Sonic Interventions

Transcription

Sonic Interventions

Sonic Interventions
Thamyris/
Intersecting: Place,
Sex, and Race
Series Editor
Ernst van Alphen
Editorial Team
Murat Aydemir, Yasco Horsman, Isabel Hoving, Saskia Lourens, Esther Peeren
Sonic Interventions
Editors
Sylvia Mieszkowski
Joy Smith
Marijke de Valck
Colophon
Design
Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands
www.warmerdamdesign.nl
Printing
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994,
Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”.
ISSN: 1381-1312
ISBN: 978-90-420-2294-2
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Mission Statement
Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race
Intersecting is a new series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus.
Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of
black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue
and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the
socially committed international journal which was established by Jan Best en Nanny
de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency
of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work
on the cutting edge.
We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring categories: place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that
order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will
necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will
keep analyzing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil concepts (ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sexuality has to be addressed as an always active social strategy of locating, controlling,
and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural practice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most productive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move
beyond narrow identitarian theories.
The title of the new book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think
together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of
our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to
theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these intersections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be understood in
practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-reflexive,
contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoretically relevant
issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different backgrounds) and
activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational
community?
We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting
addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented perspective with intellectual rigor and theoritical insights, interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating
and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at
[email protected]
Contents
9
Acknowledgments
11
Sonic Interventions: An Introduction
Sylvia Mieszkowski,
Joy Smith and
Marijke de Valck
29
I. Resonance – Politics – Resistance
31
The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)
Fred Moten
“Affirmative Resonances” in the City?:
Carolyn Birdsall
57
Sound, Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s
Germany
87
You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s
Marisa Parham
Acoustic Illusion
101
II. Incantations: Gender and Identity
103
Reciting: The Voice of the Other
Mahmut Mutman
Disturbing Noises – Haunting
Sylvia Mieszkowski
119
Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
147
Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations:
Milla Tiainen
New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing
and Subjectivity
169
III. Performing Subjectivity: Literature,
Race and Mourning
171
193
Invisible Music (Ellison)
David Copenhafer
Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly
Soyica Diggs
Sight: James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie
211
Between Orality and Literature: The Alida
Joy Smith
Folktale in Ellen Ombre’s Short Fiction “Fragments”
239
241
IV. Mixing Music: Event, Place and Transculturality
“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise
Susanne Stemmler
Andalusian Style in Contemporary Spain
265
Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics
Anikó Imre
287
Situating Sound: The Space and
Julian Henriques
Time of the Dancehall Session
311
The Contributors
313
Index
8 | Contents
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 18 (2007) 9–10
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank everyone involved in putting together this volume. Special
thanks go to Isabel Hoving, the series editor who supervised the editorial process,
Saskia Lourens for helping with the copy-editing, and Mart Warmerdam whom we
thank for the cover design. We are grateful to Toni Liquori, Media Relations Manager
at the Montclair Art Museum for granting us permission to reproduce the Morgan
Russell painting that appears on the cover. We are also grateful to the participants of
the workshop-conference Sonic Interventions, hosted in spring 2005 by the Amsterdam
School for Cultural Analysis. It was their expertise on sound, and their enthusiasm
about the academic potential of the concept of sonic interventions, that convinced us
to compile the themed volume that we now present.
Sylvia Mieszkowski
Joy Smith
Marijke de Valck
Amsterdam & Frankfurt, August 2007
Acknowledgments | 9
Sonic Interventions:
An Introduction
Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith
and Marijke de Valck
As an interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging field of “sound studies,” Sonic
Interventions sets out to explore the potential of the aural realm in search of productive new approaches to investigating cultural practices. Sounds are as fundamental for understanding the world as things visible, and the ability to hear, and/or
to listen, is as indispensable for analyzing cultural formations – be they social, political, artistic, psychic or technological – as the ability to see.
Within traditional European philosophy, sound is categorized as our second sense,
and, especially in the West, our belief in a visually dominated culture still prevails.
This hierarchy of the senses often becomes invested with a supremacist touch when
translated into a relationship between different cultures, for example, when “the
West” is conceptualized as primarily visually structured, while other societies are
considered to place more importance on the acoustic dimension. In academia,
sounds and orality are often subjugated to the visual and/or theorized in opposition
to images and the written word. In our daily lives we care more about the way we look
than how our voices sound. We worry about the effects of violent or sexually explicit
(media) images while easily forgetting that sounds can have an (ideological) impact
as well. One of the underlying assumptions of this volume is that sounds, noises and
voices are neither natural nor neutral nor immediate, but complex cultural constructions that may lend themselves to processes of individualization, as well as to political, religious or ideological instrumentalization or resistance.
