Texts and Sects: Since the 1960s, readers have been fascinated with the possibility of heresy at the origins of Christianity and with “apocrypha” that were “excluded” from the Christian Bible (especially inspired by the Nag Hammadi gnostic texts). Gospel Thrillers amplify the excitement about lost texts but also express acute anxiety about heretical Christian sects: ultimately, they allow orthodox status quo to prevail.

With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.

This chapter examines relationships between documentary screen-media and jazz from the 1950s to today. As a mode of production which often lays claim to “truth” and “reality,” documentary’s reflexive relationship with jazz is interrogated for its enduring power to keenly shape ideas about both jazz and documentary itself. Concert-films, meta-narrative documentaries, and biographical film are introduced as key repositories of jazz culture that reflect and codify jazz history and meaning. The use of jazz in nonjazz documentaries is also explored as an example of jazz’s integration into screen-media’s cultural vernacular and the aesthetics of the everyday. Throughout the chapter, attention is given to examples in which ideas about jazz and US democracy are propagated through documentary film practice, reception, and aesthetics.

The Bible Hunters: This chapters describes the background from which the political, theological, and personal stakes of the Gospel Thrillers emerge in the colonial context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often encoded in fictional “tales of adventure.” A new political climate of modern discoveries (Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi library) signal the shift from “adventure” to “thrillers.”

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.

In July 2019, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Brooklyn went dark. In 90-degree temperatures, over 55,000 customers in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and Georgetown lost electricity in one of the largest power outages in New York’s history. Con Edison, the city’s power company, admitted that it deliberately disconnected these neighborhoods in order to prevent a widespread loss of power that would affect wealthier, whiter areas of the city. Although Black neighborhoods earn the highest scores in New York City’s heat vulnerability index (a ranking system that takes into account the proportion of green space to developed space, access to air conditioning, and the percentage of people living below poverty levels), they are the first on the line when the city’s infrastructure fails.1 What the index does not take into account, however, are the social and political risks to which these neighborhoods are also exposed during a blackout. After the lights went out, 200 police officers flooded Brooklyn, with the nebulous mandate to preserve order. A week earlier, the US Department of Justice had announced that it would not press charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Now law enforcement roamed the streets of Canarsie, policing Black children for splashing water in 90-degree heat.

It is not possible to argue that the framers wisely created the electoral college and provided a sound basis for selecting the president in the twenty-first century. The electoral college does not work at all as the framers anticipated. Electors rarely exercise discretion and are condemned when they do. Instead, they are agents of political parties, which did not exist in 1787. The House has not selected the president since 1824. In addition, most of the motivations behind the creation of the electoral college are simply irrelevant today. Legislative election is not an option, there is little danger that the president will be too powerful if directly elected, voters have extraordinary access to information on the candidates, there is no justification at all for either electors or state legislatures to exercise discretion in selecting the president, defending the interests of slavery is unthinkable, and the short-term pressures have long dissipated. Those delegates who wanted electors to exercise independent judgment or be selected by state legislatures would soon be disappointed, and there is no support—and no justification—today for either option. In addition, the broad thrust of constitutional revision over the past two centuries has been in the direction of democratization and majority rule.