---->JENELLE: This post may veer a little from the topics we usually engage with in our course, but I've been thinking a lot about the Solange visual album Anna presented last class, and the use of landscape, especially in "Stay Flo." I'm really interested in the way deserts are represented in art and especially cinema and especially music videos. Deserts often seem to signify dystopian aesthetics in cinema, and so in some way may have something to say about Afrofuturism, or they seem to be used as blank spaces ready for projected significance. They are just visually interesting spaces, and especially great for photography with all the weird reflected light (and I have definitely shot a lot in deserts myself!)—but they are also not blank spaces in that they have been historically (and often currently still) inhabited and have their own histories. I'm just thinking about landscape used as style, and if filmmakers have a responsibility to place, especially when they have no obvious connection to that place or no obvious recognition of indigenous relationships to that place. This feels really different than the use of place in films like Daughters of the Dust or Compensation, and I wonder if there is something somewhat settler-minded about using especially deserts this way (I am thinking about the history of the west and California, where white settlers acted like the desert was empty and ready for their projects/irrigation/speculation). Don't get me wrong—I also always love looking at the desert, and I don't mean for this to come across as overly critical of Solange! The representation of the desert just happens to be a pet interest. I'm also interested in thinking about how this might be a different conversation for white and Black artists (or others from non-white settler backgrounds)—is it different if your ancestry was or was not involved in extractive and genocidal settler imperialism in these spaces?
---->ANNA: This is really interesting! I see your point regarding the use of place as backdrop rather than place as imbued with history and culture (as well as intrinsic value). I can't quite make any complex argument as I'm not well-read regarding how we use the American desert in art, but I wonder if there's something more going on in the piece. I think there is a sense of communion with the space present, one that doesn't seem to claim the desert as Blank Space but recognizes a connection with it and sees it as populated rather than empty. The use of Afrofuturism vis a vis the desert backdrop definitely seems in line with a dystopian aesthetic trend, but I'm not sure if that is the only valence at work. There's something to be made of many of the desert shots being particularly of the West Texas desert. More than anything I'd say Solange is making a piece about what it means to be a Black Texan, and the desert is part of that conversation. The desert is home, a valence of home, a way of expressing Texas-to-Solange or Texas-to-Blackness more so than I think it is an ode to indigeneity or a disavowal of indigeneity. I don't think there's nothing to be said regarding indigeneity in this context, but I wonder if settler theory is not the right avenue for thinking about this, as it's primarily a mechanism of construing Black space.
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