeeper’s smoke, and the filtered light through the concrete also have their own qualities of emergence, like the awakening subject. But the film does not begin or end on the screen. The space of the exhibition and screening itself becomes socially and politically entwined with this site that affects local Ceiba communities. As these elements begin to cohere in motion into a living assemblage, they leave behind their qualities as divided spaces (video location here, projection space there) as is convenient for the state and the military. If understood as spaces that continually inform each other, they attain a condition of possibility that does not fit the logic of calculable per-acre economic values and the chemistry of ecological remediation. Instead, these emergent approaches to the “post-military” space are contingent on our unfolding conversations and socio-political relations from the ground up, not on the dictated parameters from the top down. Post-Military Cinema fictionalizes and reveals its own process of making: a film that came about from walking the site of the former Roosevelt Roads, and in the closing images and sounds of the footage returns to walking. Walking becomes a study of the living conditions of Roosevelt Roads and a process of making with the site—its own cinematic light and sounds—and leaves off with the possibility of ongoing walking and recording of such kinds of sites. The Walking Sessions The inception of this project came during Santiago Muñoz’s walking sessions with students, researchers, and artists. Since 2013, I’ve periodically joined her on some of these seminars—during a guest visit to the first two-week session, which Santiago Muñoz declared the theme “land, place, and visuality,” and later participating in a portion Javier Arbona desde hace tiempo.6 La artista convierte las condiciones cotidianas de la militarización estadounidense en Puerto Rico en algo extraño y uncommon [fuera de lo común], expresión que se podría utilizar para esclarecer la fórmula política actual de Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado) de Puerto Rico.7 El lente a través del cual el público ve la película es misteriosamente incorpóreo, pero al mismo tiempo está profundamente entrelazado con su entorno. Más aún, si damos por hecho que existe una conexión entre el cine y el público, uno hasta podría considerar que este misterioso ser en la película existe puramente para fungir de limen socionatural a través del cual el público puede acceder al espacio del paisaje posmilitar. Los sonidos del bosque, las cualidades sensoriales sugestivas del humo del apicultor y la luz que se filtra a través del concreto también tienen sus propias cualidades de surgimiento, como el sujeto que se despierta. Pero la película no empieza ni termina en la pantalla. El espacio mismo de exposición y de proyección se acaba entrelazando social y políticamente con este sitio que afecta a las comunidades locales de Ceiba. Al unificarse a través del movimiento en un ensamblaje vivo, estos elementos dejan atrás sus cualidades de espacios divididos (locación del video aquí, espacio de proyección allá), lo cual es conveniente para el estado y la milicia. Si se leen como espacios que continuamente repercuten uno en el otro, alcanzan una condición de posibilidad que no cuadra con la lógica de valores económicos calculables por metro cuadrado ni con la química de la restauración ecológica. Más bien, estos acercamientos emergentes al espacio “posmilitar” dependen del desarrollo de nuestras conversaciones y de las relaciones sociopolíticas que surgen desde abajo, no de los parámetros impuestos desde arriba. Post-Military Cinema crea una ficción y revela su propio proceso de producción: una película que surgió a partir del hecho de caminar por el sitio de la antigua base Roosevelt Roads y que en sus últimas imágenes y sonidos regresa al acto de caminar. El caminar se convierte en un estudio de las condiciones de vida en Roosevelt Roads y en un proceso de creación con el sitio —su propia luz y sus propios sonidos cinematográficos— y nos deja con la posibilidad de seguir caminando y registrando este tipo de sitios. Ecologies of Practices in a Post-Military Cinema of the three-week “walking seminar” during the summer of 2013. These collective experiments have led me to reconsider a charged mix—except that the word “mix” is not a sufficient term here—of place, research, and artistic medium. On the one hand, film, sound, light, and gallery space combine with each other into a whole, but on the other hand, so do the historical archive, existing documentation, political discussions with local activists in preparing the film, and more. This mix I refer to is an ambiguous, messy “worlding”—a term that I take from anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena to describe “ecologies of practices” between worlds thrown into conflict by market capitalism and colonialism that struggle to create a new common ground.8 The worlding is a common place where learning, making, and translating into a political language are hard—impossible—to disentangle. Of these worlding processes, such as those that I would argue emerge in the work of Santiago Muñoz, de la Cadena has this to say: “Instead of the expression of shared relations, and stewardship of nature, this commons would be the expression of a worlding of many worlds ecologically related across their constitutive divergence.”9 The spaces of viewing, filmmaking, and of ecological remediation, for example, are divergent worlds (broken apart through market relations) but related across their “constitutive divergence,” and Santiago Muñoz pays attention to this relatedness, and yet, separateness, in the researching, making, showing, and disc...
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