Student Blog Post: "Performance of Absence/Absent Performance in Fine Clothes to the Jew," by Hannah Lewis

            Before I get into my responses to the reading, I want to briefly say that, for the second week in a row, I left the Edwards reading for last and, after reading it, had to go back and revise my initial readings of the other texts, particularly Johnson's preface. The first time I read it, I very much sensed a privileging of the literary and even, perhaps, the white. In addition to the assigned readings, at Imani's suggestion, I also read Hughes's “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which Hughes describes a troubling tendency among his peers, writing, “[A] young Negro poet said to me once, 'I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,'  meaning, I believe, 'I want to write like a white poet' […] this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness.”

            When Johnson says things like “A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged […] the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced,” and repeatedly disparages the accomplishments of the poets he's including in his collection, I certainly see him privileging the literary and the white/Western, even as he exalts the musical quality of dialect writing. Edwards's generous and careful reading, though, picked up on some thing which I certainly did not, and which have great bearing on Hughes's poetry.

            I unfortunately don't have the space in this blog entry to rehash Edwards's argument in detail. I will, however, draw out the threads I found most compelling, such as his discussions of performance and swing(ing)/sway. Edwards draws this concept from Johnson's preface to Book of American Negro Spirituals, in which Johnson describes the swaying bodies of the congregation keeping time, but the particulars of this time are important. He is trying to transcribe these sermons with some difficulty, writing, “The 'swing' of the spirituals is an altogether subtle and elusive thing. It is subtle and elusive because it is in perfect union with the religious ecstasy that manifests itself in the swaying bodies of the whole congregation.”  As Edwards explains, though, “[A] true transcription is possible for Johnson; it is one in which the transcriptional form somehow 'catches' what it cannot represent notationally” (589).

            Hughes's poems attempt to catch something of the blues in a similar way. Edwards talks about a double-apostrophe in the blues poetry of Hughes. Hughes isn't transcribing an original performance like Johnson; instead he's writing a text in which “sight is forced to infer an absent sound,” in which there is no original performance to transcribe, per se. Absence, Edwards points out, is an essential feature of the blues, in which an apostrophe calling out to an absent lover is also a prominent formal feature. So to put this in my own words, the absence of the performance actually performs absence. Since we recognize a musical quality that isn't there but feels like it should be, that the poem is invoking through its formal elements, we are doubly-aware of the sense of loss that the poem conveys.

            That said, I've found a couple of readings of Hughes's poems that I thought we should consider. In a way, I felt like Edwards was saying that the ideal performance of Hughes's poems was in the text itself, because it contained that double-apostrophe, that mixtery between the event—the performance—and the fixed text. However, I'd like to talk together in class about how this performance of “Weary Blues”--which doesn't come from Fine Clothes to the Jew, but which I chose because there's a video of Hughes performing it that I found super compelling, particularly because he reads the words “This is what I'm gonna sing,” in spite of the music. I also included a performance of “Mulatto,” which comes from “From the Georgia Roads” in Fine Clothes because I thought it embodied call-and-response in a way in which perhaps Edwards was suggesting the “Blues” poems in Fine Clothes didn't.

Hughes reads “Weary Blues” to Jazz accompaniment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM7HSOwJw20

“Mulatto,” with not musical accompaniment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_6Z1_3btQ8

            Listening, rather than reading of “Mulatto,” do we experience the kind of apostrophe Edwards is talking about? Do we feel the absence of music? And if not—for me the answer is no—is it because the apostrophe is absent in the text, or is it a failure as a reader? Is there anything significantly different between this reading and the way Hughes reads “Weary Blues” above? Or is there a difference in the way this poem invokes call and response in its text that links it with that aural tradition rather than a musical blues tradition?

            I should mention this was one of the more troubling poems for me to read, more troubling still to hear. In the preface to Fine Clothes, Hughes wrote “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung, people laugh,” and while this poem did not come from the “blues” collection of the poems, I didn't find myself laughing when I read it or when I heard this reading of it. In fact, I didn't experience the laughter much at all in this collection. I'm curious to hear if I'm alone in this, or if I should take Hughes's statement literally or not.

