"Visibility is not always in our best interest"
A conversation with Maleke Glee, a curator and practitioner of cultural sustainability.
In a 2021 essay published in Current Affairs, Bertrand Cooper offers a necessary and incisive critique about who is enabled to create Black popular culture. He writes, “A Black creator born and raised in the middle class can take from any aspect of the Black poor’s existence without risking charges of voyeurism, appropriation, or predation. It is an overwhelmingly common abuse of social power given how much of Black popular culture traffics in depictions of the Black poor. It is as if all Black creators are presumed to have equal insight.”
The economic realities informing and influencing public and popular art are a core concern of Maleke Glee, a curator and scholar of cultural sustainability based in Washington D.C. and my latest guest on Busy Being Black. He describes cultural sustainability as “cultural heritage preservation amid rapidly changing sociopolitical dynamics”, and he’s especially concerned with how we sustain Black cultures, communities, histories and futures outside of the extractive infrastructures and institutions that thrive on Black death and disposability.
Maleke’s research, academic and curatorial practice centre on go-go music—a genre and sonic landscape native to Washington D.C., rooted in the percussive traditions of our West African ancestors. Alongside a thriving and insular nighttime economy sustained by the flow of the Black Dollar, go-go music and the scene that celebrates it provide opportunities for economic empowerment for self-taught and formerly incarcerated musicians. It is in spaces and movements like these, Maleke suggests, that our cultural and creative vitality remain closest to their source.
In our conversation for Busy Being Black, we explore the spiritual work that energises Maleke’s ongoing passion for the preservation of go-go music, how initiatives for Black inclusion within art world institutions often stifle efforts to sustain Black vernacular cultures, and how a closer relationship to ugliness helps us queer what it means to embody and pursue Black excellence.
Josh: When I think of cultural sustainability, what comes to my mind is cultural preservation. I'm thinking of the need and the desire for Black queer people in particular to call back our culture, to reinforce the gates, if you will, because we're seeing so much of that culture not only seeping out by nature of our expressive culture but being co-opted and sold back to us. Can you go into what role sustainability and progress play together?
Maleke: In this present moment, progress does not often elicit sustainability. Progress can be quite gestural; progress can be quite symbolic. We're in the age of representation, diversity, access and inclusion; and, to use film as an example, I think of the number of roles that we see in cinema for Black actors, which may be quite substantial in comparison to 10 or 20 years ago. However, that's progress in quantity, not sustainability. What kind of stories are being continued? What narratives are being forefronted? So when I think about sustainability, I'm thinking about that connection between the past, present and future, and progress doesn't always have an invitation to or respect for the past.
Josh: It brings up the word acceleration, right? Because what technologies are doing, for the most part, is accelerating, not only in their generation and application out into the world—their scale—they're also accelerating our human experience and flattening the human experience. And those of us who are paying close attention are really having to forcibly, slowly and abruptly ensure that we have the space within these technologies to tend to our communities, to sustain our cultures, to learn about ourselves and figure out who we are. So, I'm understanding cultural sustainability as an analysis of what's happening in this moment with a connection to the past and an eye towards the future. Because the future is the next moment, right? It's tomorrow. It's an hour from now.
Maleke: And because you used the word technology, it made me think about maybe a more succinct example. In the cultural sustainability circles that I run in, when the Renegade dance came out, it was one of the first viral TikTok dances; and we saw a product of Black culture that grew and moved with a sense of immediacy because of technology but that then doesn't sustain Black cultural producers. And when I say sustain, I mean in terms of the economy of visibility: they're not getting those influencer checks; they're not seen. But also I think about my fear of the future as it relates to regional cultures and particularly participatory culture. And I'll use dance again, as an example. I'm someone who spends too much time on TikTok, and there are a lot of dance trends. There are also a lot of slippages when we get to regional colloquialisms, and suddenly we're all speaking the same; but because of this technology, we may have access to this cultural information, but we don't always have the privilege of knowing the source, and nor are we required to be in community with that source. So if I can learn the lingo and the dance coming out of Oakland, California, having never been to Oakland, California, there is some sustainability being lost because we know how Black people create: we're creating in a participatory communal manner, and the internet and technology do not require that we participate in communion. It often gives gifts and relics of culture without foregrounding the environment necessary to sustain said culture, with the embedded cultural values of participation in the community.
Josh: That's culture as costume only, not even ceremonial costume; it's just something people put on and take off. The example that's coming to my mind that might illustrate the difference in another way is Paris is Burning. We've got Jennie Livingston—and we can get to politics around Jennie Livingston's access—a white lesbian documentarian going into club culture and ball culture and hearing first-person narratives about life as a queer, Black and trans person in what Jafari S. Allen calls “the long 1980s.” So, the provenance is there, it’s documented, it’s included; we have the source right there in front of us. However, many years later, we're able to have a more curious, complex and culturally relevant conversation about the politics of capturing Blackness and queerness and transness in that way and with that lens, right? What you're saying is, we're not getting that, right? We're not getting a snapshot of the original culture. Instead, we're getting what Jean Baudrillard called a “simulacra” of the original culture.
Maleke: Absolutely. And I’m thinking of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s book, Elite Capture: the persons who have the privilege to touch a particular industry may not have a relationship with a community, but they may be made a spokesperson—and sometimes a community doesn't need a spokesperson: they can speak for themselves. I often hear that in my work as a curator: people are “giving voice to”. A lot of communities have a voice. You need to maybe de-platform yourself and platform and centre the originator and the voice of the community.