Is it hustling this world, or something else? Reflections on three engagements with Improvised Lives

This is a book that attempts to deploy Black epistemologies, to think not so much about Blackness per se, but rather about the continuously mutating forms of urban collective life. I want to use this statement then as a way to respond to some of the profound questions raised by my interlocutors; questions that deal with apparatuses and styles of agency, of remaining stuck in the Anthropocene, and of ethical considerations about how long a writer should stick around in a place in order to be able to say something useful. By Black epistemologies I mean the ever-changing archive of ways of knowing, unknowing and refusing the world based on a wide register of sensuous and technical engagements honed through the multifaceted experiences and displacements of (not) being Black across different terrains.

The endeavour to draw upon Black epistemologies is inevitably complicated by the conundrums that a vast repertoire of heterogeneous epistemologies faced in terms of their enunciation and application. Elaborated under conditions of subjugation, how were these ways of knowing to make themselves known, faced with alternating devaluation and assignation of supernatural powers – where any basis for Black capacity was either reduced to sheer labour or to special relationships with dark worlds? Here, large measures of dissimulation, reversal and opacity were required in order to realize at least some of the potential Black knowledge possessed. Stylization of words, bodies, everyday performances ran interference, erased tracks, offered short-term protection, nurtured gestations, all to modulate the attention paid. Certainly our common understandings of the 'hustle', of improvising ways of getting by and circumventing constraints, are all part of the repertoire of Black epistemology. But such agencies were also cultivated to be more than they seemed, to divert attention to the ways in which Black sensibilities and cultural productions were intensely technical, rooted in elaborate mathematical and systemic readings of things, methods for calculating the possibilities for converting atmospheres of abjection into the grounds for assembling intricate architectures of association with natural worlds; for disparate dislocated bodies to operate in concert across the interstices of weakly guarded spaces, blind spots and invisibilities in plain sight.

Not dissimilarly, improvisation in what the Art Ensemble of Chicago long has called 'Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future' may on the surface reflect an agency that embodies a hustle, an inexplicable ability to twist and turn simple vernaculars into dizzying lines of flight, a demonstration of bravura. Yet most of the great improvisers also saw themselves largely as technicians, experimenters with physics and mathematics, all reaching to posit structures of force able to intersect diverse knowledges – entailing practices of counting, intuiting, divining, formulating – into forms of alternation, where every knowledge was considered equal, had no more purchase on the real than any other.

Today, improvisation is too often considered as a kind of resilience reflecting some deep-seated capacity of the subaltern to roll with the punches, to pull all kinds of cute rabbits out of the hat. Rather, musicians such as Coleman, Mitchell, Rivers, Parker, Shipp and McPhee realized that the 'real world' has nothing to do with truth, language or meaning; that there is no way to get at it, but rather to always work a way around it so that it can come at you from different angles, put you somewhere else than where you think you are, so wherever you are and what you have, confront that this is only part of what is going on, that in most respects whoever you are is already 'out of there', somewhere else. Given the unrelenting anti-Blackness that has shaped a large part of the world, improvisation remains a critical 'scientific method' of endurance and generativity. Given all of the hard work that has taken place across households and communities across the global South to experiment with the albeit limited resources to which they are usually availed – all of the keen observations, patient calculations and collaborative study that has taken place from street corners to overcrowded public universities – there is much more than 'hustle' going on.

Since I have tried to...