Sonic Interventions concentrates on how sounds intervene with notions of gender
and race as critical categories of identity formation. The volume’s third focal point,
place, draws attention to the fact that neither identity nor the processes which shape
it can be understood independently of a setting, either historical, or social or topographical. It was not until the 1990s that an “auditory turn” in the humanities occurred.
Sonic Interventions: An Introduction | 11
Since then, scholarly interest in the exploration of sound and its phenomenology, in
voice, in the poetics of sound in culture, history, and in cultural politics, in the formation
of acoustic communities and soundscapes, and in the links between sound, place, and
affective life, continues to grow.1 The emerging and increasingly diversified field of what
has been called “sound studies” covers a much broader area than the traditional discipline of musicology, and precisely because it has not yet been institutionalized, new perspectives from diverse and, at times, unexpected corners are constantly added to the
academic discourse on sound. We welcome this characteristic interdisciplinarity of the
field as a productive condition for exchange, dialogue and mutual enrichment between
the various disciplines and perspectives.
The volume includes contributions by scholars of musicology, literature, philosophy, film and media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, American and ethnic
studies. All of these articles tune in to the relevance of sound for either racial and/or
gendered identity in one or several cultural contexts that stretch topographically from
the US and the Caribbean over Spain and old “Al Andaluz” to The Netherlands,
Germany, Hungary, Israel, and historically from the 6th century AD to the present.
They show it is possible to move beyond the theoretical dichotomies between the
visual and the sonic, the oral and the literate and, instead, do justice to the diverse
and often multi-faceted manifestations of sonic interventions.
Sound and Race
Much of black modernity is characterized by its obsession with sound, and sound within
literature (Weheliye 1–72). Music and orality figure prominently in black literature as
sources, topics, and act as models for writing, providing a sense of rhythmic, colloquial, or musically inspired texts. Research on sound, in terms of black musics and orality, really began to gain scholarly recognition within the academy in the eighties, where
theories of analysis based on history and the cultural, the black vernacular, were proposed, rather than unreflectively imposing European theories on to black literature.2
Sound in the text, in terms of the oral tradition, was also asserted.3 In the
Caribbean, orality has been linked to 20th century neocolonial affirmations of identity and nation-state formation (Brathwaite; Glissant). The assertion and appreciation
for indigenous and creolized cultures, language and literary works was part of these
movements. In African literature, there was a shift from merely documenting the continuity between literature and oral forms, to analyses that take into account the
“strategic deployment” of orality in literature practiced by its authors (Quayson). In
the United States, the performative, conversational aspect of the oral, particularly
Gates’ notion of the “speakerly text,” had tremendous influence on the analyses of
African American texts. The recognition of folklore as part of a black literary tradition
helped in developing different approaches to African American literature with a view
toward communal affiliations, and the prominence of voice and dialogue.
12 | Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith and Marijke de Valck
The cultural field became the ground for exploration of black subjectivity, and
music became an important site for research in race studies. Music and signs other
than linguistic were also explored in research on African American literature. These
studies gained momentum through the 1990s with two major works on music, Black
Noise by Tricia Rose, and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Black Noise was a precursor
to a developing genre of works about of rap music and its importance to American
culture. Rose made astute analyses of rap music’s post industrial, urban black roots,
and its relationship to black culture in the North East part of the United States.
Rose makes clear rap’s continuity with black vernacular forms that rely on repetition, rhythm, orality and percussion. She also states that rap blurs the line “between
literate and oral modes of communication by altering and sustaining important
aspects of African American folk orality” (85). The literature-based music technology,
the high tech equipment, beat boxes, electronics, and the practices and innovations
that accompany them, alter and inform orality, while the oral performance makes the
technology “tactile.” In other words, “rap simultaneously makes technology oral, and
technologizes orality” (86). Rap is where orality and music meet in this volume, and
is represented strongly here in terms of a gendered critique.
In Black Noise, however, there is little mention of women, or more importantly, gendered critiques of rap lyrics, or hip hop culture. While Rose devotes a chapter to
women in rap, and their up and coming status in the music industry, the focus is on
their dialogue with black male rappers, and their existence within the field, rather
than on a strong critique of how women are (mis)represented in this musical genre.
