Lyman Report: Vincente Perez
We're pleased to have awarded Vincente Perez the 2024 Lyman Fellowship. The Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in New Media, established in the memory of esteemed UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman, provides a stipend to a UC Berkeley PhD candidate to support the writing of their PhD dissertation on a topic related to new media. The fellowship is supported by donations from Professor Barrie Thorne, Sage Publications, and many individual friends and faculty. Here is what Vincente had to say about working on his dissertation:
The Lyman fellowship provided the time, space, and resources to complete the drafting of two chapters of my dissertation, Sonic Blackness: Hip Hop Poetics, as well as confirm publications and multiple conferences to present my work and receive feedback from my colleagues. Sonic Blackness: Hip Hop Poetics is an interdisciplinary project that argues that Black rappers and poets are engaged in a complex encoding praxis where sound is used in order to free Black meaning-making practices from the constraints of white institutions of capture such as genre specificity, logocentrism, and Western metaphysics that forecloses the black from being and meaning. This summer I was able to complete research for the first and fourth chapter of my dissertation, “Sonic Blackness: Turning, Away from TIME, Towards Blackness” and “life is like a party shawty : Teezo Touchdown on Authenticity, Quality, and Representation” respectively.
As a Lyman Fellow, I conducted research on Teezo Touchdown’s debut album tour, which led to me placing a condensed version of chapter four in a southern Hip-Hop anthology. In this chapter I build on work that I started in 2022. Thanks to a conference grant from BCNM, I presented my research at the 2022 Silly Media Conference. In this chapter I argue that Teezo Touchdown is engaged in a surrealist performance of personas that allow Teezo to circumvent the imposition of white institutions like genre specificity and respectability. For his 2021 “Rid the Mid” campaign, Teezo relied on an eccentric persona and elements of afro surrealism. To promote his music and address the rampant issue of “mid” music, Teezo dips into politics and becomes Mayoral Candidate Touchdown. I examine a few videos from this campaign as well as interviews to argue that Teezo’s music is emblematic of a trend where Black artists wrestle Black meaning away from whiteness and white meaning-making structures via silly and absurdist work that directly addresses its intended audience: Black people. I build upon Raquel Gate’s theorization of the concept of “negativity” and assert that Teezo Touchdown employs “Strategic Negativity” by donning the persona of a mayoral candidate and running a campaign to rid the streets of mediocre music. I want to build upon Gate’s argument that trashy reality television represents a “metaphorical gutter” and argue that Hip-hop, especially the rap music video, represents the storm drain, a fecund site for exploring Black culture and Black social life that does not cater to the white gaze. Teezo revels in the “Ratchet” and employs various negative images to support his inversion of high/low quality measures that could not comprehend how “mid” represents a crisis in Hip-Hop. It’s important that my research begins to be read as work that sits at the intersection of Hip-Hop studies and Black performance theory and this forthcoming publication will give me a unique chance to work with prominent scholars in Black literature and Hip-Hop studies like Constance Bailey and A.D. Carson. Additionally, I will be the presiding officer for the panel “Hip Hop Aesthetics and Spoken Word Poetics” at Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association 2024 conference.
Finally, I completed chapter one, “Sonic Blackness: Turning, Away from TIME, Towards Blackness”, which engages Saul Williams’ poetry as well as his rapping, writing and acting in the film Slam. I chart how antiblackness and whiteness attempt to overdetermine and define blackness for its own purposes and argue that Black poets like Saul Williams predict and preempt this process of Black sonic erasure and exclusion through an intentional praxis built on interiority, double-consciousness, and introspection. I charge the violence of white supremacy as white noise, a term that illuminates how whiteness saturates the sensorium with its own logics of domination, capture, and objectification. I suggest that Black poets like Saul Williams use sound in order to flesh out a sense of Blackness that does not cohere within the humanistic registers within western modernity generally and American popular culture, specifically. I term this process Sonic Blackness and argue that Black poets and rappers are sonic practitioners that are sounding Blackness outside of the metaphysical trappings of whiteness such as linear time, human Being, and property. To avoid the pitfalls of humanism and its sonic logics, I show how Williams explores Blackness through an intentional turn inwards, towards Blackness, and a turn away from logics that attempt to know and master Blackness according to antiblack ideals such as The Human. I will present parts of my research at the Furious Flower IV Conference, a conference on Black poetics that convenes every decade!
Without the Lyman Fellowship, I would not have completed this research and placed myself in a position to land a tenure-track position. I enter the job market with forthcoming publications, conferences to continue honing my work, and relationships with faculty and colleagues that will sustain me for years to come. I look forward to honoring the legacy of Peter Lyman and cannot overstate how grateful I am to BCNM!