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In her songs “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ‘bout A Revolution”(1), Tracy Chapman evokes different spaces and temporalities within which feminist theory can be found. Given her descriptions of spaces within both songs, as well as the songs themselves existing as textual/discursive space, they generate what Dian Million refers to as “theory from life” (2014, p. 31). This idea will be used alongside the work of Katherine McKittrick on cartographies of resistance (2006), Simone Browne’s discussion of dark sousveillance (2015), and the work of Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles (2020) on how textual spaces can challenge surveillance. Together, these theories illuminate how Chapman’s subject matter is rooted in experiences of anti-Blackness, the legacies of chattel slavery and colonization, and the situated knowledge that comes from moving through the world as a Black woman. While Chapman’s use of acoustic guitar and folk rhythms tends to place these songs as sad or even romantic, they are also sites of anger, trauma, and survival. In this paper, I will argue that through her lyrical storytelling, Chapman describes the car and the welfare line as spaces where subjectivity is both generated, surveilled, and challenged. I begin by discussing how “Fast Car” and “Revolution” both describe and generate space. Next, I demonstrate how surveillance is used as a tool of racial control, which is reflected in both songs. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what Chapman teaches us (2) about feminist theory and how her music can help us move forward in the creation of an abolitionist world. 

Through her descriptions of the car and the queue, Chapman describes and participates in resistance through her storytelling. Dian Million argues that “stories, unlike data, contain the affective legacy of our experiences” (2014, p. 31). Both “Fast Car” and “Revolution” can be understood as reflective of this idea, as Chapman’s lyrics tell complex stories of intergenerational trauma and affective responses to violence. Additionally, how Chapman describes and challenges space is a response to the legacies of chattel slavery, colonization, and the continued white supremacist project. One of the central facets of white supremacy is the construction of spaces as inherently white, thereby erasing Blackness through spatial conquering. Katherine McKittrick describes this “whitening” of spaces as a “material, political, and social landscape that presumes—and fundamentally requires—that subaltern populations have no relationship to the production of space” (2006, p. 92); meaning, white supremacy and colonialism require that spaces be constituted as white, and that all subjectivities be constructed in relation to whiteness. The insidiousness of the white supremacist project requires that whiteness not only be upheld through geography, but through textual, discursive, and normative mechanisms. Sara Ahmed describes the function of whiteness as an institution, not only as temporal space but a discursive one (2014). Chapman’s music challenges white supremacist spatial dominance, while the two songs themselves also function as discursive space. Both “Fast Car” and “Revolution” are describing and becoming space(s) that challenge how space is produced. The car in “Fast Car” plays a role as a site of freedom, as well as a vehicle to generate space between the subject and the place that causes them pain, i.e. a space constructed by and through whiteness. In the first verse of the song, Chapman sings: “You got a fast car/I want a ticket to anywhere/Maybe we can make a deal/ Maybe together we can get somewhere/Any place is better” (1988).

She sets up the idea of this space as not related to a particular temporality: it can be anywhere, any place, as long as it is different from her current one. It is here that Chapman plants the seeds for imagining a future no longer tethered to the aforementioned legacies of white supremacy that construct space and subjectivity. Within the textual space of the song, she imagines somewhere in which both the subject and the listener can participate (this is also part of what makes the song so timeless), a space that demolishes borders and establishes something new. 

This question of border abolition is an important one. In order to challenge the white supremacist project, a major cartographic shift needs to happen. This is true not only insofar as colonization has been continued through globalization, but through domestic methods to delineate what spaces are for whom. “Fast Car” can be seen as challenging both these methods of bordering. Chapman continues: “Won’t have to drive too far/Just ‘cross the border and into the city/ You and I can both get jobs/And finally see what it means to be living” (1988). Evoking borders brings in another spatial reality of white, colonial narratives as described by McKittrick and further explained by Harsha Walia. Walia describes borders as an “ordering regime” that operates through “racial-capitalist accumulation and colonial relations” (2021, p. 2). The border in “Fast Car” is a reminder of the life or death choice that Chapman makes reference to when she sings “leave tonight or live and die this way” (1988). We know that attempts to cross borders are met with violence and punishment at the hands of the carceral, imperialist nation-state. While borders are most often considered transnationally, the conceptualization of local borders is significant here as well. “Fast Car” evokes images of crossing from life lived in shelters to a house in the suburbs (Chapman, 1988). This distinction reminds the listener of the delineation between socio-economic status and the connection of wealth to space. The image of the suburb as a white space is quite clear; most often constructed as clean, upper class, and lacking in crime and violence. Lower socio-economic spaces, whether they are the shelter or the low-income household that the subject of “Fast Car” wishes to leave, are narratively constructed as the result of Blackness. The reality is that the border between low-income spaces and high-income ones is both discursively and spatially generated by white supremacy. In opposition to this construction, Chapman is generating both a textual and imaginative space in which this is no longer the status quo. This narrative aligns with what McKittrick describes as the possibility of geographies that are not bound by borders (2015, p. 104). In her hopeful refrain, Chapman is saying that there is something beyond borders that promises a better way to live. The song is both describing space and being space. The space of the car as a vessel for a new life is imbued with desire, while also putting distance between the subject of the song and the initial space in which she finds herself (one marked by white supremacist hegemony). By evoking borders, Chapman ends up generating a space not beholden to the rigid temporalities of nation-state boundaries. 

