From Absence to Excess: Black Grief and Afrofuturism in Colombian Hip-Hop

Abstract

This article examines the videoclip Quilo, made by the Colombian hip-hop duo DxD and circulated online. Using bodily technologies such as hairstyles, clothing, and posing, Quilo depicts how the futurity of Black life can be shaped. Drawing from recent conceptualizations of Black life and from Latin American hip-hop studies, this article analyses Quilo by contrasting it with media coverage of police violence and the killing of Black youths in Colombia, and with the discursive construction of the multicultural mestizo nation. In this context, I interpret the treatment of temporality and space in Quilo as aesthetically evoking the non-specific time of Black grief.

RESUMEN

Este artículo examina el videoclip Quilo, realizado por el dúo colombiano de hiphop DxD y difundido en línea. Mediante el uso de tecnologías corporales como peinados, ropa y poses, Quilo representa cómo se podría moldear el futuro de la vida de las personas negras. A partir de conceptualizaciones recientes de los estudios de la diáspora africana y del hiphop latinoamericano, este artículo analiza a Quilo en conexión con la cobertura mediática de la violencia policial y el asesinato de jóvenes negros en Colombia y con la construcción discursiva de la nación mestiza multicultural. En este contexto, interpreto el tratamiento de la temporalidad y el espacio de Quilo como una evocación estética del tiempo no específico del duelo negro.

Keywords:

• hip-hop
• afro-futurism
• grief
• Colombia
• police brutality

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• hiphop
• afrofuturismo
• duelo
• Colombia
• brutalidad policial

Disclosure Statement

The author has not declared any potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 A police officer, who had arrived in the neighbourhood to resolve a dispute between neighbours, shot at Carlos Esteban when he looked out the window (Q’hubo 2020). The officers involved have never been indicted in the case.

2 The Colombian Constitution of 1991 is known for its multi-ethnic outlook, which emphasizes equal protection of rights, freedoms, and opportunities without any discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national or family origin, language, religion, or political or philosophical view.

3 In his book Pa’ dónde vas Nazareno con esa pesada cruz. Meandros de los afrocolombianos migradesterrados, Santiago Arboleda Quiñónez argues that Aguablanca has been constructed in the press as a constitutively external space, both in physical and symbolic terms. He explains that the district is perceived as a provisional place, one that does not necessarily respect a normative framework. That makes this part of the city neither typical of Cali’s customs nor desirable for other residents in Cali, that is, inhabitants of the western part of the city where the majority is non-Black.

4 When representing Aguablanca, the Cali press is substantially sensationalist, obsessed with the number of deaths and attacks on the police (see El País 2011, 2014, 2023). At the same time, there is a conspicuous lack of cultural news or investigations focussed on the systemic racism that its inhabitants face, which is the main cause of the problems that newspapers put on the front page.

5 The strike called for a series of demonstrations triggered by the announcement of a tax reform project proposed by the government of Iván Duque. The demonstrators, seeking the elimination of this restructuring proposal, suffered the excessive use of force by the national police, which murdered 75 people, most of them of colour (Telesur 2021). The tax proposal was eventually withdrawn by the president.

6 We might recall H&M’s internet advertisement showing a Black child wearing a hooded top inscribed with “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” or a Vogue cover depicting LeBron James as King Kong. In Colombia, hair straightening products like Epa usually exploit the racist stereotype of “bad” Black hair to sell shampoos and gels (Rodríguez 2021).

7 Viveros Vogoya explains that “although black music has been incorporated into the musical repertoire of Colombian society and is particularly attractive for its Dionysian impulse, this does not mean that the relationship between white and black society is unambivalent. On the one hand, the black world is considered primitive, underdeveloped, and morally inferior, but on the other hand, it is considered powerful and superior in the areas of dance, music, and the amatory arts. However, this superiority refers to areas that have been devalued from various perspectives: morally, because the body has been considered a territory of sin; materially, because these skills do not generate economic wealth; and symbolically, because on the dominant value scale the physical is inferior to the spiritual” (2002, 62–63).

8 Fernando Urrea Giraldo and Fernando Murillo Cruz (1999) have studied the dynamics behind the “ghettoization” of Aguablanca, that is, the rhetoric of stigmatization that different institutions and public officials impose on inhabitants. In their study, “ghetto” as a denominator has penetrated deeply within the ways of being and feeling among residents of the district, shaping forms of (self-)perception and marginalization of people in different areas of Aguablanca.

9 In fact, Gloria Isabel Ocampo explains that “la experiencia compartida de la invasión es tan intensa que define los límites de la comunidad al constituir un nosotros que excluye cualquier circunstancia extracomunitaria” (2003, 251).

10 In Camera Lucida (2010), Roland Barthes discusses the effects that photographs have on viewers and explains that some images contain what he calls a “punctum,” which is a detail that the photographer did not necessarily mean to include in the image, but that creates meaning. The punctum is unique to the viewer’s response to the photograph and pierces the image’s studium, which is the historical, contextual, symbolic meaning that the photographer intended the image to have.

11 The tongue-twister reminds us of the homonymous novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. It is worth noting that language itself is also one of the most important problems for the novel when it comes to representing everyday reality. Orality, both in the work of Cabrera Infante and in Quilo, appears not only as a door to colloquiality but also to making visible the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified. When Cabrera Infante portrays the Havana night from the perspective of the three friends who visit bars, squares, and other emblematic places in the city towards the end of the 1950s, the oral language is intertwined with multiple references to canonical authors to invade the “archivo literario cubano” [Cuban literary archive] says Ana Sabau, thus erasing “la línea que distingue la copia del original” [“the line that distinguishes the copy from the original”] (2015, 112). Just like Cabrera Infante, Quilo displaces what the press says to the sphere of gossip, thus demystifying the representation and construction of Black life.

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Notes on contributors

Marcelo Carosi

Marcelo Carosi is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Hamilton College. He has written on Ibero-American cultures, including visual representations of care in relation to Black femininity/masculinity, transsexuality, neoliberalism, reproductive labor, aging, and death.