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.
Part I:
ReplyDeleteIn this week’s reading, what stood out to me was this recurring theme in Jaji’s Africa in Stereo of the role of re-presentations to understanding the importance of music for the African diaspora. As Jaji points out with regards to South Africa, “musical authority and textual authority were complementary in civil society” (60), and this comes through with her analysis not just regarding South Africa, but also Ghana and Senegal. Time and time again, we see that the way in which music and musical texts are re-presented being central to relationships between Africa and the diaspora. I focus on a couple of these instances below.
I was immediately drawn to the way in music’s function for Sol Plaatje. Music holds immense sway for Plaatje, beginning with his accounts of the Boer War, describing the sound of gunfire as music itself, deeming language insufficient (55). This further comes to light in Plaatje’s attempts to represents the tonal shifts in Setswana—something that affected the ways in which missionaries were able to communicate with their congregation—by using musical notation, a strategy employed as much to make sure his fellow speakers of the language wouldn’t have to hear errors from the missionaries ranging from the innocent to the obscene (64-65). Even if indirectly, re-presentations of music (in this case re-presenting language in music) figures heavily not just for Plaatje but also in Plaatje’s relationship with other black South Africans. This possibility gives Plaatje immense joy, leading to Jaji’s assertion that “the value of music within Plaatje’s work…went far beyond mere divertiment” (65). For Plaatje, a black subject, music and the many ways it can be reconfigured are of extreme importance.
Part II:
ReplyDeleteAlong with Plaatje’s use of music, the use of jazz in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poetry stood out to me, particularly because it made me think of my own re-presentations of music in my work. Jaji notes that “For Senghor, music was the universal language of Négritude,” jazz being the most important as “a quintessential example of l’âme noire—the black soul” (68). However, it wasn’t just jazz music that stood as vital to Senghor’s Négritude. Writing about jazz, including earlier poetry, figured heavily into the formation of Senghor’s own jazz poetry, oftentimes more than actual performances (69). This reliance on the writing from the likes of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Alain Locke, and the writers he encountered in Paris once again demonstrates the importance of re-presentations of musical texts in discussing connections across the African diaspora. This gains added importance with Senghor turning not only to a diasporic form of music in jazz, but to writers from the diaspora in his formulation of Négritude. Now, granted, this does bring into question issues of how African Americans and African American culture are privileged when discussing the diaspora (something Jaji mentions early in the text), and one of the critiques of Senghor has been his privileging of big band jazz over bebop and free jazz, demonstrated by the artists invited by the Senegalese state (90-91). However, it’s fascinating to me how much sway these re-presentations of jazz had on the way in which Senghor experienced and wrote about jazz.
Now these things stand out to me because of the importance re-presenting music has taken in my own work lately when reflecting on my cultural identity and relationship with diaspora (the African diaspora, but also the Puerto Rican diaspora). The ways in which I use lyrics to represent a memory or even stretch them to fit what I’m trying to do with a poem. Reading through Africa in Stereo and seeing the ways in which music has been used and reconfigured (as well as the critiques of such usage) is making me rethink the ways in which I’m interacting with music in my work. What ideologies am I privileging based on what I include and leave out? How might I think of different ways in which to re-present music in my work, leaving lyrics behind and focusing on other things such as the instrumentation, other writings on the music I’m interested in, and the relationship between the sound and language? I’m still working through a number of things regarding this text and stereomodernism, but the ways in which music has been and can be utilized stands out as something to keep looking into.
Malcolm,
DeleteI, too, was really interested in Senghor's use of Jazz, and the importance he attributed to Jazz. Particularly, I was puzzled by what to make of the difference between accessing music by listening to it as opposed to reading about it. When Jaji wrote "[T]he limited number of performers mentioned by name and the level of abstraction in his descriptions raise the question of how much Senghor actually listened to the music he so readily cited" (70), I had to stop in my tracks ans ask myself what the implications are when we read about music as opposed to listening to it. I'm curious to hear what you, as a writer who uses musical references to evoke memory, might have to say about this! When we access music by listening to it vs. reading scholarship about it vs. remembering it when a lyric we recognize is referenced, what is different about each of these encounters, and are can we compare them to one another or are they fundamentally different experiences?
