Conference Agenda

In 1933, John and Alan Lomax traveled across the US South, hunting for Black folksongs to record for preservation in the Library of Congress. The “purest” of these, they posited, could be found in segregated plantation-penitentiaries. Scholars have addressed the conflicting priorities between the duo across their careers (Filene 2000), as well as among the Lomaxes and their interlocutors (Stone 2019). Underexamined, however, are the disjunct temporal currents of the archive: on one hand, the Lomaxes’ conception of Black folksongs as memory relics of an Old Southern past; and, on the other, imprisoned musicians’ use of folksongs to articulate the multiplicitous temporality of Black fugitivity.

This paper listens across several registers of the archive, analyzing research notes and correspondence in the Lomaxes’ papers alongside the musical, lyrical, and historical details of the recordings themselves. First, I lay out the relationship between folksong and memory in the Lomaxes’ fieldwork methods and recording practices. Together with their published writings, these findings show that John Lomax in particular relied on the carceral logics of the plantation-penitentiary in his efforts to preserve the pastness of Black folksongs—what he called their “strange primitive beauty”—by isolating them from modern commercial, white, or educational influences. This impulse resonates within a larger history of folksong collecting before its socio-functional turn, as well as within contemporary cultural criticism by Southern conservatives. Second, I respond to Daphne Brooks’s invitation to “listen to the dense history of the carceral state” (2021) by closely attending to two versions of the same folksong, “Long Gone” and “Long John,” recorded at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas. Through musical repetition and confounding imagery—including “funny shoes” that face two directions at once—musicians like “Lightning” Washington used song to retrace mythic histories of escaped convicts, bring those histories sensibly into the present, and imagine their own eventual fugitive flights out of the prison. Ultimately, by drawing out the temporal tension in the Lomax archive, I critically re-evaluate recordings at the heart of the 1930s American folksong canon and demonstrate the fundamental role of music in mediating felt experiences of time in the Jim Crow South.

In February 2012, before the release of good kid, m.A.A.d city, a scrapped track titled “Cartoon & Cereal” leaked online, introducing “euphoria” as a guiding covenant: “Not to worry, every warrior will come and see euphoria / And that’s a covenant I put on every tribe.” Though never officially released, the concept accrues meaning across Kendrick Lamar’s oeuvre, reaching its most explicit articulation in his 2024 diss track “euphoria," directed at Drake.

I argue that Lamar’s conception of euphoria represents what I term Afrofuturist space: a liminal, fluid reality generated by the tensions of Black identity, enabling bricolage, teleological experimentation, and identity play (Weheliye 2002; Eshun 1998; Womack 2013, 2025). To demonstrate this, I analyze Lamar’s compositional choices, including sample interpolation (Adams 2009), metric tension and release (Ohriner 2019; Mattesich 2019; Wadsworth and Needle 2022), and vocality, across his musical output, establishing his formal norms and personas (Bungert 2019). Over time, the notion accrues a meaning closer to personal and communal spiritual transcendence, which I trace through all references to “euphoria” across Lamar’s work, plotting its musical and semantic evolution from 2012 to GNX (2024).

My analysis will show the compositional and production techniques that signal Lamar’s auteur status and largely define his work up until GNX are subdued in favor of a straightforward West Coast G-funk sound world (Keyes 2002) inhabited by his most essentialized gangster persona to date. I interpret these choices as an act of sonic “disidentification” (Muñoz 1999; Harrison 2015). With this frame, the feud with Drake becomes an arena for showcasing his authenticity by casting Drake as his natural foil. By performing an authentic version of a Compton rapper that mostly eschews the complex sonic signifiers that initially gave him auteur status, Lamar simultaneously rejects the savior narrative imposed upon him (Linder 2018) while unapologetically claiming its rewards.

Ultimately, the paper argues that Lamar reframes escape as return, locating liberation in tradition and collective memory rather than flight (Gilroy 1993; Nelson 2002). Where earlier Afrofuturist practitioners mobilize transcendence as departure from material reality, GNX attains euphoria through sonic departure to facilitate a radical, personal homecoming.

Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025) offers a significant intervention in contemporary Black horror cinema through its deployment of blues music as both narrative device and epistemological framework. I argue that the film positions Delta blues not as historical artifact but as what Clyde Woods terms "blues epistemology," a living system of knowledge production that preserves African-American cultural memory while resisting extractive appropriation. Drawing on Woods's theorization of blues as explanatory tradition emerging from plantation capitalism, A.J. Dalton's concept of geopolitical vampirism, and Kristin Burnett and Judith Leggatt's analysis of cultures rendered "undead" through colonial preservation, I examine how Sinners inverts traditional vampire narratives by positioning cultural appropriators, rather than racialized Others, as parasitic monsters.

The film's pivotal "I Lied to You" juke joint sequence demonstrates this inversion through its radical collapsing of temporal and stylistic boundaries, layering traditional Delta blues with African rhythms and hip-hop production to refuse the ossification of Black musical traditions. I analyze the film’s sonic architecture, examining how Göransson's scoring choices and the strategic blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic boundaries construct Black identity and resist cultural extraction. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how Sinners positions the struggle over cultural ownership as a struggle over epistemological authority. The film suggests that effective resistance to cultural vampirism lies not in defensive preservation but in ongoing creative transformation that insists on the vitality and continued relevance of Black cultural production.