WEEK 3: Tsitsi Jaji Africa In Stereo and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Prologue)

As we approach week three, I encourage you to take a comparative approach to our readings. In class on Tues, we will attempt to trace the important threads running through Gilroy’s vision of black Atlantic hybridity and the countercultures of modernity, Weheliye’s focus on the technological practices sonic Afro-modernity, Edwards’ framing of diaspora as a practice informed by translation, and Jaji’s discussion of stereomodernism and pan-African solidarity, which turns upon the “the essential work of listening” as a creative, political, and critical practice.

Each of these texts (in explicit dialogue with the others) draws our attention to the ways that music (and other expressive forms) travels—illuminating the challenges and the possibilities of transnational solidarity.

 As our work moves increasingly to transnational spaces, it is useful to take a moment to rehearse Paul Gilroy’s larger argument that moving beyond the boundaries of the nation state allows us to understand the black and Atlantic as web of complex affiliations rather than a monolithic entity.

How does Edwards advance Gilroy’s argument in the Practice of Diaspora?  For example, how do we grapple with Edward’s claim that the “cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation?”(7).  To be sure, translation turns upon linguistic questions, as Edwards reminds us that “the great majority of peoples of African descent to not speak or write in English.” His turn to Paris as site of collaboration for black artists exemplifies translation at work (The English word “Negro” and the French “nègre” do not signal commensurate understandings of blackness, for example).  However, we are of course in broader field than language alone. Indeed, Edwards wants to attend to the ways that “discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference”(7)

In what way is translation in the broader sense (as cultural and critical practice) useful for our discussion of the ways that ideas about blackness, diaspora, and modernity shift and are transformed across different contexts?

This is a key question as we move to Africa in Stereo, a text that (with incredible complexity and range) engages Gilroy, Weheilye, and Edwards in its exploration of Africa’s participation in the discourses of solidarity, modernism, media that have shaped our understanding of the black Atlantic.

The anecdote that opens the text is a provocative example. Jaji recalls hearing Bob Marley's “Buffalo Solider” over the airwaves of Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation radio as a child. She reflects that it was the “musical elements” of the song that were able to sustain such “durable structures of feeling,” even as the song’s historical references remained “opaque, mistranslated, untranslatable” to many listeners in Zimbabwe.

How do translation and listening as “as active and necessary participation” aid our understanding of the ways that music makes meaning? How does music shape affect, and how does affect structure solidarity? (What, in fact, is solidarity, as defined by Jaji?) What is at stake in retaining a sense of  “pan-Africanism as an ongoing project” even as the term now appears “outdmoded” in many critical spaces?(8)

I am reposting a video of Jaji’s discussion of Africa in Stereo with Mark Anthony Neal (especially the of pan-Africanism) below. Feel free to response to these and any other concerns in your comments.

Interlude: Scat and the Excess of Meaning

 

After our discussion yesterday (specifically our talk about lyrics vs. other kinds of vocalizations) I was inspired to write my own post-class reflection. Ella Fitzgerald's iconic version of "How High the Moon," performed live in Berlin in 1960, contains what is arguably the greatest scat sequence in all of jazz.  Note the tempo change one minute in. She begins scatting around 1:25. Around 4 minutes in, she begins to incorporate melodies and words from other jazz standards (Stormy Weather), as well as the vocal techniques of other sings (Louis Armstrong was a common) Around 4:54 she references her own "lack" of intelligibility, with the phrase "I guess these people wonder what I'm singing!" (In keeping with our attention to the importance of transnational contexts, we might recall that Ella is not singing in front of an English-speaking audience to begin with.)

Scat, John Szwed reminds us, is not unique to jazz, but is also found in Brazilian, Cuban, and Caribbean music. (Jazz 101, 298.) It is often understood as the vocalist's impulse to mimic the instrument. However, I prefer to think it as the voice highlighting it's own instrumentality, and in this case, sonic virtuosity. There is more than technical virtuosity on display, however. How can we return the question of meaning making, (so urgently raised in class) since clearly we are in a more complex realm than representation alone? Abandoning the simplistic definition of scat as nonsense syllables, Brent Edwards observes that scat activates "an excess of meaning, a shifting possibility of the multitude of meanings," which may be related to Alex Weheliye's claim about the ways that sound "transmits intensit[ies]" which "belong to the realm of expression rather than content," or Nathaniel Mackey's discussion of black music's "telling inarticulacies." By invoking these claims I don't want to impose a hierarchy by suggesting that these kinds of "vocalizings" (as Armstrong called them) are some how more "pure," or that we should abandon an analysis of song lyrics. Rather, how can we take seriously Edwards' understanding of scat (and other kinds of non-linguistic vocal expression) as "supplementing the sayable?" Such a question seems key to understanding black cultural production in its many forms.