I love these questions about music and poetics, which will become increasingly relevant as the course proceeds. Malcolm, your use of the word 're-present' (with the dash) is especially interesting. Perhaps, even inadvertently, you are suggesting a different way of thinking about representation; what does it meant to re-present (to present anew?) What kinds of transformations can poetry enact, which take it beyond the realm of mimetic representation?
DeleteI'm just now seeing these two responses and I'll try to respond to them both here.
DeleteHannah: When I first read about the privilege Senghor gave to writings about jazz as opposed to his own listenings of jazz music, I was a little thrown off. For me as a writer, this seems ridiculous, but that has to do particularly with the way in which I use music in my writing. Music for me is connected to how I've negotiated my identity growing up, coming from a mixed-race family (African-American mother, Puerto Rican father with roots also in Jamaica). Music for me is connected to memory--not just the collective memory that might come with a song, but also the personal memory associated with how that song figures into my own notions of identity (collective and individual). An example of this in my own writing comes in the form of my "Ode To Bob Marley," found here: http://www.wordriot.org/archives/8792 (Don't you just love my shameless self-promotion?). The song "I Shot the Sheriff" and the figure of Marley hold massive importance for the poem, but so does the memory associated with it in the poem as far as how I connect to my father's Jamaican heritage. I think that in going through Jaji, the way that I was able to come to grips with Senghor's use of jazz is that he isn't invested in that sort of personal, individual connection/identification with music, but a different sort of political, maybe even theoretical implication of the music, for which I'm still a little hesitant regarding his use of reading about as opposed to listening to jazz but I can maybe understand a little more.
Imani: I chose "re-present" as opposed to "represent" at first because of our discussion on "Black and Blue," and it's original context vs. the context of the Louis Armstrong recording, how the song is "presented anew." In terms of poetry (as well as other arenas where music is utilized), I think that when music is presented (or at least the way I present it, which which is in no way a stand-in for all of the ways in which music has been presented in poetry), it becomes as much (sometimes more) a matter of what's happening in the poem (formally, content-wise, etc.) as it is about the song or music itself being utilized. In that way, the music gets presented anew, sometimes resignified to hold meanings that the original song/music/performance may not have had. Again, as an example I'll turn to one of my own poems (shameless self-promotion at its best), "Afro-Seattleite Fragment #15" (http://www.pacificareview.com/afro-seattleite-fragment-15-jimi-hendrix-plays-the-star-spangled-banner-woodstock-1969/). In this poem, first of all, you don't get the full sense of Hendrix's performance. All you get is my words (distortion, bending, breaking, burning, etc.), the formal set-up of the poem (short, chopped-up lines), and my linking of the performance to conditions of late 60s CD, Seattle, WA. While I'm commenting on Hendrix's performance of the national anthem, I'm also trying to re-present it in a way that (at least in my experience) often isn't talked about.
Thank you so much for the questions, y'all. I hope this in some way makes clear my stance/ideas on Senghor, music, and poetry.
In last week’s discussion of Weheliye’s Phonographies and analysis of Louis Armstrong’s performance of “Black & Blue” that we viewed in class, we talked a lot about the differences, advantages and disadvantages, and what is more prominent and/or what’s missing from the visual or the aural experience, particularly when thinking about “black music” and black experience.
ReplyDeleteImani’s question of “How does music shape affect?” strikes me as particularly provocative, especially paired with her question of how that affect then could “structure solidarity.” Jaji’s Africa in Stereo has helped me better conceptualize a theoretical framework that allows for us to think of the visual, the sonic, and the feeling as interdependent, and how music itself can shape affect. By placing all of the texts we have studied thus far in class, we can begin to translate and understand this sense of musical affect and blackness. The texts we read this week illuminated how, even with differences in language, pan-African affinities and practices permitted an affect of blackness to drive musical practices internationally.