As the subject of “Fast Car” is expressing joy at the promise of freedom and becoming, the song itself is shifting. While the other stanzas tell the story of pain, poverty, and trauma (Chapman, 1988), the chorus promises something different both lyrically and musically. The space of the song changes as her tone moves from level and deep to louder and brighter, and her guitar shifts from the light picking to strumming. Chapman’s voice belts:

So I remember we were driving, driving in your car/Speed so fast, I felt like I was drunk/City lights lay out before us/And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder/And I-I, had a feeling that I belonged/I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone (1988).

She evokes memory and embodiment in this stanza, asking the listener to feel what she felt. By situating the audience this way, they are sitting beside her, becoming part of the space that she describes. Moreover, the shift itself is representational of theory generation. The space in-between stanzas challenge the binary structures of joy/sadness. This shift evokes what Toni Morrison describes as a flooding of imagination (1988). The song itself is “emotional memory—what the skin and nerves remember” (1988, p. 199). By utilizing this in-between space, Chapman generates a theory of remembering that challenges emotional binaries and leaves room for a new affective response. Through Chapman’s reference to belonging, the car once again becomes both a vessel to and of her subjectivity. While she holds space for the complexities of poverty and trauma, she sings of the possibilities of love as a generative process of becoming. Leanna Betasamosake Simpson writes that the process of how is theoretical (2013, p. 19). The processes through which we challenge the status quo and attempt to generate new methods of being and relating is just as significant as the destination. In “Fast Car” Chapman does not describe the destination but the process of becoming, as well as the roots of her subjectivity in a space that was not built for her. Simpson’s idea that movement into becoming is theoretical is important here. She challenges the idea that creating is not a grounding for how we move through and experience the world (Simpson, 2017, p. 23). By generating an in-between space through her tonal shift, mobilizing an imaginative affect, and beginning the process of future building, Chapman demonstrates the how. “Fast Car” illustrates the power of creativity and memory to point us in new directions. 

Now that I have demonstrated the use of space to challenge temporality in “Fast Car,” I will turn to “Revolution” as a space for challenging sites that are temporally fixed and surveilled. The song centres around the queue as a temporal space and whispers as discursive space. Chapman sings: “While they’re standing in the welfare lines/Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation/Wasting time in the unemployment lines/Sitting around waiting for a promotion” (1988).

Understood as an extension of the nation-state, the welfare line is another ordering regime through which racial subjugation is maintained. The line is evoked as a method of control and construction of docile subjects, something that can be traced back to the positioning of bodies through chattel slavery (McKittrick, 2006; Browne, 2015). Under white supremacy, Blackness is relegated to the margins and positioned as in need of salvation by whiteness. Chapman’s reference to The Salvation Army generates an image that easily comes to the mind of the listener, as well as a space that can be seen as an extension of white supremacist endeavours to colonize through religion and so-called aid. This can be further unpacked through McKittrick’s description of Blackness being landscaped out of sight (2006, p. 96). McKittrick argues that nations reproduce Black invisibility through the absorption of Blackness into the nation-state, while maintaining Blackness as “Other” (2006, p. 97). We can take Chapman’s description of both the welfare line and the unemployment line to be reflective of this: The Other can exist, but only when frozen in a time and place that reflects the hegemony of whiteness. Simone Browne describes the slave ship as a site of panopticism in which Black prisoners were relegated to inhumanely tight quarters, designed to encapsulate as many bodies as possible (2015, p. 47). Her conception can be extended to the welfare line as a space in which marginalized communities are forced into the queue. This often creates uncomfortable conditions, but becomes a requirement for receiving a state-rationed livelihood under the capitalist system integral to white supremacy. Such a queue is further demonstrative of the legacies of chattel slavery and the occupation of land under colonization. The hypocrisy of such imagery is glaring. The white supremacist project stole and occupied land, captured and enslaved bodies, in order to build what it deemed to be a better society; the result is late-stage capitalism, wealth discrepancies, and the very queue that Chapman illustrates. “Revolution” demonstrates how the white supremacist project was designed to map Black and brown bodies out of sight, and continues to do so through contemporary social services. The slave ship and the coffle may be things of the past, but their legacies—by design—are very much present.  

