In the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, writer McKenzie Wark talks about DeForrest Brown Jr’s book Assembling a Black Counter Culture – a historical book on Black techno music
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“The thesis of DeForrest Brown Jr’s book Assembling a Black Counter Culture was always interesting to me. It didn’t get the attention it should have when it dropped. It’s hard to get people to pay attention to the history of Black music – hip-hop, yes, but techno gets left out of the story. The way I’ve understood America is through what Black people say. The truth about America? It’s 400 years of slavery and violence. As Brown points out, techno is Black music for the post-civil rights era of deindustrialisation, when the grand Fordist dream was starting to fall apart. Techno proposed a different kind of future from the ruins.
“My book Raving is anchored by a quote from Brown. I’m a white woman dancing to techno – I’m the uninvited guest in somebody else’s culture, which must be acknowledged. In Brown’s version, Black music got stolen by a global party culture. What are we doing when we’re dancing to a music that we didn’t make? In my book, I tried to centre the experience of raving itself, but if you want to know what it means to the people who created it, that’s what Brown’s book is for. Raving is not transcendence, resistance or utopia – it is a collaborative art form for which we will always need rich and varied languages.”
In Raving, McKenzie Wark’s intoxicating 2023 work of autofiction, the acclaimed Australian writer and media theorist put language to an experience that’s sensorial and ephemeral — that of being a raver in New York’s underground queer nightlife scene in the late 2010s and 2020s. The first book she wrote after transitioning in 2018 and experiencing prolonged writer’s block, Raving is as eclectic and high concept as Wark’s other books, which have included a criticism of the commodification of information in the digital era (A Hacker Manifesto, 2004), gossipy, lusty emails exchanged with the post-modernist writer Kathy Acker, with whom Wark had a real-life fling (I’m Very into You, 2015) and a sensual meditation on the trans experience (Reverse Cowgirl, 2020). Currently based in New York, Wark can be found raving in Brooklyn or Queens in her free time, or teaching classes on race, gender and nightlife to students at the New School.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.