Before reading Africa in Stereo, I had no idea that the musical cultures of African American spirituals and South African part singing were “concurrent” and “flourished in tandem” and “intersected”(Jaji, 26). How did this happen? Jaji explores this, and spends some time describing transcription—a term which, as a writer, helps me better understand the concepts. Jaji says that transcription is “a set of writerly practices shuttling between sound and text” that enabled an “ambitious reimagining” of solidarity amongst Black folks, internationally(25). This use of transcription towards solidarity perhaps is operated under the pretenses of thinking of solidarity in the way that Jaji explains it…the “noise and static, reverberation and echo, feedback and interference” that works together as a “continuum.” This continuum is to be thought of as a “continuum of achievement and apparent failures that have to be understood together”(18). Thus, is affect gained by this transcription—a study of all that is present, determinable and not, moreso than a simple translation (of language) or other monolithic method? As Edwards notes in his prologue to Practice of Diaspora, these moments of paradox—as he illustrates as the “ironic” nature of the Paris noir movement and existence (a Black sense of unity amidst the political landscape of Paris after World War I)—are “constitutive of black modern expression in general”(Edwards, 5) It seems that we can conceptualize music and blackness in similar, fluid, complex, perhaps contradictory ways. In Africa in Stereo, Jaji points us to Connor who says that the “auditory sense is an attractive theoretical model because it is a ‘fluid’ more variable conception of space”(Jaji, 18).
The theoretical frameworks discussed by these scholars, together, help me better grasp notions of affect and blackness, particularly when dealing with music. Although I will admit, there is a lot going on in the readings that has me curious as to the best way to interpret these scholars’ work. To the class I have the question of: Is it safe to say that these affects of blackness transcend music? Further, do we buy all parts of the theory given to us by these scholars? How does one keep all of these ideas (transcription, solidarity, stereomodernity, etc.) straight and working together?
-Steffan
So many great points here. The question of transcription will come up again and again, as you will see! And to your last question--these theories may or may not work together; perhaps the question is, how can we develop a comparative orientation toward these projects?
DeletePart I:
ReplyDeleteThis week's readings were interesting for a number of reasons, but what resonated most with me, perhaps given past conversations we've had was Jaji's discussion of sound technologies. The cover of her the book, which she references in her interview (above) is emblematic of the interest of black African women in the global economy of black music; it represents the kind of cultural exchange that Gilroy claimed black music (whatever that is) lends itself to, and the way Jaji explains that black music and sound technologies provide an access point for black African women into pan-African modernity.
Jaji seems to offer a new way of thinking about commerce in audio technologies. Last week, we critiqued Weheliye's argument about the new (black) subjectivities that the phonograph chelps to construct. Some of my classmates pointed out that it is hard to think about the phonograph as being integral to black subjectivity when the material limitations on many poor black people prohibited them from obtaining these technologies. Weheliye addresses this concern: In chapter 3, he explains "mobile sound systems were an alternative for those who could not afford to buy expensive US import records for private consumption. As a result, newly urbanized Jamaicans could publicly partake in the reproduction of recorded music..." (87). Earlier, he explained that "by the early 1980's, the phonograph primarily brought musical[...] entertainment into the homes of middle-class Americans. In 1894, Columbia Records produced the first inexpensive phonograph; prices now ranged from twenty to fifty dollars, compared to two hundred dollar [...] Suddenly, the phonograph became a mass-produced and mass-distributed household item" (27). In other words, the phonograph was readily accessible to most poor blacks in one way or another. However, even at this relatively low cost, this technology was still certainly beyond the reach of many.
Jaji seems to be looking at commercial sound technology from the other side, though. She apologetically draws attention to the record player as a status symbol that represented various things simultaneously. She looks at the three Telefunken advertisements, all of which seek make the Telefunken desirable, but through strategies that promote various conceptions of the modern African woman. The advertisements--released one per month in the first three editions of Bingo--proclaim first that "Raky is modern" and interested in global politics and culture (140), then "Raky is pleased" that her husband can afford to bestow the gift of the latest thing on her (142), and then "Raky is sensible" (144) and functions as an autonomous economic agent who is able to judge for herself what purchases have value. All of these competing messages about African women's roles in the globalized modern world centered around a piece of sound technology, and the advertisements focused on what the product actually could be used to do, focusing on what sound technology brings to women's lives and what opportunities it makes available to all women, "even in the remote bush" (142).