As spaces are constructed to marginalize bodies, surveillance inevitably follows. Browne argues that surveillance is an inherently racialized project (2015, p. 8). She describes racializing surveillance as “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a power to define what is in or out of place” (2015, p. 16). We can see the racializing surveillance of Blackness reflected in both of Chapman’s songs through descriptions poverty and welfare. As Robyn Maynard demonstrates, Black women are surveilled and policed through welfare structures (2017, 135). Welfare is explicitly named in “Revolution”, but “Fast Car” also touches on the socio-economic realities of poverty. The song describes dropping out of school, living in shelters, and struggling to make enough money in minimum wage jobs. Together these songs paint a picture of how one comes to be positioned within these neoliberal institutions. Similarly, as “Fast Car” describes flying away, “Revolution” describes mobilizing the welfare and unemployment line as a site of resistance. A space intended to generate docile bodies is manipulated to be a site of community building and revolution. While situated in a fixed space and time, the participants in the welfare line are encouraged to whisper to one another. The close proximity created by this neoliberal structure becomes the very method by which to resist it. In both the opening lyrics and the chorus of the song, Chapman is generating a space of resistance within her music. The lyrics begin: “Don’t you know/They’re talking about a revolution?/It sounds like a whisper/Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share/Poor people gonna rise up/And take what’s theirs” (1988). She reminds the listener what is at stake and what resistance can look like: whispers, talking, and reclaiming. Her songs are a site of what Browne calls “dark sousveillance” (2015, p. 21), a starting point from which to both critique racialized surveillance and begin to imagine processes of freedom (2015, p. 21). In “Revolution”, Chapman is both critiquing surveillance and offering a method of resisting through whispers. She describes a simple method of communication between those who are being subjugated and demonstrates the power of collective thinking. The idea of poor people rising up is a dangerous one for the capitalist, neoliberal nation-state, and by demonstrating the power of the collective in the spaces designed to subjugate them, “Revolution” is dark sousveillance in action.

This method of counter-surveillance is seen contemporarily through the sharing of images and hashtags in reaction to police violence. In #HashtagActivisim, Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles argue that while social media has been used to surveil Black communities it has also been mobilized to hold white supremacist forces accountable (2020, p. 131). The authors describe specific instances in which Twitter has been used to link evidence of police violence from other platforms (2020, p. 143). This method of resurfacing images is reflective of Browne’s sousveillance because it reminds the forces in question (the police) that they are being seen and that their actions do not go unnoticed. It also brings into textual, discursive space the life and death realities of white supremacy. Similarly, “Fast Car” makes several references to how life is often constituted by poverty and trauma, reminding the listener that both physical and social death are inevitable for some. Chapman’s reference to buying a house in the suburbs demonstrates the insidiousness of the neoliberal, capitalist state in which suburbs are gatekept as spaces built by and for the maintenance of whiteness. In the middle of the song she sings “leave tonight or live and die this way” (1988). It is also the final lyric of the song. This choice demonstrates the visceral experience of living as Black woman under a white supremacist state, purposely kept from achieving a life outside of spaces designated for Blackness. Mobilizing the same discursive space-making that #HashtagActivism describes, Chapman’s songs function as a counter-surveillance to punitive systems such as those who control welfare and borders. She brings into view the possibilities of using physical spaces for resistance, as well as the value in generating discursive spaces toward the same end.

