The African Diaspora

A Musical Perspective

Ingrid Monson, Ingrid Monson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317777250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music. Featured here are jazz, wassoulou music, and popular and traditional musics of the Caribbean and Africa, framed with attention to the reciprocal relationships of the local and the global.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Ingrid Monson

To speak of diaspora evokes many interrelated ideas: dispersion, exile, ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization among them. African in front of the term adds the concept of race and racism, conjuring debates about Pan-Africanism, black nationalism, essentialism, and hybridity, as well as invoking issues of history, modernity, and cultural memory. If the Jewish diaspora was the quintessential example of diaspora before the 1960s (Tölölyan 1996), the African diaspora has surely become the paradigmatic case for the closing years of the twentieth century. If the fact of dispersion, exile, and migration has been the traditional point of departure for defining diaspora (Tölölyan 1996), then the continuing experience of racial oppression has been crucial in the emergence of the transnational identities and ideologies of the African diaspora.

This volume offers ten essays, organized in three parts, exploring the relationship of music to the emergence of African diasporic sensibilities in the twentieth century. The first part, Traveling Music and Musicians, explores the globalization of African diasporic musics with particular attention to exchanges between African America, Europe, and the Black Atlantic. Beyond Tradition or Modernity, the second part of the volume, explores the redefinition of tradition and modernity through music in contemporary Africa, with particular emphasis on gender, urban popular theater, and the selling of "traditional experience" on the international market. The third part, Contradictory Moments, explores aspects of particular musics that do not conform to idealized notions of African diasporic music as fully resistant to Western hegemony and a source of unambiguous black cultural pride. The aims of the volume are to address why music claims such pride of place in the African diasporic imaginary and to provide particular case studies of the interweaving of the local and global in the lives of musicians and their audiences.

Musical-Centrism?

Music, more than any other cultural discourse, has been taken as the ultimate embodiment of African and African diasporic cultural values and as prima facie evidence of deep cultural connections among all peoples of African descent. One reason for this perception of the centrality of music surely lies in its ability to coordinate several culturally valued modes of expression, including song, verbal recitation, dance, religious worship, drama, and visual display. The participatory, egalitarian, and spiritual qualities of African diasporic musics have frequently been idealized in the ethnomusicological literature (Chernoff 1979; Keil 1995), with scant attention to intracultural power stratifications and processes of contestation. In contemporary African diasporic cultural sensibilities, music is often a place where black trumps white, providing a sweet sense of cultural triumph, a vision of black power in its cultural, moral, ethical, and embodied dimensions. To the extent that the recognized achievements of black people are confined to music, however, this very point of cultural pride also serves to fuel stereotypical notions of the essential black subject, whose "natural" intuitive, emotional, and rhythmic gifts define her or his possibilities.

As attractive as the idea that music holds a special place in the cultural definition of the African diaspora may be, in other words, the claim is not without its problems and complications. Just as racism, slavery, and colonialism were crucial to the construction of the idea of Africa (Mudimbe 1988), and the very idea of blackness (with its simplifying synthesis of many African ethnicities) was forged in a dialectic with white supremacy, so the idea of a transnational black music has been synthesized in opposition to racial subjugation. The idea of a unified black musical ethos, consequently, is partially dependent on the continuing experience of racism. The forging of a collective identity through opposition to a common enemy contributes, in turn, to the ease with which the complexities of the African diaspora dissolve into a binary opposition between black and white. As Faye Harrison (1998: 617) has noted: "This construct is difficult to uproot, even in the current context of an increasingly multicolored and multicultural society in which racial formation assumes a multiplicity of forms, many of which vigorously contest the hegemonic constructs of whiteness and blackness." The continuing structural quality of racism, with its enduring set of economic, political, ideological, and color hierarchies that place black on the bottom, is the ultimate context reinforcing this tendency to binarism.

Nevertheless, claims for an idealized "Africanness" articulated and transmitted through music, often a subtext of the literature on the African diaspora, are sometimes disquietingly similar to twentieth-century nationalist assertions of an opposite political valence. Pamela Potter's (Potter 1998) fascinating study of how a German sense of musical superiority was used to uphold ideologies of racial superiority in the Third Reich, for example, reveals that claims for music's embodiment of the collective character of a people cannot be evaluated independent of the political and historical use to which such claims are put. In an African diasporic literature that frequently celebrates musicality, spirituality, and emotional depth as obviously counterhegemonic, it is important to remember that German National Socialists of the early twentieth century also claimed to be an especially musical people, given to passionate depth and spiritual transcendence through art (Potter 1998: 200-234). This is not to suggest that African diasporic assertions of the centrality of music are equivalent to those of the National Socialists, but to underscore the importance of placing the emotional and spiritual dimensions of music within the context of concrete historical and social practice.