Rather than focus on the ways advertisers might be trying to capitalize on African women's desire to be modern/cosmopolitan, and to be independent like the stars in the magazines where the advertisements appeared, Jaji chooses to focus on how African women reading these periodicals were able to use them as tools of empowerment through their "sheen reading," their advanced, critical literacy that allowed for sophisticate dreading within the genre of the pop-culture magazine, which contained competing narratives of nations, communities, possibilities for women, etc (116). She gives African women more credit as consumers than a traditional narrative of advertisement as exploitative might.
Part II:
ReplyDeleteOf course, since magazines are visual and the discussions of the magazines focused on their content promoting women as musicians and sound technology, I thought of this chapter in particular when I read Edwards's prologue. In the post above, Imani brings into focus Edwards's claim that "cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation" (7). Reading Edwards's prologue after reading Jaji, my ears pricked up at numerous points when he discussed the role of language/translation and the role of cultural centers--Paris and Harlem. I kept thinking to myself, "isn't he forgetting about the globalization of media via sound technology and visual mediums like magazines that only partly rely on text to make meaning?"
Of course, there are ways that Edwards talks back to Jaji, too. His account of the dissonance between African-Americans in Paris and black French colonial subjects, conscripted soldiers, etc., seemed to directly challenge what Jaji paints as a pan-African solidarity spread by cosmopolitan modern African readers. The critiques that he describes Africans levying against the African American elites of Harlem could perhaps be similarly directed at bourgeois Africans as well. He writes, "the level of the international is accessed unevenly by subjects with different historical relations to the nation (for instance, in a collaboration between a US citizen marked by a context of violent racist exclusion, disenfranchisement, and segregation of a minority population, and a French West African citizen marked by a context of colonialism, invasive subjugation of a majority population, and Eurocentric structures of privilege and mobility)" (7). Similarly, one might say that the level of the international is accessed unevenly by those Africans with access to state-of-the-art Telefunken music players and those without; by those who know of the "composers of beautiful music" and to the "less fortunate" to whom these composers are unknown ( Jaji 130).
I see Jaji and Edwards responding to one another in ways that are very astute. Jaji seems to be critiquing Edwards's view that privileges the translation of text as the primary vehicle of pan-African solidarity, and Edwards seems to be critiquing Jaji's focus on modern, urban, cosmopolitan Africans at the expense of the rural and the poor, the ones who would find African American's elevation of Paris (and perhaps Jaji's cosmopolitan Africans' less-than-critical views of France) as vulgar, short-sighted, offensive, and dismissive. These totally different conceptions of what pan-African solidarity might be or mean have me wondering if a single vision is necessary for pan-African solidarity and, if so, if it is possible.
Jaji anchors her text with this idea of stereomodernism.. Stereomodernism examines the role of textual referencing and transcontinental circulation in the construction of pan-Africanism-while engaging in affective labor. Jaji redeployment of pan-Africanism through stereomodernism serves critically important functions: elongates the pan-Africanism’s temporal and historical trajectories and, expanding beyond the scholarship of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, politicizes Black cultural production through sound. Jaji’s case studies shift notions of diaspora and (re)centers gender analysis.
ReplyDeleteThe text moved from music to print magazines and even textual jazz references. Rooting her project through the impact of sound with technology presented grounds to consider how black cultural production organize around notions of solidarity yielding pan-Africanism that challenges Western notions of modernity. Because of my own particular research interests in contemporary engagements with the historical past, I enjoyed her historiographical choice of reading these practices through pan-Africanism. In doing so, this project considers how Black cultural producers work across geographies, temporalities, and technologies to sustain a cultural politic.
