The cut and stitch of the 1AC’s sonic element is improvisational afro-futurism…love in a different space and time transcends the war on Black women’s property through the ritualization of Black technoscaping.

According to scholar Patrick Manning, black culture “renews itself repeatedly through new technology, new audiences, improvisation, and continued borrowing” (Manning 2010, 34). Other scholars have explored the cultural and historical underpinnings of black vernacular and creative expression, especially as it relates to technology. Beth Coleman argues that technology’s embedded function of self-extension may be exploited to liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency (Coleman 2009). According to Coleman this function entails “the ability to move freely as a being—and it is not restricted to individuals but also in- cludes systems: it concerns how beings are subjected in systems of power, ideology, and other networks (Coleman 2009, 70). She frames the work of twentieth century Italian Futurists who attempted to destroy Western icons and replace them with altered systems through sound, images, or text. In this reconceptualization of technology, race becomes “denatured” from its historical roots and becomes a tool for creative expression. James Snead differentiated European artistic practices such as Italian Futurism from black cultural expression that he organized around two key principles, repetition and the “cut”: In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is “there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.” If there is a goal in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, in the musical mean- ing of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series. (Snead 1984, 67) Snead’s work supports evolving modes of black techno-vernacular produc- tion—signs of change that are evident and cyclical in the art of the African Diaspora. Repetition, through techniques such as collage, sampling, and re- mixing, employ the “cut” as a tool to reuse portions of one or more sources as instruments and images in new work. Artists explore how what is cut away (as a subject) from dominant culture finds its way back into the picture through layering and repetition—the trans- formation through language and signification—and cutting that enable artists of the African Diaspora to piece together fragments from their past of histori- cal emigration (forced relocation), violence, and marginalization. The “cut” of blackness and the silhouette that remain are mobile, able to be collaged or layered with other things or repeated. For example, Kenyan-born artist Wan- gechi Mutu pieces together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials to explore the split nature of cultural identity referencing colonial history, fashion, and contemporary African politics. She uses the term “augment” to describe her process of altering, disrupting, and layering images. 2

Improvisation, call and response, hacking, and tinkering elicit the active engagement and participation of the at-large community (audience). Call and response is a form of spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listeners in which all statements (calls) are punctuated by expres- sions (responses) from the audience. Riffs, vamps, thematic variations, and call and response are endemic to jazz, blues music, and the visual arts. In a Johns Hopkins University study, researchers who examined the neuroscience of jazz and the power of improvisation found that the brains of jazz musi- cians participating in spontaneous improvisation with other musicians showed robust activation in the same areas of the brain traditionally associat- ed with spoken language and syntax (Limb and Braun 2008). We hear these syntactic and semantic exchanges in the music of John Coltrane and Sun Ra (Rudolph 2010). In sum, combined with repetition and cutting, improvisation in music, art, and performance contributes to techno-cultural shifts that lead to the technoscape of Afrofuturism.