Establishing the particular network of the linkages made between music, cultural identities, and globalizing economic, historical, and political forces thus is crucial to the larger project of analyzing African diasporic musical sensibilities in the twentieth century. The essays in this volume generally reject the idea of a static African essence in favor of a more continuously redefined and negotiated sense of cultural authenticity that emerges from generation to generation in response to larger geopolitical forces.

Gilroy’s Legacy

Since Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993) has been critical in defining both the cultural studies debate about the African diaspora and arguing for the centrality of music in the construction and maintenance of contemporary transnational identities, a review of his principal arguments is in order. As the title suggests, Gilroy is interested not simply in the inter-change between Africa and the New World—a binary relationship between those exiled and the "homeland." Rather, Gilroy addresses the multiplicity of cultural flows between and among the Caribbean, Britain, the African continent, and North America. Ships, chosen for their symbolic ability to evoke the middle passage, provide his visual image for the transatlantic interaction, but it is music to which he returns to make his case again and again.

Gilroy identifies three principal positions regarding the relationship between race and cultural meaning: (1) ethnic absolutism, (2) anti-essentialism (or pluralism), and (3) anti-antiessentialism. Positions on black music, he believes, are divided between those "who see the music as the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness and those who would dispute the existence of any such unifying, organic phenomenon" (100). Ethnic absolutism is the term he uses to describe the first position, while the second view (antiessentialism) implies a social constructionist and ideological view of race. The problem with the antiessentialist position, in Gilroy's view, is that it is often "insufficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically racialised forms of power and subordination" (32). For Gilroy this is tantamount to "forsaking the mass of black people who continue to comprehend their lived particularity through what it does to them" (101). The third position, "anti-antiessentialism," is the least discussed, but is centrally important. Here Gilroy invokes Foucault's notion of the "technology of power" to suggest that racialized subjectivity be seen "as the product of social practices that supposedly derive from it" (102). Here Gilroy holds to a social constructionist view of race, but takes exception to the idea that racial identity is simply an ideological effect. A deeply real difference emerges, he argues, as a product of racialized power exercised over black people. Since Gilroy's viewpoint is often confused with the second notion of antiessentialism, this point deserves emphasis. For Gilroy, despite his frontal assault on essentialism, race is not an imagined community, something that can be infinitely deconstructed so as to neutralize the importance of black power and experience, but a condition produced through coping with the historical legacy and contemporary reality of what Cornel West calls "white supremacist abuses." If West defines blackness as minimally involving being subject to these assaults and "being part of a rich culture and community that has struggled against such abuse" (1998: 155), for Gilroy (and many other commentators on the African diaspora) the centrality of black music emerges from the fact that "the self-identity, political culture, and grounded aesthetics that distinguish black communities have often been constructed through their music" (1993: 102).

Gilroy's book is refreshing, in part, because he addresses intradiasporic stratifications of power, especially of the apparent African American dominance in black diasporic culture in Britain. His charge of "ethnic absolutism" is most usually directed at African American ideological leaders, who, from Gilroy's vantage point, forsake the global in claiming elements of diasporic cultures as signs of a specifically African American cultural authenticity. The Caribbean antecedents of hip hop, transported to New York from Jamaica, which frequently go unacknowledged, are a particular sore point for Gilroy, who asks "what is it about black America's writing elite which means that they need to claim this diasporic cultural form in such an assertively nationalist way?" (1993: 34). Jacqueline Brown, who has documented the role of African American culture on black Liverpool and its specifically gendered effects, suggests that a central question that must be asked is "how particular black communities outside of the United States are affected by the global dominance of American culture." When, she wonders does the "unrelenting presence of black America actually become oppressive, even as it inspires?" (1998: 297).

The first part of this volume addresses many of the questions posed by Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993)—issues of identity, ritual, aesthetics, and globalization. Proceeding from Gilroy's call for greater attention to the "rituals of performance," Travis Jackson's "Jazz Performance As Ritual" argues that jazz performance is driven by both an encompassing blues aesthetic and a sense of performance as a sacred ritual of transcendence. Drawing much from the work of Albert Murray (1970, 1976) and the community of contemporary jazz musicians with whom he conducted ethnographic research, Jackson develops a nonessentialized concept of blues aesthetic and demonstrates its implementation in performance. For Jackson, the notion of a blues aesthetic implies both a shared set of normative and evaluative criteria and Steven Feld's (Feld 1994) notion of an "iconicity of style"—where music becomes a "cross-modal homology" linking many different modes of cultural expression, such that its metaphoric power becomes "feelingfully synonymous" from one cultural domain to another. Indeed, music's ability to link several expressive modalities—including language (lyrics or recitation), dance, and visual display (clothing and personal style), as well as present idealized ethical and social sensibilities—seems central to its symbolic power across diasporic settings. The coordinating function of sound in this expressive integration should be especially noted.