There are several articles included in this volume that deal with rap, race and gender,
in the United States, as well as an analysis that critiques the various ways gender
and ethnicity come into play in these appropriations of an African American art form
outside of the United States, and also an examination of its now world-wide appeal.
Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, also published in the 1990s, was concerned with establishing the centrality of blackness to modernity, as opposed to understandings of
modernity that place blackness and slavery outside of it, where slavery has been construed as an ancient hold over of the past. This marginalization seemed to be
reflected in the marginalization of black cultural productions in general, particularly
those whose formations were historically coterminous with enforced illiteracy. In addition to critiquing the academic predilection for the textual, and shifting music to the
analytical fore, Gilroy took a transnational approach to his research on of black subjectivity. These shifts would come to influence African American studies, its attempts at
rewriting modernity, a concern with transnationalism, and of course, a focus on the sonic.
An approach to black studies that explores internationalism, and the cross-cultural, as
an important strategy of analysis, is represented in this volume.
Recently there has been a veritable explosion of music and poetics in black
expressive culture, what Brent Hayes Edwards calls a “jazz poetics.”4 In his introduction
to an issue of the journal Callaloo, devoted entirely to the subject of “jazz studies
through its approaches to literature,” Edwards’ attempts to define a broader more
inclusive category for sound in black literature in general:
If we can define a black poetics, it may be elaborated most consistently in what
Albert Murray terms practices of “reciprocal voicing” – the relations between the words
and the music, sound and sense, in black expressive practice. A black poetics works
that interface, in other words, mining the fertile edge between “orality” and “literacy.”5
Edwards’ black poetics refers to the influences of sound in literature, in terms of style, its
mimetic function, rhythm and rhyme, call and response, as well as repetition and revision.
Following the dramatic import of African American theory on the fields of race, ethnicity and sound studies, race, in terms of blackness, is well represented in this volume. It is always conceived as a social relationality rather than an identity one
somehow possesses. To use Saidiya Hartman’s words,
Blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among
blacks, whites and others, and the practices that produce racial difference. Blackness
marks a social relationship of dominance and abjection and potentially one of redress
and emancipation; it is a contested figure at the very center of social struggle.6
Hartman’s work is concerned with a particularly hurtful history and its effects; the
pain of the traumatic Middle Passage, slavery, stolen bodies, loss of origins, history,
family, and the lack of continuity. In terms of communal identifications, cultural memory (Eyerman) and cross-cultural engagement in political and aesthetic practices,
slavery is a point of continual return for the negotiation of black subjectivity.
The repercussions of this history are still felt, not only in terms of economic
oppression and racism, but also as psychical and emotional effects, that Anne Anlin
Cheng, in her book, The Melancholy of Race, describes as “racial grief.” The response
to the predicament of social objectification and invisibility is a kind of mourning, and
reflections on these conditions are often captured in the aural realm of black cultural
production and are explored in this volume in terms of blues and its interaction with
theater, and jazz music in literature. Sound produces innovative ways of theorizing the
subject that do not necessarily privilege the linguistic or visual sphere. Acoustic histories signified in music, scatting, or “monin” provide counter-histories to those that
are written. For critics who work on sound and subjectivity, it is not the goal to replace
language, or the visual, with sound as the preferred mode of discursivity in apprehending the gendered, racialized subject. Rather, sound contributes new insights to
these fields while questioning their primacy.
Ethnicity is also represented in this volume, often in reference to black identity politics and art forms in the United States. This connection to African American and black
diaspora studies is a unique approach to Roma studies, and it is explored here in two
articles that deal with the Roma in Eastern/Central and Western Europe, and rap music.
The best-known studies on the Roma uncover and explain the Romani genocide during
World War II (Lewy; Zimmerman). Other studies continue to focus on their marginalization, with a view toward historical oppression, and their persistent discrimination after
the Cold War, as well as the disciplining, governmental structures that continue, despite
the political and economic restructuring that attended the overthrow of communism
(Barany).
Romani agency and attempts at self-determination, in their negotiations with governments and larger, majority populations, are an understudied area. This has only
recently received academic attention where ethnic and political mobilizations have been
examined.7 The articles in this volume add to the scant research on Roma attempts at
resistance and self-fashioning. Interventions in media and representations are examined here. The ways in which Romani groups utilize the arts is discussed as well as the
dangers of national/state reappropriation of these cultural productions.
