Viola Clune
We, The Unseen: A Note on Genre and the Unseen
In the 12th track of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter—2025’s Grammy-winning Album of the Year—Linda Martell quips “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” The 84-year-old Black female country star continues “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” This introduction to “Spaghetti”—a song in which Beyonce raps “I ain’t no regular singer, so come get everythin’ you came for,” Black country singer Shaboozey is featured, and the title itself, a reference to “spaghetti westerns,” alludes to ideas surrounding origins, authenticity, and what constitutes a true American art form—could be viewed as a preemptive response to the backlash the album would go on to face, with detractors outraged by Beyonce’s incursion on the country music space, deriding her as inauthentic and not real country. Beyond this purpose, though, Martell’s introduction also invokes a much bigger story, entailing the complex relationship between the American music industry and race.
While taken for granted as an objective demarcator between different types of music–or film and writing–the history of genre in the United States is fraught. The creation of the “race records” genre in the 1920s to record, disseminate, and sell the sounds of Black musicians–ranging from the blues, to jazz, to gospel—obscured the diversity of the African American musical tradition, placing it under one large, marketable umbrella. Critics like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes worried that the creation of “race records” would subject Black musical forms to the homogenization, inauthenticity, and appropriation of white dominant culture. By the 1940s, the “race records” sector of popular recording labels like Columbia and Paramount was rebranded and a new genre, “Rhythm and Blues” or R&B, was created.
Historically, musical genres have served to constrict rather than to liberate. Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, then, simultaneously represents an exploration of genre’s history as a tool to obscure the origins of various American musical traditions, dilute their authenticity, and exclude, appropriate, exploit, as well as an attempt to wrangle free of genre’s confines.
While the genres of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry that we use to define and differentiate our writing may not have such fraught histories as that of American musical genres, their objectivity can be refuted and their usefulness questioned. If we recognize the ways that genre has served as a border and a boundary, then we may ask, in our use of genre, what and who is left behind? And in an issue where our writers’ artistic and moral imperative was to seek out and bring into the light “the unseen,” did our seemingly neutral methods of organization make that task harder?
In thinking about this themed issue of Potomac Review, I tried to understand “the unseen” first as a noun, then an adjective, and finally as a verb. Did “the unseen” refer to a particular group that was static and unchanging in its unseen quality—that quality being its defining characteristic? Or was it a state of being, a descriptor, that could describe anyone or anything at a particular moment in time? Or was it more useful to think of “the unseen” as an action? To ‘unsee’ became, in my formulation, a verb that had everything to do with power. Who has the power to ‘unsee’ someone—and beyond unseeing a person, who has the power to unsee, obscure, and render invisible, and therefore obsolete, an entire truth, reality, facet of the human experience? Genre, in this formulation, is a tool of power, with the capacity to disappear whatever falls beyond the boundaries it draws. Yet, it is the work of the artist, the writer, to see, to recover the unseen. Seeing, then, becomes a sort of politic.
As I work on this issue of Potomac Review, I am also editing zines composed of the writing and creative work of incarcerated individuals. The state of incarceration is by its very nature “unseen,” and there are forces much more powerful than genre that make this unseeing not only possible but necessary. The forthcoming zine will be entitled “Black Box,” its theme revolving around the mysteries, invisibilities, and illogics of the prison system both to the outside world and its prisoners alike. As we select and edit the pieces that will be included, genre is an obsolete concept. Borders are counter-productive when the task is one of opening, unearthing, and rendering visible what was once invisible. And after all, everything is political writing when your life is political. Everything is fiction when your experience is unrecognizable to ‘real life.’ And everything is poetry, if one has eyes to see.
While I had come to understand “unseeing” as an action made by, and for power, I had failed to recognize how “unseeing” could also be chosen by the subject and enacted as a tool of resistance. To render oneself unseen, beyond the boundaries of genre and other fraught classifications, could be an act of fugitivity, a creation of a new ethic where to be unseen is to be safe, protected, and ready to be found only by those in that same space of ‘beyond.’ So while I first thought it noble for the writer to enact a politic of ‘seeing,’ such an act necessarily comes from a vantage point of above, placing the writer in the position of the explorer, the conqueror, the divine. It is perhaps a more worthy pursuit to render oneself unseen and subject alike—to place oneself in the margins, in the space beyond definition and categorization, a space of fugitivity, and upon arrival, to, finally, after all, open one’s eyes and see.