But at the heart of Jaji’s project is a rethinking about Africa’s position in diasporic discourse. Whereas Africa is positioned as an origin or place for return, Jaji considers how disaporic communities inform African socio-politics. It is interesting to consider how disaporic communities constructed transatlantic solidarity through the circulation of cultural products. I was particularly interested in both how leaders of the Negritude movement deployed jazz rhetoric that encoded a kind of transnational and transcontinental solidarity based upon an African American performance practices. Within the work of Negritude activists Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, they utilized jazz sounds in their poetry and speeches that spoke to a jazz aesthetic. The point here is to consider how the incorporation of jazz sonic sounds referenced or conjured an African American tradition of production and resistance. Solidarity was produced through the deployment of African American resistance traditions that connected with West Africans fights against imperialism and racism.
Le'Mil, both here and in class you approached the (fraught) topic of pan-Africanism with great sensitivity. Your last sentence here strikes me as crucial, since the fights against imperialism and racism are not always linked in practice; perhaps we can "hear" solidarity precisely at the intersection of these two frontiers of black liberation.
DeletePost-class reflection:
ReplyDeleteOur class discussion was illuminating in a number of ways, but as usual I find myself with lingering questions, particularly about the ideas of echo(location) and "repetition of difference."
During the second part of class yesterday, we talked about Jaji's discussion of the echo (and echolocation), and how the echo changes over/across time/space. This reminded me of the discussion of the copy in Weheliye's Phonographies and how the original is often privileged as "original" although it, too, is a copy in some ways and has no special claim to authenticity/truth. In Weheliye, I found myself buying into this cool idea about each listening experience as a unique performance, but in Jaji, I found myself (thanks to her metaphor of the echo and her discussion the decay the echo undergoes) more anxious about the way sonic experiences survive/are archived across time/space. She is interested, too, I think, in thinking of what later iterations of sonic moments add to those moments--what new creations come from the echoes of sonic experiences--but I'm a bit fixated on this idea of decay. I worry that rather than offering opportunities for creative expression, appropriations of sound and sonic experiences across space/time could be (more often are?) exploited for commercial and political agendas.
That said, I'm interested in the idea of "repetition of difference," and I'd like to know more about what exactly that means and how it plays out in the example of Soul to Soul, for example--if the "echoes" of that concert are capitalizing on it inappropriately (as, perhaps, Roberta Flack's request for removal from the more recent film might suggest), or if subsequent "echoes" are drawing on it for historical resonance/creative emphasis, or if there's another alternative. I'm also interested in what the "difference" in "repetition of difference" does to the "original" sonic text. I very much appreciated the discussion of the echo, since it helped me to clarify some of the questions I had about its use in Africa in Stereo.
After our most recent class, I keep finding myself thinking about the “echo” and our qualms with and resistance to the word. I think the word “echo” has a valence that implies that all its resultant “echoes” are inherently weaker than what comes before it. This is helping me think of diaspora in a more nuanced way, because I think that before our class discussion, diaspora felt to me more focused on commonality than an acceptance or analysis of a continuum” (as Jaji uses)—always referent back to a fantastical, utopic Africa mentality, in which all black folk and members of the diaspora came from.
ReplyDeleteIn the introduction to African in Stereo, Jaji cites the scholar Connor who speaks about the benefits of the aural: “Most importantly, the singular space of the visual is transformed by the expreince of sound to a plural space; one can hear many sounds simultaneously, where it is impossible to see different visual objects at the same time without disposing them in a unified field of vision(19).
I think that thinking of multiple sounds as a chorus of some sort, rather than an echo might be a good way of imagining diasporic thought. Where echo may fell, another word like refrain might be better. A return or extension of what came before, but not less important.
