By recognizing the blues’ interdisciplinarity and temporality, we invite audience discussion that foregrounds the art as a source to explore contemporaneous issues, like living amidst steady exposure to climate catastrophes, enduring pervasive economic precarity under neoliberalism, or the role of cultural expression in navigating forms of anti-blackness. To stimulate this conversation, our presider, Dr. Ambre Dromgoole, will offer an indigenous land acknowledgment, impose 15 minutes per speaker, pose questions to the presenters, and solicit audience queries.

We begin with Alex Alston's "Jean Toomer's Cane & T'he Blues of Black Land Sovereignty." He examines black people's relationship to western land by analyzing Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and its depictions of agrarian culture. Alston asks what a discussion of form(s) in Cane, such as the blues, yields when situated in the context of the black folk and agricultural lifeways that inspired and provided the source material for the text. Alston thusly contends that literary critics have failed to rigorously think through Cane's folk-farmer-inspired eco-poetics in ways that place it squarely in conversation with histories of African American thought, practices, struggle, and organizing around land and food sovereignty. He claims source material for the novel's affective and psychological inputs should be interpreted as directly related to the social and ecological elements, actors, and interfaces associated with being a black farmer in the rural American South. Conclusively, Alston argues that Cane's black eco-agrarianism is subtended by its commitment to the blues rather than a celebratory orientation.

Further pursuing matters the blues gestures about Black life and nature, Jaz Riley addresses affective interpretations through attention to cultural foreclosures in post-Katrina, Black Gulf South movement practices. In “Katrina’s Black Diaspora: An Ambivalent Blues Discourse,” they probe how early Black Studies, post-Katrina literature situates the complex affect, beliefs, and political demands of the Katrina diaspora, or persons displaced by 2005's Hurricane Katrina, within Woods' blues epistemology. Riley critiques the blues' discursive adaptation as servicing settler colonial needs for legibility through its revelations about Black survival. Thus, the philosophy presumes post-Katrina Black social lives and formations are transparent. Riley juxtaposes Sunni Patterson's performance poem "We Know This Place (2006)" alongside Tracey Wrick's (2005) and Alvin Stampley's (2022) oral history interviews detailing their experiences with the storm's landfall and subsequent Gulf South migrations. This literature details Black (im)mobility practices that engender an affective ambivalence deviating from the revelatory, overdetermining resistance narratives emergent within early Katrina literature. In these Black Gulf South's self-narrations of post-storm (non)movement, Riley ambles a sentient dialogue of opacity that urges consideration for an understudied blues dynamic: its social, cultural, and legal foreclosures.

Lastly, the panel shifts to use of the blues epistemology as a storying tool that worlds liberatory Black cultural expression. In "Philly Soul Musicking & The Message in The Music," Christopher Rogers traverses Philadelphia’s Black music culture while wielding Woods’ logic to construct working-class theories and social explanations of Black futurity. He examines Philly-based ethnographies featuring "Mr. John," "Mr. John Jr." and “Gloria's” artistic pursuits in 1960s-80s West Philadelphia as they preserved narratives of Black freedom struggles through their respective recording practices. Rogers’ work shines through its ever-present message in our music -king, which has upheld Black presence and creative visioning within and beyond West Philadelphia to give future generations something to hold onto—a prefigurative world where blackness is irreducible to the suffering that may perhaps have called it into existence.