Dr. Alix Chapman is a professor of Comparative Women's Studies at Spelman College. In his work, he uses anthropological methods to examine the social geography of bounce, contextualizing as a site of lived politics connected to both the broad historical dynamics of racism and hetero-patriarchy and the neo-liberal order, as well as to the site-specific dynamics of New Orleans.
Sam Backer: Could you start by introducing yourself? Tell us what you work on, and how you first got interested in bounce music?
Alix Chapman: My name is Dr. Alix Chapman. I’m an assistant professor of Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College. I teach classes in Women’s Studies, and also teach a class called Black Queer Studies. I did my doctoral research, and I’m currently working on a book on bounce music, more specifically on what’s been called “sissy bounce.” I’m an anthropologist, and I did a two-year ethnographic project where I performed, toured with, and managed different bounce artists. I’m still working and processing that project. When I first got interested in bounce, I already had an interest in New Orleans because of my family. My grandfather was from New Orleans. I grew up on the West Coast amongst a community of black people who had left the south, particularly that area, because of violence during the great migration and Jim Crow era.
As far as research, I think of myself as a cultural activist. Before becoming a scholar, I was a performance artist. I’m interested in the preconditions for politics and how spaces that are normatively seen as nonpolitical, specifically clubs, block parties, certain aspects of street life, provide the preconditions for more explicit forms of social movement and resistance. With the project on bounce, I’m really interested in bounce’s relationship to histories of racial segregation. A lot of people have said that bounce is not necessarily hip-hop or r&b, but have instead referred to it as “project music.” People in New Orleans refer to it as project music. As with a lot of hip-hop, there’s a repping of spaces—particularly ghettoized spaces. I think it’s very interesting that in bounce music a lot of these spaces have, within a generation, disappeared because of displacement. Some of that displacement having to do with the breaking of the levees, not necessarily with Katrina, but with the context of removal and destruction of housing that in some cases was undamaged after the storms. It was used as a pretense for making sure that working class and poor black communities could not return to New Orleans.