A recent trend in Islamic scholarship has been to examine women and their place
within Islam in various countries. Several approaches can be observed, including sociological and anthropological studies on Islam and modernity that include problematizing
Western views on, and explorations of the politics behind headscarves, women’s roles
and education. There have also been controversial, liberal readings and interpretations
of the Qu’ran by women who critique patriarchal interpretations.8 Closer to the research
on the understudied role of the acoustic and its relevance to Islam, are the studies dealing with orality and Islam. There is an anthropological body of work on oral tribal poetry
that includes examinations of Arab, Islamic identities (Abu-Lughod; Caton). Recently, a
claim to the importance of orality to Islamic law and practices has been asserted
(Souaiaia), as well as an analysis of the timbre of the voice in relation to Islamic cultural
events (McPherson). Gender and orality, with regard to Islam, are, however, still seldomly
explored. This type of analysis is represented in Sonic Interventions by a discussion of
the interpellative force of recitation and prayer on religious identity formation.
Sound and Place
The study of sound and space/place has been given considerable attention as early
as the late 1970s. Murray Schafer’s groundbreaking work on the notion of “soundscape” (Schafer) distinguished between the pre-industrial soundscape, in which
sounds were clearly audible (high-fi) and the modern soundscape, where individual
sounds were muffled (low-fi). According to Schafer, the conditions of the modern
soundscape were schizophrenic due to the split between original sounds and their
electro-acoustic reproduction. As Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld have pointed out,
Schafer’s pessimistic outlook has been countered by recent contributions to sound
studies that “offer a more optimistic view in which there is the possibility of control
over one’s sonic accompaniment to daily life.”9 The introduction of radio, for example,
allowed the middle classes to enjoy their leisure time in the privacy of their own
homes, far away from the noise and agitation in public theatres (Douglas).
REGISTRAR SILENCED DUE TO RACE REGAINS VOICE
Racism comes in many forms. In contemporary Western societies there is racial
discrimination in selection procedures, ethnic exclusion from social circles, verbal
pestering and even physical assault. If one looks at the way sonic strategies are
appropriated for racial purposes, then “silencing” strikes as one of the most
common and radical. In Belgium a shocking incident occurred in the winter of
2007. Several couples refused to be joined in matrimony by Wouter van Bellingen,
the first black registrar in the Flemish city of Sint-Niklaas. These couples, in other
words, deprived him of performing the perlocutionary speech-act which his office
requires him to perform in public. He was silenced in his regular activities and
responsibilities because of the color of his skin. The incident became a news item
in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Van Bellingen was invited to talk shows and
received support from many indignant citizens; people decided to sign up for
marriage with him. Although upset, Van Bellingen said he would not file a complaint
against the refusing couples, because he did not want to turn the incident into a
“symbolic dossier.” This position seems to make sense in another way as well.
Considering that the legal steps are predominantly a red-tape process (with
perhaps a short moment of spoken judgment), one could argue that the benefits
are small. What is needed to counterbalance the radical act of silencing is not
writing, but an equally radical public act of reclaiming the silenced voice. This is
precisely the strategy Van Bellingen chose. He appeared on television, the platform
for public speaking per se, and performed a public marriage on the big square of
Sint Niklaas on 21st March, the International Day against Racism. In doing so he
reclaimed the public voice that had been denied to him before. On the 21st March,
hundreds of couples joined in the mass ceremony in St. Niklaas’ most prominent
public location in protest against racism. Most of the participants renewed their
vows some used the public protest to actually get married.
Algemeen Dagblad, Monday 5th February 2007
Many of the studies on sound and space deal with (the history of) new technologies. Emily Thompson, for example, has explored how the influences between
acoustics, new technologies and architecture brought about the new sonic experiences and the “soundscapes of modernity” (Thompson). Jonathan Sterne focused
on sound reproducing technologies – the telephone, phonograph and microphone –
and the way these constitute a distinguished modern sound culture (Sterne). Other
studies dealt with the relation between the sonic and the spatial in installation art
(Pichler; Leitner, Sound: Space) or paid special attention to the audience’s resonating
bodies (Leitner, Kopfräume⫽Headscapes). Theater and dance studies have drawn
attention to the role of bodies in perceiving sound as time-based acoustic-geometric
space. Under the umbrella of sound studies we, in short, find a rich and varied
palette of works that deal with space and place.
