Afrofuturism in clipping.'s 'The Deep': A Musical Analysis

The novel 'The Deep' by Rivers Solomon explores how marginalized communities create alternative societies to preserve their collective memory and identity, using the imaginative premise that descendants of enslaved women thrown overboard during the slave trade have built an underwater civilization where one woman serves as their historian to remember their tragic past and guide their future.

The Deep is a novella by Rivers Solomon, based on a song by the musical group Clipping. The story is described as a 'game of telephone' where each new person adds their own take on the mythos, allowing the story to expand. It follows a society of mermaid-like creatures who are descendants of pregnant African slave women who jumped from slave ships. The main character, Yetu, is the historian who holds all the memories of her society within her. The reviewer compares it to The Giver by Lois Lowry, noting that the first half was difficult to access due to its mythology-heavy nature, but the second half was excellent, particularly in exploring how trauma is passed between generations. The book is described as super queer, with sapphic main characters and various queer side characters, and all characters are people of color.

This song by Clipping, inspired by Rivers Solomon's novel 'The Deep,' tells the story of the Wajinru, an aquatic tribe born from pregnant African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. The Wajinru live in the ocean depths, unaware of surface dwellers until humans destroy their habitat with oil drilling. The song uses accelerating tempo and depth symbols to narrate their uprising, culminating in a tsunami that destroys humanity, symbolized by the final noise wall.

Rivers Solomon's novella 'The Deep' (2019) explores the underwater descendants of pregnant African slaves thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade, focusing on Yetu, the historian tasked with carrying her people's collective memories, which threaten to destroy her; the book exemplifies how novellas can balance poetic prose with character depth while exploring heavy themes of trauma and identity, and it exists as one of three creative interpretations (alongside a Drexciya song and a clipping. song) of the same underwater civilization concept, demonstrating how different artistic mediums can offer complementary perspectives on a single narrative world.

The Deep is a novel by Rivers Solomon that combines fantasy, alternate history, and sociological study. The story takes place in an underwater world inhabited by water folk who are descendants of pregnant Black slave women thrown overboard by their owners. Due to the trauma of their past, they pour their memories and history onto one person: the historian, a young woman named Yetu. She must remember for her people the painful, traumatic, sad, beautiful, and wondrous aspects of their history. This role destroys her and leaves her with an impossible choice: abandon her people's memories and culture, or cling to her role and possibly destroy herself. The book explores themes of memories, culture, past, and identity, and is inspired by the song 'We Are in the Future' by the rap group Clipping.

This comprehensive lecture presents post-colonial eco criticism as an interventionist framework examining how environmental issues are central to European conquest and inherent in ideologies of imperialism and racism. The lecture traces colonialism's evolution from ancient Greek 'apoikia' to modern European exploitation, distinguishing between exploitation colonies (cash crop production) and settler colonies (permanent settlement). Colonialism fundamentally involves territorial settlement, resource exploitation, and indigenous governance, requiring examination of ecosystem transformation through land use and resource extraction. Post-colonial eco criticism preserves literary aesthetics while drawing attention to social and political usefulness—the capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for material transformation. The lecture applies this framework to Mahasweta Devi's 'Shekhar the Hunt' (India) and Ken Saro-Wiwa's 'Africa Kills Her Sons' (Nigeria), demonstrating how post-independence governments continued colonial frameworks of resource extraction. Both analyses reveal ongoing colonial legacies in environmental destruction, systemic violence against marginalized populations, and the need for land return to indigenous communities as genuine decolonization. The lecture concludes by connecting speciesism to colonial human-subaltern relationships and recommending foundational texts including Nixon's 'Slow Violence,' Mukherjee's 'Post-Colonial Environments,' and works on the Chipko movement.

Postcolonial ecologies is an emerging interdisciplinary field that examines how colonialism created environmental violence and exploitation, and how postcolonial literature can address both social and environmental justice. The field addresses the critique that postcolonial studies has been too anthropocentric (focusing only on human concerns) while ecocriticism has been too Eurocentric (ignoring non-Western perspectives on nature). By converging these two fields, postcolonial ecocriticism moves from metaphorical to material understandings of land, giving agency to the land as witness to colonial ravages and promoting a balanced view between human and non-human environments.