Post Class Reflection:
ReplyDeleteThe main word that resonated with me this week was solidarity and the variety of meanings that can come from this term and be altered based on the discipline. Jaji shows the variety of ways that solidarity appears for people in the African disapora. While there can be issues in the broadness of pan-Africanism and the sometimes weird relationship with Africa for those no longer living in the continent, it's important to acknowledge it and capital p Pan-Africanism start the conversation about commonalities and places of solidarity of people within the diaspora. This article came up at some point and it might be interesting for those who are interested in further examining Black American's sometimes strained relationship with Africa:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/is-it-cultural-appropriation-when-africans-wear-jordans_us_56099b3be4b0768126fea24d
-Candice C. Robinson
Post-Class Reflection:
ReplyDeleteSince the end of last week’s class, the idea of “collaborative dissonance” has been resonating through my mind, as well as Le’Mil’s points on p/Pan-Africanism and one of the dangers being in who’s speaking and on whose behalf. I can’t help but go back to a portion of Jaji:
“The role of the interpreter—the real-time parallel to what Benjamin would call “the task of the translator” some thirty years later—is to convey rather than supplement the other’s language. Plaatje’s own linguistic mastery gave him enough aural acuity that, like a listener with perfect pitch who immediately identifies a slight fault in intonation, the smallest deviations in grammar or lexicography registered with him, and it was from this vantage point that he could critique the practice of intervening rather than merely interpreting.” (57)
The importance of interpretation stuck out to me given some of our discussion on different songs/sources figuring differently in different contexts, such as “Black and Blue” or Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier.” Along with Le’Mil’s comments on who is speaking and for whom, this idea of interpretation sticks out with regards to what sources/musics/modes of performance get privileged. The danger comes when those in positions intervene rather than interpret, when one experience (such as the Black American experience) becomes the stand-in for all experiences across the diaspora. I think if we’re going to try to build solidarity across the diaspora, one of the things that has to be cautioned is intervening instead of interpreting. In the same way, if music is privileged, it also has to be noted that different songs are going to signify differently in different contexts, and we have to consider the dangers in turning to one group/nation’s struggle to speak for the diaspora as a whole (as good as Kendrick Lamar and Marvin Gaye and Louis Armstrong and others may function in relaying Black American experiences across time, they still present a Black American experience that may not map exactly onto people across different countries in Africa, the [Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, Dutch, etc.] Caribbean, Europe, etc.).
Since our last class, I’ve been thinking a lot about “collaborative dissonance” (what a brilliant term, my god) and its potential mobilization—something like “solidarity,” but thicker.
ReplyDeletePrior to this course/last week’s class in particular, I’d always imagined solidarity as a supportive orientation toward the needs and well-being of others. I emphasize “others” here because being “in solidarity with” a group of people has always implied for me that I am not in that same group. I can stand in solidarity with people in Palestine, for instance, because I’m not a person in Palestine, or with people in Flint, MI, because I’m not a person in Flint. I can even stand in solidarity with homeless people in Pittsburgh, PA, because while I’m a person in Pittsburgh, I am not part of the homeless population. And so on.
Yet “collaborative dissonance” forces a recalibration of the above terms. Rather than allowing me to focus, as I have, on solidarity’s power lies in the ability to be “with” someone across difference and without equivalent experiences, it’s asking me to question what that “with” actually looks like—or, alternatively, the many ways it might feel or sound. In other words: how might we become better at listening to one another, and how might that listening allow us to better participate in the (necessary) “noise” of community, and even empower us to be contemporaneously and collaboratively “dissonant” rather than merely taking turns or attempting only harmonies?
My hope is that this adjustment of perspective might allow me to better revisit Jari’s renewed attention to p/Pan-Africanism. What is it that I couldn’t see because of my preoccupation with difference? A preoccupation, it’s worth noting, that I viewed as somehow incompatible with collaborative (rather than simply cooperative) political work.
Post Class Reflection:
ReplyDeleteMy ire towards Pan-Africanism is as alive as ever. While the spirit of academic generosity begs for a second look at the ways in which the word is usefully re-inscribed and Black American hegemony is pointed out, I still feel pause towards the term. However, during class Le-Mil brought up the ways in which the problematic history of pan-Africanism that gives me cause (think dashikis) also had real importance and attempted to carry the weight of solidarity, through a knee jerk diasporic reaction towards a romantic idea of a continent, a pull towards a homeland in the face of chronic loneliness in a racist America. This knee jerk reaction is at the heart of Jaji’s conversation about solidarity. Jaji’s Pan-Africanism however seeks to create a space in which that which has traditionally been mythicized is brought to speak in the conversation, instead of being spoken about. This feels radically different. This seems like a Pan-Africanism that with time can calm my ire into something more akin to indifference, and maybe acceptance.