Having chaired a panel at ASA 2014 on "The Sonics of Black Excess," I'm also continuing to think about different ways to define "excess" and the ways it transmits and invites affect. To that end, I should add that, on a personal note, Ella's performance makes me feel all the feels. More specifically (of course) for me it sonically enacts all the feelings of ascendency and flight that the title of the song suggests.

More soon.

 Edwards, "Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat," Critical Inquiry 28.3.

Mackey "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol."

Szwed, Jazz 101

Weheliye Phonographies

In honor of MLK.

Nina Simone, "Mississippi Goddam" (1964)

" Why? (The King of Love is Dead") (1968)

Week 2:  Discussion on Alex Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Quite fittingly, the opening of Weheliye’s Phonographies is all about sonic beginnings:

“Beginning and introductions are occasions for sonic events or apparitions—and song intros are no exception: the soft, mid-tempo, yet insistent drum-machine rumblings and water tap sounds of Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit” that prolong the wait for the grand entrance of the bass, especially in the extended twelve-inch version; the lengthy cinematic string section of Phantom/Ghost’s  “Perfect Lovers (Unperfect Love Mix)”; the looped invocations of “love ya babe” in conjunction with the crisp, syncopated snare drums and sampled bird sounds that introduce Aaliyah’s “One in a Million.” I could continue this list indefinitely, but I trust that you get the picture, or that sound as it were, of the allurements that lurk in the crevices of sonic beginnings, those sonorous marks that launch new worlds, holding out pleasure to come while also tendering futurity as such in their grooves” (1).

Much the same could be said for the beginning of this class—its introduction to the complexities of modernity, diaspora, the politics of authenticity, and the allurements of black Atlantic performance. Weheliye’s focus here is on the technologies which mediate our access to culture; which provide our point of entry and grant us the means of repetition: the phonograph, the CD/mp3 player or, especially in our case, the YouTube video:

 

If this book's point of entry is a meditation on sonic beginnings, perhaps the hook, as it were, is that “sound technologies are a vital element of the musical text rather than supplementary to its unfolding” (2). Similar phrasing could be used to describe Weheliye’s argument that black culture is vital to the unfolding of Western modernity. Worth considering in class are the ways that Phonographies responds to and revises Gilroy’s arguments about black culture’s intimate relationship to modernity. If Weheliye’s focus on technology marks one signal difference between the two approaches, what new lines of inquiry does this focus open up? What are its limitations?

Weheliye’s book is not a history of sound technologies themselves but rather focuses on their representation in various literary texts. (The final chapter is a departs from this in both method and scope.) Sound becomes a form twice-mediated. This raises various questions about the relationship between literature (and literary aesthetics) and technology—or literature as technology—that would be useful to engage in our discussion.

There is much to say for example, about the book's engagement with Ralph Ellison’s writings—especially the phonograph if the Invisible Man prologue. And this video recording of Louis Armstrong’s stage performance of “Black and Blue” is a profoundly rich musical and visual text in it’s own right:

What are your thoughts? Sound off in the comments!

Black Atlantic Mixtape: An Introduction

We begin with some writings on black music--a grouping that we might call a kind of "Black Atlantic Mixtape"--tailored to the purposes of our introductory class.  A mixtape suggests juxtaposition, overlap, and resonance, and in some cases, dissonance. The theme(s) or moods that link these various writings will be the subject of our discussion.

