feeling
fUnking
Funk as Philosophy
As the fugitive in the black south surrenders their boundaries between the physical and spiritual realms [rule 1 of absconding in the black south], funk acts as a locomotive force, driving the fugitive to the hidden and unmappable.
funk allows us to understand black [southern] existence, creative production, and the imaginary outside of what it means to be human and alive in the [black south, a colony of the u.s.] west.[1]
Jitterbugging in a Juke Joint on Saturday Afternoon (Clarksdale, MS) by Marion Post Wolcott, 1939.
Southern Route 33, Tamara Reynolds
the place of funk
the jook (juke) joint, the "pleasure house" is the most important place in America [according to Zora Neale Hurston's theorization]. its "shoddy, smelly confines" birth "the true Negro style" jooking. to jook is to gain sensation. it is to gain pleasure. [2]
"funk exists as a philosphohy that usurps the divide between eros (life) and thanatos (death) since it is sustained by otherly human and nonhuman bleiefs in the supernatural, afterlife, and reanimation." -- L.H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic
![Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday evening outside Clarksdale, MS November 1939 (Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [LC-USF34- 052594-D])](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a43ff57ccc5c504cd257d41/1595488361549-I9842N2X504N35YX3MNI/juke+joint2.jpg)
Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday evening outside Clarksdale, MS November 1939 (Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [LC-USF34- 052594-D])