The authors in this volume take up many of the issues that have been analyzed in previous works and, in addition, bring them to bear on questions of cultural identity, often
understood as racial or gendered. Although the study of sound in its spatial dimensions
cannot be considered a novelty, knowing the legacy of work on soundscapes, and the various social and political manifestations that occur as result of the specificity of history
and geography, i.e. place, the articles we present here do succeed in calling attention to
sound as a cultural construction. They show, on the one hand, that the links between
sound and places can be influenced, mixed culturally or colored politically, and promulgate, on the other hand, that our understanding of these cultural and political practices
can greatly benefit from “sound” academic research on such sonic interventions.
Some of the articles deal with contemporary musical practices and the way they
interact with different spatial (local and national) influences. It is shown that cultural
resistance or cultural divergences tend to come with this kind of musical hybridity.
Hip-hop in particular, seems to lend itself to being appropriated by various musicians
worldwide in support of their local and national identities. Thus, new hybrid genres
blend African-American global hip hop culture with regional musical elements, mobilizing them transculturally and offering alternatives for homogenizing mainstream
musical collective identities. Like most recent work in sound studies, the perspective
that is offered on the emerging genre of world music is ultimately a positive one. The
concept of sonic interventions, however, does not close the door to criticism. In the
case of world music it is been shown that beneath creative appropriation and cultural
diversification, other, less heterogeneous, openly normative or even oppressive agendas may be hidden. This is where the appropriation of sound to cross from one place
to another becomes less important than the appropriation of certain places by
sound.
Finally, the volume counters the trend to focus on the individual listening experience. In recent sound studies some serious attention has been devoted to contemporary listening practices. Michael Bull, for example, showed how people employ their
personal audio-sets to block externals sounds and impose control over their environment (Bull). The papers in this volume complement his excellent work by also studying collective listening practices. They point out that a crucial role is reserved for the
event where performer(s) and audience interact or, in other words, where the act of listening to music becomes a performance in its own right. It is here that musical hybridities become sensori-bodily experiences and sounds may infuse – unconsciously or
with full political awareness – cultural identities. Here again, the articles in this volume
strive to demonstrate that the influence sound can exercise on collective consciousness may be employed in radically differing political contexts, on the side of oppressive regimes just as readily as on the side of cultural resistance.
Sound and Gender
Contrary to the wealth of research which has been done on sound/orality as a
shaping element of racial identity, that investigates the poetics of sound in culture,
SOUNDS UNDER SURVEILLANCE
In the twenty-first century visual surveillance is a widespread and well-known
practice. Every day many of our actions are recorded by an increasing number
of cameras; in urban areas, in public transportation, at work, in shops when
withdrawing money from an ATM – at all these occasions is it likely we are under
the surveillance of a camera. In the Netherlands, the first city to implement
permanent camera surveillance in urban spaces was Groningen in 2000.
The experiment was considered a success and by 2007 the entertainment
district had sixteen “electronic eyes.” Some of these are static others can
revolve 360 degrees to allow security personnel to focus its gaze on the center
of disturbances. Where visual surveillance has become a common tool
in maintaining public order, surveillance of sounds is (still) a novelty. Techniques
have long been optimized for intelligence purposes – as the multiple prize-winning
film Das Leben Der Anderen (Germany: Henckel von Donnersmarck 2006) on
the system of observation in former East Germany elegantly shows – but as a
practice, sonic surveillance has not yet crossed over from crime and defense
to civil departments. Why is this so? Is “listening in” assessed differently from
visual observation and, as a result, are other considerations prioritized? Or is it
only a matter of time before the surveillance society extends its grip to our
“second sense”? In the Netherlands, recent newspaper reports seem to suggest
the latter. Groningen, the first city to implement camera surveillance, launched a
pilot project in 2007 to test “digital ears.” Some of the sixteen cameras in the
inner city were equipped with microphones that can detect signals of violence,
such as screaming, yelling and cries of distress. The technology is already quite
refined, because most ambulance sirens, motorcycles and barking dogs are
recognized as not-relevant (non-violent) noise. Its success – the implementation of
sonic surveillance led to 67 detected reports of violence in five weeks – is not
unlikely to spur the interest of other customers, be the governmental or
commercial.
NRC Next, Monday 2 April 2007
history and culture politics10 or to the host of publications that establish and work
with the concept of the “soundscape” in relation to “acoustic communities,”11 the
role sound plays for the constitution of gender identity has been relatively neglected
to date.
