Theorizing the Funk: An Introduction

Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations

“…For Bolden, the positioning of Black performance as innate rather than learned (that is, as a product of craft, discipline, technē, and ultimately, intelligence, even if claiming to be liberatory) places Black people as underdeveloped. 3 Instead of offering metaphysical/mythical origin for funk, he suggests that it is an aesthetic inflection of cultural-economic life of Black Americans in the postwar era. He characterizes the aesthetic of funk as "speed, self-reflexivity, asymmetry, dissonance, and repetition."…”