Treat It like a Seminar: Black Sonic Resistance to the Reagan Revolution

Abstract

Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection isolated urban centers in the United States as sites of domestic resistance to Reagan’s ascendant conservative hegemony. Black (and Latine and queer White) artists and activists located in major cities who rejected (and were rejected by) the “Reagan Revolution” contested their symbolic erasure from the polity by establishing conceptual spaces—sonic, literary, organizational, and otherwise—where they might defy the assertions of US right-wing conservatism. Musicians Tracy Chapman and Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) of the hip-hop group Public Enemy exemplify the choice that some Black artists made to produce politicized art that sought to refute conservative rhetoric. Chapman and Chuck D mobilize a sonic counterpolitics of nostalgia that allowed them to connect the messages embedded in their music to sounds associated with important social movements from the recent past in order to resist the conservative politics that dominated the Black 1980s.