The Auditory Culture Reader’s index, for example, contains neither an entry for
“sound and gender” nor for “female voice” nor for “male voice” (Bull and Back).
There is, however, one entry for “voice, mother’s,” which refers readers to a two-pagelong subsection in Vic Seidler’s article on “Diasporic Sounds”:
The first sounds that you hear as a baby find a deep resonance. It is through hearing
the sound of the mother’s voice that you know where you are in the world. It is through
this voice that you feel comfort and security. […] Mothers sing the same songs to their
babies that their mothers sang to them.12
Seidler’s key interest clearly does not lie with questions like “does it matter if the first
sounds you hear as a baby are uttered by a male or a female voice?” or “what impact
do the voices a baby hears have on the development of its gender identity?” or “what
makes a voice into a ‘mother’s voice’? Pitch? Timbre? Love? Genes?” or “can a man
speak in ‘a mother’s voice’?” or “Do fathers sing the same songs to their babies that
their mothers sang to them?” A few pages later, Seidler writes “Often young men
learn to keep their silence so that they will not express the hurt they carry to others,
and will do their best to hide it from themselves.”13 The very phrasing implies that
this might neither be true for all men nor might it be true for men only. Yet again,
questions like “which cultural/historical/social factors help to gender silence as
‘masculine’?” or “if silence is gendered masculine, what does that mean for women
who refuse to suffer without making a sound or for men who hide their pain from
themselves or others by keeping silent?” or “how might a dichotomy of silence⫽masculine vs. noise⫽feminine be deconstructed?” remain unasked.
One could argue that it is hardly fair to pick on Seidler for not dealing with questions of sound and gender when his topic is sound and diasporic identity. But the
point here is not to blame Seidler; the point is to realize that there might be questions about gender in the context of sound studies that have not yet been asked. In
other words, although it seems possible to write about mothers’ voices and young
men’s silence without reflecting on gender’s relevance for sound or sound’s relevance for gender identity, it might be more productive to do so.
One might argue that Seidler’s is only one of twenty-nine articles in The Auditory
Culture Reader. But since the other articles in this important collection do not show
any more interest in gender, Seidler’s turning a deaf ear can be considered symptomatic. When gender does get mentioned in The Auditory Culture Reader, it is in the
context of staging “otherness” as, for example, in an observation made in Mark
Smith’s article of the “Heard worlds of Antebellum America”:
At base, what was deemed noise – and who was noisy – was very much shaped by
class relations, which were […] influenced by considerations of race and gender.
Gentlemen North and south [sic] blasted putative ladies for their ‘love of little tittletattle’ and ‘gossiping tales,’ but remained convinced that ‘doubtless, there are many
ladies … who do not come under the denomination of gossips, which prefer silence to
scandal.14
In quoting these statements from a journal article originally published in 1811, Smith
points to the fact that some sounds (noise, gossip), here, are gendered (feminized).
But although he also implies that this gendering both reflects and helps to stabilize
a sexist (and classist and racist) power structure, he does not pursue a closer investigation in the direction of gender and sound.
To remain fair, the editors of The Auditory Culture Reader do, albeit implicitly, address
the category of gender in a two-page sub-section of their introduction. Tellingly, it is titled
“Dangerous Sounds” and draws attention to the fact that “sound and its reception are
infused with cultural values. Just as sight is understood in terms of scopophilia, so sound
has its own narrative of desire.”15 On these two pages, Bull and Back comment on
Horkheimer’s/Adorno’s reading of the sirens’ episode in Homer’s Odyssey. But the implicit
gendering of both desire (masculine) and danger (feminine) remains uncommented. What
also stays completely beneath the horizon of observation, here, is the quoted statement’s
tacit assumption that desire necessarily takes place between men and women. There is,
in other words, absolutely no consciousness of the heteronormative ideology at work
here. A question like “how may sound represent male/male or female/female desire?” is
as completely out of ear-shot as “which roles does sound play in the de/stabilization of
the dichotomy which opposes heterosexual and homosexual desire?” Also, there is no
indication of an understanding that calling the section “Dangerous Sounds” reproduces
and perpetuates stereotypes concerning gender and sexuality rather than analyzing them.
But it distorts facts to keep criticizing only The Auditory Culture Reader for having a deaf
spot when it comes to gender, since this is true for a great number of publications in the
expanding field of what has been called “Sound Studies,” John M. Picker’s study of
Victorian Soundscapes being the rare and laudable exception.
