What I Have on My Mind

A Transformative Reframing of the Blues Epistemology

Abstract

Clyde Woods’s work is positioned at the nexus of critical, urban, and cultural studies, and his blues epistemology offers a guide to reading the cultural production of marginalized groups as maps containing alternative visions of the past, present, and future. However, research that extends the blues epistemology has been limited, and tends to approach his multifaceted blues in a piecemeal fashion. While his writing consistently sought to unite cultural studies with activist praxis, he never settled on the best terminology with which to capture his multifaceted understanding of the blues as both a body of explanation and an engine of change. Rather, he tended to reframe his blues to fit given projects. Moreover, this lack of consistency is reflected in a secondary literature on the blues epistemology that tends to center either the former or the latter. By tracing connections between literature on imaginaries, cultural studies, Black geographies, and blues epistemologies, I argue that Woods’s theoretical contributions are most accurately and productively understood as blues imaginaries. I conclude that remapping urban imaginaries through the lens of blues epistemologies reshapes our understanding of urban imaginaries by highlighting the voices of the marginalized, focuses our understanding of the blues by recentering praxis, and creates spaces for diverse groups of people with radical epistemologies to reimagine radical futures.