ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of “soul” in Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul (Or . . . When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021) and in several other black concert/performance films as an analytic with particular ontological force. Tracing the substance of “soul’ across visual, affective, and spiritual registers, I am interested in what soul looks like, sounds like, and feels like and how it circulates beyond the sonic/musical sphere. I trace important frameworks which expanded the discourses around soul and post-soul in the work of Mark Anthony Neal and Nelson George, and more recently in the work of Emily Lordi. I also locate Summer of Soul’s depiction of a black music festival in Harlem as a kind of connective tissue conjoining two sub-genres of black concert/performance documentary films. The first of these categories includes ‘secular’ concert films like Soul to Soul (Denis Sanders 1971) and Wattstax (Mel Stuart 1973) and the second focuses on black religious music performance as seen in Say Amen, Somebody (George Nierenberg 1982) and Amazing Grace (Alan Elliot and Sydney Pollack 2018). Exploring Summer of Soul through this lens and alongside other seminal documentary films illuminates the powerful connection between black performative and cinematic histories and black spiritual life.
