Black Life Podcast

Explore the vitality of contemporary Black art and culture in the Bay Area and beyond with this podcast hosted by Ryanaustin Dennis.

In this episode, Dennis speaks with writer and thinker Akande X, a Black Life alumnus who shared their multimedia presentation “That Feeling When” in 2018, exploring the intersection of blackness, comedy, the Internet, and politics. In an moment when white nationalism has a deep foothold in Internet culture, “TFW” provides a theoretical approach to the ethics of the Internet and the substance of memes as comedy and as political message, revealing how memes are one of the most subversive, volatile, and promising black art forms today. The conversation covers affect theory, Akande X’s work as the editor of Maji News, a Afrofuturist community newspaper, and theorist Aria Dean’s seminal article on meme culture “Poor Meme, Rich Meme.”