It seems to be no coincidence that the brief sound bites readers are offered by Bull
and Back on gender deals with the sirens. Indeed, there is one branch of research on
sound that is generally more interested in questions of gendering than others, namely
studies which analyze the voice, its myths, fictionalizations and performances.16 The
voices of Echo or Orpheus, of the Sirens, of the opera queen, or the castrato singer are,
as a rule, investigated as gendered voices or voices that question or criticize the gendersystem. Most of the articles in this volume which comment on the intersections between
sound and gender start out from vocal phenomena as well, while dealing with a wide variety of voices that sing, moan, chant, speak, imitate, recite, rap, are recorded, sampled,
played back and distorted while being gendered or de-gendered, or changed from one
gender to another. By analyzing these voices, the contributors ask new questions about
how music or literary texts that focus on the sonic, explicitly or implicitly, use gender as
a category and – moving in the opposite direction – how these texts and musical pieces
try to undermine gender as a stable category by using discourses on sound. But this volume’s articles also investigate the gendering of non-vocal sounds, the sounding out of
gender, and the ways of intersection between gender, race and place through sound that
is not voiced, but whistled, percussive, played or electronically produced.
Overview
The first sub-section, titled “Resonance – Politics – Resistance” assembles three articles that address music – as diverse as jazz, calypso, propagandistic song, and rap –
as politicized sound which may produce a sympathetic reverberation in the audience,
provoke opposing repercussions of resistance or national identifications.
Fred Moten’s article on “The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)” explores
divergences in Afro-diasporic culture(s) through an analysis of two recordings:
Trinidadian calypsonian Rupert Westmore Grant’s recording of “Crisis in Arkansas”
and African American jazz bassist Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus.” Moten illuminates what to emulate and what to change in the black diasporic tradition of transoceanic aesthetic and political endeavors.
Carolyn Birdsall’s contribution, “ ‘Affirmative Resonances’ in the City? Sound,
Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany”, investigates how sound was
deployed by the Nazi party to discipline crowds and safeguard mass support for their
political regime. Looking at collective singing and cheering, loudspeaker technology
as well as the call-and-response-interactions between orator and crowd, Birdsall
CONFLICT OVER CALL TO PRAYER
In March 2007 a Vlaardingen-based (Netherlands) mosque requested to be
allowed the use of loudspeakers for its call to prayer. In Arabic countries Muslim
believers are called to prayer five times a day: at dawn, midday, in the middle of
the afternoon, just after sunset and at nightfall. Traditionally it is the muezzin who
mounts the stairs of the minaret and calls into all directions to “hasten to prayer.”
But now many mosques have turned to using loudspeakers. The request in
Vlaardingen was made for Friday afternoon, the most important call to prayer of
the week. It caught attention although mosques are increasingly visible in the
Dutch urban landscapes – these architecturally traditional houses of prayer are
usually built in areas with large Muslim communities. No mosque, however, had
asked to be granted a sonic presence in the urban soundscape explicitly before; a
sonic presence on an equal footing with church bells, that is. The request spurred
discussion. Other mosques in the same city were reported to be considering
sound-technology as well. The mayor took a liberal position, announcing he would
not impose restrictions unless surrounding residents were to suffer demonstrable
acoustic inconvenience; or if some community spokesperson objected to their life
space being transgressed by these unfamiliar sounds. The event was exploited for
political purposes as well. Several conservative and right-wing politicians grasped
the opportunity to play on feelings of fear of a growing Islamic influence.
Suggestive questions were posed in the Second Chamber: “How do you evaluate
this development, in which loud calls to Islamic prayer enter the public domain?
Do these emphatic calls create a climate that is alienating to a lot of Dutch
people and which may increase the tension between the different cultural and
religious communities? Would it not be wise to refrain from such calls to prayer?
Does the constitution offer possibilities for interdiction?” Here a religiously
intolerant attitude is masked by one-sidedly postulating “other” sounds as
loud and intrusive. In response, the Minister of Interior Affairs pointed at the
constitutional right to use sound, by ringing bells for example, in order to call
believers to religious ceremonies.
De Telegraaf, Tuesday 27 March 2007
shows how these musical and non-musical sounds were effectively used to legitimize
the Nazi party.
Marisa Parham’s contribution, “ ‘You Can’t Flow Over This’: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic
Illusion,” examines spoken word performance on The Roots’ 1995 album Do You
Want More??!? exploring rap music through genre, oral and written poetry. Parham
reconsiders rap as an oral form, and offers an important gender critique in terms of
authorship based on an analysis of Rucker’s performance of “The Unlocking.”