In Dark Matters, Simone Browne makes reference to Frantz Fanon’s views on themes of escape in blues music. She describes the way in which song was used as counter-surveillance to racial segregation (2015, p. 5). These affective and emotional legacies of resistance through song are integral to an understanding of these songs as both describing and being space, and as methods of counter-surveillance. The epistemological nature of dark sousveillance (Browne, 2015) is reflected in Chapman’s use of storytelling as a method of resistance. As she sings about whispers, she is producing a similar action through soft folk rhythms. The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” refers to their early origins as a space to share texts, ideas, and experiences (1995). The spaces in which subjectivity is formed and challenged is not only through geographic space but through the power of collectivity. Throughout “Revolution,” Chapman shifts from the objective “they” (3) to the personal “I.” She demonstrates to the listener that she is reflecting her own experiences as a Black woman, as well as a person whose position is tied to a community. What Chapman has done through her music is maintain the affective legacies of these roots, as well as the history of music, poetry and art as dark sousveillance (Browne, 2015, p. 5). Through “Fast Car” and “Revolution,” Chapman generates theory from situated knowledge of anti-Blackness and the affective responses to both the legacy and continuation of the white supremacist project. Chapman demonstrates what Dian Million calls “theory from life” (2014), in which praxis is integral to the construction of theory. While she does not name theory in her music, she describes practices of survival and revolution that reflect dark sousveillance, Black feminist thought, and abolition. 

In “Fast Car” Chapman sings “maybe we’ll make something” (1988). It is a lyric that comes to mind when I read We Do This ‘Till We Free Us, as Mariame Kaba asks her reader to remember that something better is possible. She emphasizes the importance of future building as part of an abolitionist project (2021). Tracy Chapman’s music is an example of what the building blocks of that future can look like. When taken in stride with the work of McKittrick and Browne, this lyric posits that we can make spaces, places, and self. At the same time, it is a reminder that we are made by spaces. Subjectivity is a relational project, and oftentimes we do not choose the circumstances of that relationality. To live in the current white supremacist world is to be indoctrinated into cisheteropartiarchy and neoliberal ideologies; a world in which the institution of whiteness monopolizes space-making. Chapman’s music both depicts space and becomes discursive space from which to challenge this hegemony. “Fast Car” illustrates the car as a space that is not temporally situated but can push through borders that are. “Revolution” describes the welfare line (and other queues) as spaces which are temporally fixed, but can be manipulated toward resistance. If there must be a line, let it be filled with whispers of resistance. Chapman’s lyrics demonstrate how these spaces do not have to be the only ones in which our personhood is entrenched. When she says “maybe we’ll make something,” she is asking us to do just that. What can we make when space is not solely constructed by whiteness? What geographical markings can be overcome by challenging the idea of borders as things to be crossed? What happens when we make something rooted in our relationality as a lived, creative experience? While these questions are outside the scope of this paper, they generate important reflections for how we engage with feminist theory and non-academic sites of theory production moving forward. 

Throughout this paper, I have demonstrated the power of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution” as spaces for feminist theory production and reflections of praxis through storytelling. The methods by which spaces are constructed are important for feminist theory and opposition to the white supremacist project. What Tracy Chapman’s music does is demonstrate how praxis and situated knowledge reflect these ideas in feminist theory even before they come to be named. The power of felt knowledge is an awesome one. In order to challenge contemporary borders, surveillance methods, and racist cartographies, feminism must be committed to an anti-capitalist, anti-racist model that is rooted in the work of Black feminist thought and praxis. Both the songs I have discussed here tell stories of situated knowledge and space.  In “Fast Car”, Chapman illustrates the car as a space that is not tied to any specific temporality, but can transcend time and space to find a new world. Throughout “Revolution”, she demonstrates that even temporally situated spaces like the welfare line can be challenged by something as delicate as a whisper. It is not through participation with and reform of existing structures that freedom can be produced; but if we must participate, the proximity generated by those structures can allow us to divulge our revolutionary ideas to one another. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson argues that the act of living is creative and it is through this creativity that we both experience and influence the world (2017, p. 23). By both describing and generating space, Chapman reflects the possibilities of the life that creativity can build. She demonstrates how situated knowledge is rooted in the praxis of theory before we have the words to describe it; to live is to theorize. By living in community, we theorize together, building new subjectivities and realities for ourselves. Chapman sings “maybe we can make a deal, maybe together we can get somewhere” (1988). It is only together that we can get somewhere, anywhere, better.

(1)  For the sake of brevity, this song will be referred to as “Revolution” throughout this paper. (2)  While I don’t enjoy making general “we” or “us” claims, for the purposes of this paper I am referring to those who have an interest in feminist theory and anti-racism. (3) I understand that “they” is not an inherently objective term. It can also be deeply personal. Within the context of the song, however, Chapman shifts from speaking generally to speaking about herself.

Bibliography

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Chapman, T. (1988). Fast Car [Song]. On Tracy Chapman [Album]. Elektra. 

Chapman, T. (1988). Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution [Song]. On Tracy Chapman [Album]. Elektra.

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