This section examines postcolonial ecocriticism and curriculum decolonization. Postcolonial ecocriticism examines the interplay between environmental categories (water, land, energy, habitat, migration) and political/cultural categories (state, society, conflict, literature). It argues that colonialism cannot be understood without examining the environment it shaped - colonialism radically reshaped the world through deliberate or accidental transport of animals, plants, and peoples, causing ecosystem change under unequal power regimes. Many famines in Bengal and India were 'man-made' or 'European-made' famines resulting from replacing food crops with cash crops. Decolonizing the university involves recognizing that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations in a society shaped by colonial history. The idea of English literature as a field was first taught in colonial colleges (1850s), not British universities (1912-13), creating asymmetry in what metropolitan audiences know about colonial education.

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd propose 1610 (the Orbis spike) as an alternative Anthropocene start date, marking the drop in CO2 from indigenous genocide and subsequent forest regrowth—a chilling indictment of colonialism. This challenges the dominant narrative that frames ecological catastrophe as unprecedented. Indigenous and Black scholars demonstrate that catastrophic world destruction has long targeted specific populations. Marianne Higginbotham identifies this framing as 'existential exceptionalism'—a white supremacist narrative that overlooks 400 years of targeted existential threats to Black communities. The Anthropocene functions as a trojan horse for colonial legacies, providing conceptual cover for neo-colonial geoengineering proposals that ignore indigenous sovereignty and ecological wisdom.

The Anthropocene cannot be understood as a novel environmental crisis but must be recognized as the extension and enactment of colonial logic, specifically settler colonialism, which systematically erased indigenous presence through radical land transformation, genocide, and forced integration; therefore, addressing environmental crises requires decolonization processes including indigenous land repatriation, recognition of indigenous sovereignty, and challenging the universalist assumptions embedded in the Anthropocene concept that obscure differential impacts and responsibilities across global populations.

This segment explores Sun Ra (born Sonny Blount in the 1930s) as the inventor of Afrofuturism, combining African culture with science fiction and speculative technology. He claimed to have been abducted and taken to Saturn, creating elaborate mythologies about space travel. In 1952, he changed his name to Sun Ra after allegedly returning from Saturn. The segment then explores George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic as pioneers of psychedelic Afrofuturism, incorporating acid, psychedelics, hard rock, and urban pop culture. Clinton was influenced by Timothy Leary and the hippie movement. The band created a mythology called 'funkology' with characters from outer space and stories about Venus, Saturn, and ancient Egypt. They built a physical spaceship called 'The Mothership' - a 1,200-pound steel vessel that would land on stage with smoke and lights. This represents a 'hyper sigil' - a magical art piece that moved beyond simple symbols to become a tangible manifestation of artistic intention.

Afrofuturism is an epistemological framework that examines Black diasporic artistic production through the lens of speculation, utopia, and imagining alternative futures, allowing artists to express Black identity and resilience by creating spaces outside normative traditions; the term was coined by Mark Dery in 1994 and provides a way to understand outliers like George Clinton, Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and Janelle Monáe as part of a coherent tradition rather than as strange exceptions.

Afrofuturism is a cultural movement combining science fiction themes with African and Black experiences, challenging traditional portrayals that center on European narratives. It manifests across literature (Octavia Butler), music (Sun Ra, Janelle Monáe), and film. The movement emphasizes that African technology and development are sustainable and progressive, not primitive. In music, house features smooth chords and atmospheric vibes creating a relaxed groove, while electro has harder, more aggressive basslines. These fundamental differences create distinct emotional experiences for listeners.

Sun Ra (born Herman Paul Blount) was a musician who claimed Saturn as his home and pioneered Afrofuturism. His music wasn't just jazz but a spaceship fueled by 'space vibrations' designed to paint pictures of infinity and chart alternative destinies. He consciously constructed a new cosmology, a vibrant alternative to a history of oppression, with a path paved with stardust and pharaohs. Sun Ra believed the myth was inseparable from the music—it was the vessel. His concerts were total environments with dancers, elaborate costumes, light shows, and films, creating complete worlds to be inhabited. He embraced stark contrasts between avant-garde exploration and 'saloon wishy-washy music,' viewing these as part of the same cosmic tapestry.

Janelle Monáe's 2010 album The ArchAndroid exemplifies afrofuturism by using science fiction narratives to explore themes of racial and social oppression, presenting a time-traveling android protagonist Cindy Mayweather who serves as a liberator figure in a dystopian society, while musically blending diverse genres including funk, soul, R&B, hip-hop, and orchestral pop to create a cohesive concept album that challenges genre boundaries and offers a bold vision of freedom through artistic expression.