Student Blog Post: "A Synthesis, via Solidarity, Practice, and Flow" by Laura Feibush

Three terms stand out to me as key words from our course together this semester, which I will outline in this brief synthesis of our collaborative work as a seminar. Of course, many others are possible. I’ll be eager to hear your responses to these in class on Tuesday, when I’ll also be talking about

Solidarity:

In that it emerges as an imperative and a struggle at the same time, the idea of solidarity strikes me as an important through-line to our semester’s reading.

Solidarity becomes an imperative in many ways, affecting those included in it and those excluded. In Earl Lovelace’s Dragon Can’t Dance, for example, Pariag approaches Aldrick about painting a sign after acquiring the bicycle. Aldrick dismisses this request, which is only one of a series of acts that keep Pariag in his outsider status. When Calvary Hill wakes to Pariag’s screams over his anonymously destroyed bicycle, the emotional impact is heavy: Pariag is conspicuously outside any sense of solidarity on the Hill, and this combined with his commercial ambition make him especially vulnerable to violence. It’s as though someone has died—a funeral-like procession takes place.

But it’s also a struggle to come up with a cohesive, functional solidarity. Brent Edwards writes in “The Practice of Diaspora” that a selective blindness to colonial aggression in other parts of the world on the part of black communities in Paris means that a “transnational black solidarity is traded in for a certain kind of national currency, an anti-racism in one country” (6). So here, solidarity in one area of the world almost demands turning a blind eye to another.

Bell hooks reminds us in each of her “Love Trilogy” books that love is not just a “feeling,” of warmth, or affection or whatever else, but rather an ongoing set of actions guided by certain concrete principles: care, commitment, respect, responsibility, trust, and knowledge. Our course readings conceptualize solidarity in many different ways, but I think one compelling formulation would make it similar to this understanding of love from hooks. By that I simply mean that solidarity should not just be thought of a concept, an idea, or a vague historical affiliation between groups, but rather a set of actions, or decisions that are made in light of events that occur.

One surprising moment for me this semester came at the unexpected intersection of blackness and Jewishness in the Beth B’nai Abraham congregation located in Harlem in the 1920’s. The congregation apparently played a major role in publishing the Universal Ethiopian Hymnal, which contained the anthem “Ethiopia,” among others. According to Redmond’s examination of anthems and their performance and circulation, this was what tied Black Jews most strongly to the UNIA. She writes: “Anthology is a method of mapping and containment, compiling evidence in service of facilitating pointed dialogues within a corps of thinking and, in some cases, acting” (47). Here, anthology is the kind of action that reflects solidarity.

Practice:

I mean practice in two senses.

1)    There are practices of doing things that form the sites of analysis for studies of race, writing, and sound. These practices can be looked at as objects, or moments that, if captured, can form the “stuff” of our studies, the “what” of what we study. The costumed parades in Port of Spain could be seen as this kind of “site,” ripe for anthropological study, as could something like Jamaican dancehall in Nadia Ellis’s “Out and Bad,” or whether or not people stand when singing Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing in Anthem.

But another sense of the word practice strikes me as extremely important:

2)    Practice as process. That’s to say, looking at race, writing, and sound requires us to look not just at artifacts, events, or scenes of different kinds, but also at processes that are ongoing or still happening.

Alexandra Vasquez’s Listening in Detail, for example, asks us to listen to Cuban music as it’s happening, to see the way it defies expectations by weaving together traditions of music in a way that reflects complex movements of people and culture. Some of her readings of Cuba Linda tracks, including the one we looked at in class on page 91-96 (of Tumbao a Peruchin), are kind of like guided tours: while walking through the “halls” of the music, our attention is guided by a knowledgeable guide who is showing us a new way to see something unfamiliar. “You’re scooped, without enough air, into a tidal wall of horns playing up and down scales together” (Vasquez 92). Yes, exactly. We’re being taught to hear anew.

I have to take moment here to touch on another very important key term that I can’t leave out here: technology. Initially I thought I’d make an argument for technology being a part of practice, in the sense that we have a practice of using speakers to amp up the sound of dancehall music so it throbs in dancers’ arms, legs, and ribs. But actually technology is not just a practice—it’s also a set of materialities that shape (and are at times shaped by) those practices. Take, for example, what for me is one of the most memorable moments from this semester’s reading, in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes plans to set up five phonographs:

“Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time” (2).
If he succeeds, the narrator aims to set up an early version of surround-sound, designing an aural environment in which to immerse himself, an aural environment that highlights the sonic materiality of recorded sound—he wants to hear not just with his ear but with his whole body. The desire to do this seems to be related to his invisibility in daily society. He aims to exploit the technological capabilities of phonograph to reinforce, or at least highlight, the materiality of his own body.
Of black communities in early 20^th-century Paris, Brent Edwards writes: “In these transnational circuits, black modern expression takes form not as a single thread, but through the often uneasy encounters of peoples of African descent with each other” (5). Not single threads, then, but rather interconnected and far-reaching circuits, or networks. The practices that make up the stuff of our course move, expand, and disperse in multidimensional webs of influence. This gives me a segue into my third term:

Flow

I mean flow in two senses, too, although others are possible.

The first sense that I want to emphasize is the idea of movement. Diaspora takes different shapes, and practices of sound and writing precipitate in their particularities from that movement of people from place to place.

In Africa in Stereo, Tsitsi Jaji tracks efforts to connect Afro-diasporic communities, or at least a “Pan-African imaginary,” via several modes of transmission and distribution. This kind of circulation or movement of materials is what I’m referring to as “flows.” Jaji examines several multimodal flows, like songbooks (musical scores) and radio.

The other sense of the word flow I want to bring forward is its more colloquial sense. While Urban Dictionary is of course hardly a scholarly source, the distribution of its definitions for “flow” give the sense of what I mean. Looking past a surprising number of entries referring to long hair on lacrosse and hockey players, we have several entries of which these two are exemplary:

1.     A rapper’s ability to vocalize a rhythmic yet complex string [of] rhymes that fit together in a logical and seamless manner.

2.     To be in the moment, present, in the zone, on a roll, wired in, in the groove, on fire, in tune, centered, or singularly focused.

Ex.: “What I often listen to in the morning to reach 'flow'…”

I’m struck by how the second definition, pertaining to a state of being, draws on vocabulary of sound and sound technology: “wired in;” “in the groove;” “in tune.” When Aldrick, in his dragon costume, seems to become one with the year’s new calypsos, it’s an act that connects him to his history and his sense of purpose. It’s also a flow, or a jam, in which he loses himself. Maybe spirited performances of Redmond’s anthems could also be called flows. Ellis’s invisible narrator seeks out a kind of flow state in his imagining of stereo. Nicki Minaj’s mystique has to do with her flow. These are just a few: some kind of flow almost seems like it could be theorized as a critical category unto itself—recognizable and powerful, but at the same time difficult to pin down.

The way that the idea of flow doesn’t work is that the term usually connotes a kind of ease or fluidity, and much diasporic movement that was of course forced and violent. Is it still a flow if it’s forced?

I’ll end here for now, though there’s much more to say. I look forward to our conversation in class on Tuesday.