Tears for the Departed: See(k)ing a Black Visual Underground in Hip-Hop and African American Cultures

Abstract

Critical inquiry at the intersections of hip-hop music, African American literature, and Black visual culture inform a generative discourse for Black underground imagery within and across an array of interrelated texts. Through certain textual pairings—Jonathan Green’s “Seeking” and the Gravediggaz’s “The Night the Earth Cried”; or Mos Def’s “hip-hop” and Jeff Wall’s “After Invisible Man,” (among others)—this chapter seeks to excavate a ritualistic intertextuality imbedded in certain works that feature elements of what can tentatively be referred to as Black visual underground culture, a constellation of lyrics, images, and textual allusions that articulate an underground ethos present (if not readily audible/visible) in hip-hop culture. In Practices of Looking …, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue that “visual culture encompasses many media forms ranging from fine art to popular film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as the sciences, law and medicine.”¹ The Black visual underground functions in much the same way except that the subject matter embraces blackness and the cultural, spiritual, and political markers of Black identity—especially here in contemporary popular culture.