1. W.E.B. Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" and "Sorrow Songs" (The Souls of Black Folk)
2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (chapters 1 &3)
3. Nathaniel Mackey, "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol"
4. Michael Veal, "Starship Africa"

This post will focus on Du Bois's Souls and Gilroy's "Jewels Brought from Bondage: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity." It is fitting to begin with Du Bois's famous reflection on double consciousness in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings:"

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

If black expressive culture does not, in Du Bois's mind, facilitate transcendence of this condition, it importantly allows for its transmission. In black spirituals Du Bois locates the "articulate message of the slave to the world." His juxtaposition of scores with written text, a practice that frames each chapter of Souls, establishes a relationship between black music and writing. Du Bois asserts this relationship as much through provocative suggestion as through explicit discussion of music. What does it mean to consider music as our point of entry to the questions of modernity and double consciousness raised in the Souls of Black Folk?

This idea is taken up in Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Invoking Du Bois, Gilroy claims that the special power of black expressive forms derives from their "doubleness; their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outsiTde the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodise modernity"(73). The question of black music's modernity is taken up next week in Wehileye's Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Sonic Modernity. Here, Gilroy offers a critique of the ways that debates over modernity have centered the text and textuality as "mode of communicative practice which provides a model for all forms of cognitive exchange and social interaction." He offers that "the history and practice of black music point to other possibilities and generate other plausible models."(77)

To account for these alternative models is necessary to consider the work of range of figures "who have tried to use music as an aesthetic, political, or philosophical marker in the production of what might loosely be called their critical social theories" (79) Gilroy approaches this task with incredible range throughout this chapter: Consider the following examples:

The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the politics of authenticity. 

For Du Bois, Gilroy notes, the Fisk singers became a symbol for the reconciliation of the aims of the Talented Tenth with those of the black poor" (90). In Souls, slave music (even the more "polished" versions performed by Fisk) is privileged as "signifier of black authenticity." To provide contrast, Gilroy also cites Zora Neale Hurston's infamous charge that Jubilee Singers's repertoire was so full of "musicians tricks that Negro congregations are highly entertained when they hear their old songs so changed." Negro spirituals with their "face lifted, so to speak."

Gilroy's interest lies not in the correctness of Hurston's charge rather "her strongly felt need to draw a line around what is and isn't authentically, genuinely black and to use music as the medium which makes these distinctions credible"(92). Examining what is at stake in this highly fraught question of authenticity--as accessed through black music--will be a key consideration of this class.

Below is an early recording of Swing Low Sweet Chariot, as performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers:

Fisk Jubilee Singers, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" (1909)

Jimi Hendrix, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Sounds

Gilroy names Jimi Hendrix as another key figure, describing him as an iconic performer whose overt sexuality and "neo-minstel buffoonery" was perceived as authentic blackness to white rock audiences abroad (A characterization which I find less than generous.) Still,  Gilroy's discussion of Hendrix's transatlantic journey and navigation of London race and class politics is an instructive example of the creative possibilities opened up by transnational, diasporic cultural innovation. (94) As with the Fisk Jubilee singers, Hendrix's travels (later encapsulated in his "nomadic ideology of the gyspy") are key to understanding the global circulations (and transformations) of black expressive culture.

Hendrix, "Hey Joe" (1967)

Other examples (to be taken up in discussion) include the (problematic) gender politics of 2 Live Crew and their relationship to questions of authenticity: "2 Live Crew "Banned in the USA" Hip hop in general is a point of interest for Gilroy--not only because of its global circulations but the Caribbean/Latino influences that constitute its origins.

The new version of the Impression's hit I'm So Proud (renamed "Proud of Mandela" performed by Macka B), which topped the British reggae charts in 1990:

Mandela's release from prison, Gilroy writes, "projected an unchallenged, patriarchal voice, a voice rooted in the most intense political conflict between blacks and whites on this planet, the final frontier of white supremacy on the African continent, out across the really systems of the black Atlantic" (96) Along with Mandela's "redemptive authenticity" is Mandela's own compelling invocation of black American music in his citation of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?" "When we were in prison, we appreciated and obviously listened to the sounds of Detroit." In this moment, Gilroy writes, "the global dimensions of diaspora dialogue were momentarily visible and, as his casual words lit up the black Atlantic landscape like a flash of lightening on a summer night, the value of music as the principal symbol of racial authenticity was simultaneously confirmed and placed in question." (96)

Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On?," Live in Amsterdam

How do our other readings intersect, extend, or diverge from the concerns laid out above? How might  a consideration of form (which is discussed in all of our readings) enrich our discussion?