The ethical and spiritual aspects of jazz performance are also central to Jackson's argument. If improvisation requires several ingredients, including an individual voice, the ability to play with multiple musical parameters during performance, and an understanding of the cultural foundations of the music, then the ultimate ethical goal of the music as expressed by musicians is to take the music to the "next level." This includes the transcendence of self and the establishment of a seemingly effortless musical flow, simultaneously hitting a musical and spiritual groove. This transcendence, Jackson argues, is not about escape but deep involvement in an art form that metaphorically encodes deep cultural values and "strategies for survival." In Jackson's view, the linkages between jazz and other musics of the African diaspora are ultimately to be found in musical performance, which provides a means of integrating these local cultural values with strategies for coping with racism that are shared widely across the African diaspora.

In "Communities of Style" Veit Erlmann follows several versions of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" through recordings made at various diasporic locations. This classic of South African Zulu migrant workers' music was composed by Solomon Linda and recorded under the title of "Mbube" in 1939. Erlmann is interested in the musical alterations made as the song was revised and reinterpreted by a succession of groups including the Weavers in 1952, the Tokens in 1961 (both American groups), and a collaboration between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Mint Juleps (an Anglo-African group) in 1990 on Spike Lee's compilation album Do It A Cappella. At stake here is the construction of black diasporic identities through music, a process Erlmann calls "endotropic performance." The term emphasizes the intraracial construction of identity through a shared experience of style. These diasporic identities have emerged under the increasingly globalized and mediatized conditions of social life since the late nineteenth century. This is a "strange situation in which a person's understanding of himself or herself and their sense of the social world no longer coincide with the place in which they take place." Like Gilroy (1993: 76), Erlmann views music as "essentially phatic"¹—that is, not about meaning or representation but about the process of communication itself. Critically assessing applications of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s (1988) concept of Signifyin(g) to musical contexts, Erlmann proposes to extend a specific aspect of Signifying)—that which focuses on repetition as a means of foregrounding the signifier itself.

At first Erlmann's denial that music is about "meaning" may confuse readers familiar with the broader ethnomusicological literature on music and meaning (see, e.g., Feld 1981, 1984). Erlmann does not deny that musical sound has indexical—that is, relational—meaning (and thus plays a role in the construction of globalized cultural identities) but wishes to emphasize that black diasporic musics are less about communicating a racial signified (a denotational meaning) than a meta-communicative play of signifiers that is crucial to producing a "shared experience of style." Reaching a position similar to Gilroy's anti-antiessentialism, Erlmann emphasizes the endless process of redefining and reinventing identities in a globalized world characterized by "inescapable relatedness." In the end, "even though communities may seek to establish themselves around markers of racial identity, such coalescence of sound and society is never stable."

Traveling

Diaspora studies have historically emphasized the exile and migration from a homeland and the longing for return. Jacqueline Brown (1998: 293) credits Gilroy with developing a framework for diasporic analysis in which "all roads do not point to Africa," a perspective she argues is important in analyzing the relationship of Britain's black communities to the broader locales of a transnational African diaspora, especially African America and the Caribbean. Brown's discussion of the pull of African America in Britain, especially its music and its civil rights and black power movements, emphasizes the importance of African American travel to Europe as a source of diasporic crossfertilization. The implications of musicians as travelers for issues of globalization have not been sufficiently analyzed.

The expansion of the recording and broadcasting industries in the twentieth century has not only allowed musical performances to be circulated in virtual form but has also created demand for live performances in widely dispersed locations. For this reason, musicians' lives have been even less tied to place than other citizens of globalized modernity. From the 1930s to the 1950s, travel for jazz musicians often took the form of extended tours of one-nighters, and African American musicians traveled most of all, since Jim Crow shut them out of more stable engagements (of a week or longer) (DeVeaux 1997: 236-60). Many jazz bands, including Duke Ellington's and Count Basie'S, spent far more time on the road than in any "home" location. Since the late nineteenth century international travel for top African American musicians has been commonplace, and their early destinations included not only Europe but also South Africa (Erlmann 1991). Europe remains an important travel destination for American jazz musicians, although other locations, especially Japan and Hong Kong, have emerged in the past twenty years.

Jerome Harris's essay, "Jazz on the Global Stage," provides an insider's analysis of the globalization of jazz, based on his twenty years of professional involvement as a guitarist and bassist and on research he conducted with promoters, jour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• PART I TRAVELING MUSIC AND MUSICIANS
• PART II BEYOND TRADITION OR MODERNITY
• PART III CONTRADICTORY MOMENTS
• Contributors
• Index