This month's departmental spotlight by Endria Richardson features graduating senior and Clark Scholar Amber Griffin-Royal.
Tell me about your work. What do you care about in the world, and how did you come to care about it?
I’m a third-generation Oakland native and an award-winning DJ/performing artist, and I often find myself reminiscing with friends and family about how Oakland used to sound—and dreaming about what the future might hold. DJing has become my way of making sense of what’s happening to my city. It gives me an outlet for my angst and a tool that can be used to tap into fulljoy, storytelling, world-building, and imagining alternative realities. In an effort to bring my lived experience as an Oakland-born-and-bred artist into the work, Exploring the Spatio-Temporality of Oakland’s Black Soundscape, my honors thesis, is deeply personal. It is both a historical record and a reckoning—a way of honoring the sounds that once inspired feelings of home and belonging while also tracing the sonic shifts that have disconnected Oakland from its past and ushered in unfamiliar soundscapes of an uncertain future. My work seeks to document and decode Oakland’s Black soundscape so that even an untrained ear can pick up on the subtle—and the obvious—ways Blackness continues to vibrate throughout Oakland, AKA The Town, even when our physical presence isn’t always visible or felt in the landscape. I care deeply about freedom, joy, and the transformative power of telling one’s own story—and this project allows me a portal to delight in all three.
Who do you love? Writers, thinkers, artists, parents, friends—who has inspired you to think and write the way that you do?
My heart is so full of love because I am so loved by my family, friends, and community and surrounded by so many badass womxn of color who inspire me to no end. They remind me daily of the power of showing up fully, loving loudly, and creating boldly. Intellectually, I’m fueled by the brilliance of writers like Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, whose work dares to imagine liberation through Black feminist thought and poetics. While artists like Josephine Baker, Solange Knowles, Ka’Ra Kersey, Coco Machete, and my DJ parents, Black and Homofongo, teach me about the power of musica, performance, aesthetics, and world-building as forms of resistance and care. And academically, I couldn’t be more blessed and in deep gratitude to be guided on this wild journey of higher education by powerful Black women like Dr. Alison Richardson, who has been a true research fairy godmother to me, and Dr. Jones, whose care as my honors thesis advisor helps me to affirm my work even when I’m unsure and feel lost in the sauce of research. I’m also endlessly thankful for the entire 6th floor of the Social Sciences building. I’m forever inspired by all the rigorous work and radical joy that is always on full display. To the VèVè A. Clark Institute and my femtor Zana, who has been a dope thought partner throughout my research process, helping me expand my ideas in ways that bring both clarity and levity to my work, much love. Lastly, and most importantly, shout out to my mommy, who continues to teach me how to move through the world with grace and grit, to my sisters Kristin and Migelle, who ground me and reflect the best parts of myself back to me, and to my homegirls who hold me down and accountable in every season. I love you ladies to the moon and back! —I write and think the way I do because of y’all!
What is your writing process?
I aim to tell a layered story about sound through the medium of literature, and because my work is so sound-rich, my writing process starts with deep listening. When re-listening to my field recordings, I really dial in—focusing on atmospheric sounds like cars, passing conversations, birds, and the various music being slapped at any given moment. I try to describe, as vividly as possible, the qualities of those sounds: their tone, cadence, volume—even the absence of sound and how that silence resonates and vibrates within the spaces I’ve studied. I want the reader to be able to imaginatively hear what Oakland’s Black soundscape sounds like through the pages of my work, even if they’ve never been or paid it much attention. So getting immersed in my recordings and taking detailed notes is essential. The next step is taking the messy, raw, and sometimes illegible fragments of sound, data, and literature and orchestrating them into something like a symphony. This is currently part of the process I’m in, and it has been hella challenging. I haven’t found the perfect alchemy for getting into this phases writing groove yet, but imagining I’m working on a DJ set for a big Oakland community party has been helpful and a fun exercise. Bringing in my lived experience as a DJ in this academic space is allowing me to think through which themes of Oakland’s Black Soundscape I want to amplify, which “bars” from the authors I’m in conversation with fit best and where, and how to start mixing it all together without judgment. Leaving room for adjustments—and allowing myself to just get things out of my head and onto the page—has been key.
What are you reading (or watching, or listening to) lately?
Amaarae and Rema are two artists who are in heavy rotation in my headphones because of how hypnotic their sound is. When I listen to them, I transport to a place that’s sultry, confident, and dripping with style and taste. I imagine myself as the ultimate boss babe when I listen to them. Their musical production is so dynamic, filled with celestial synths, deep percussive rhythms, and shimmering layered vocals that feel like they were beamed in from another dimension. As a dreamy Pisces, their musica perfectly balances between digital fantasy and ancestral memory. Their soundscapes pulse with energy and vybz, blending traditional African rhythms with electronic textures that make the future feel tangible, radiant, and unapologetically Black!