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Charles L. Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College. His first book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, was released in 2015 by the University North Carolina Press. He has spoken and published widely on race, music, and American History. He is also a musician and songwriter.

Roundtable: Soul Politics in the 21st Century
Since its emergence, soul has remained central to the musical manifestations of Black politics. In its early heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, it served as both symbol and mechanism of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and structured accompanying discussions of class, gender, region and sexuality. Since then, soul has held a treasured yet debated place in the longer history of Black creative genius and cultural resistance. It remains a powerful demonstration of the larger transformations that it accompanied and provoked, but also sometimes symbolizes a supposed degeneracy and downfall (with cries of “who stole the soul?”) that occurred in subsequent decades. Fifty years after its emergence, it seems an opportune moment to assess soul music—of both past and present—in the cultural politics of our tempestuous current moment. 

In this roundtable, panelists will offer thoughts on this key and complex question, considering the multivalent, shifting and contested role of soul music and its attendant symbolism in a contemporary context. How do soul legacies inform (and also perhaps distort) understandings of our contemporary moment? How do contemporary soul (or soul-influenced) artists and audiences reimagine, remix or resist these legacies? Is the declaration of “soul” by contemporary artists like D'Angelo, Anthony Hamilton, or Jazmine Sullivan an attempt to recover a previous era or is it part of an unbroken continuum? Conversely, what is the symbolic status and meaning of Stevie Wonder’s recent Songs in the Key of Life tour or Aretha Franklin’s performance of "Natural Woman" at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors? Are these throwbacks, reminders, something new, or something else? What are the liberating possibilities of soul in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and “post-hip-hop” sonic experimentation? What are its limitations? Considering a variety of expressions and experiences, the participants will explore these and other topics in both contemporary and historical perspective.