The second triplet of articles, gathered in a sub-section titled “Incantations:
Gender and Identity,” brings to attention how repetitive vocal practice participates in
forming (gendered) identity. Incantation is a key concept in all three contributions, yet
the cultural contexts differ dramatically: Islamic recital practice; individualized selfhealing of a traumatized psyche represented in secular literature; and professional
training for Western opera-singing.
Through a discussion of Levinas’ concept of God, and Althusser’s theory of interpellation, Mahmut Mutman’s article on “Reciting: The Voice of the Other” explores
the importance of the voice in Islam and in particular the Qur’anic recitation. The
article asserts the hearing of the voice of the other as part of the monotheistic religious experience, positing this voice as feminine and questioning the patriarchal
foundations of the Islamic and other monotheistic narratives.
Sylvia Mieszkowski’s article on “Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds” analyzes
how sound as noise, sound as chant and sound as mediated voice affect the restitution of gendered identity after traumatic loss. The psychoanalytically informed reading of Don DeLillo’s (post-) modernist novella The Body Artist introduces the concept
of the “sonic symptom” and proposes that the protagonist’s game with her friend’s
answering machine may be read as an aural version of Freud’s “fort/da-game.”
Milla Tiainen’s article, while also dealing with questions of individual gendered
identity, shifts the focus of attention from literature to opera, and hence away from
representations of the voice in writing, back to actual sound-waves and their interference with the physical materiality. In “Corporeal Forces, Sexual Differentiations: New
Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing, and Subjectivity” she investigates how
sound, more precisely, how the production of a particular kind of vocal sounds, helps
to shape a multitude of sexual differences in the body that produces these sounds.
Sub-section three, titled “Performing Subjectivity: Literature, Race and Mourning,”
consists of three articles on African-American and Afro-Caribbean literature that deal
with sound and affect; with the searching for, expressing of and relating to racial identity through forms of musicality, or orality, that transform mourning in reaction to discrimination, oppression, aggression and physical as well as psychic suffering.
David Copenhafer’s article on “Invisible Music (Ellison)” addresses the complex
interaction of the audible and the visual in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, seeking
to grasp the dynamics of race in music and figural language.
Soyica Diggs’ “Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight” contextualizes
James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie by placing it in a tradition of African
American fiction that makes use of musical sound as a model for both individual and
collective recuperation. In this article, Diggs uses psychoanalytic theory to investigate how the play, by using the blues as a metaphor, renders audible the affective
and social histories of lynching victims as an acoustic legacy of mourning.
Joy Smith’s “Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Folktale in Ellen Ombre’s
short fiction ‘Fragments’ ” explores the “strategic deployment” of a well-known folktale by writers during the colonial years in the former Dutch colony of Surinam, as well
as the story’s resurfacing in the postcolonial years in the Netherlands. The article
discusses the folktale’s continual emergence and suggests it acts as a powerful
force for Surinamese communal affiliations, namely sonic interpellation, while asserting an oral poetics within Ombre’s short story.
The articles assembled in sub-section four, titled “Mixing Music: Event, Place and
Transculturality,” share as their object of investigation the community-building musical
event characterized through techniques of mixing and blending. While the first two contributions present one positive and one critical reading of new genres inspired by
Hip Hop, the last article emphasizes the importance of place – both spatial and temporal – for the Dancehall Session.
In tracing two musical traditions – that of hip hop and that of flamenco – Susanne
Stemmler’s article on “ ‘Sonido ciudadísimo’: Black noise Andalusian style in contemporary Spain” investigates the cultural matrix that allows these traditions, by
combining their elements, to both open up a space for the aesthetic performance of
identity and allow for cultural resistance through a new urban sound.
As a complement to this, Anikó Imre’s exploration of “Hip Hop Nation and Gender
Politics,” takes a critical look at rap music’s deployment through identity politics,
focusing on case studies in the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, and the United States.
On the one hand, Imre agrees with Stemmler in her assessment of contemporary
world music as characterized by hybridity. On the other hand, she shows that beneath
the nationalist appropriation and cultural diversification of hip-hop as a global genre,
another, less heterogeneous agenda is often played out. On this second level, which
becomes a target for feminist critique and resistance, masculine (and militaristic)
identity is normalized and sold as “natural,” while alternatives are devalued.
It is precisely one such alternative that Julian Henriques’ article comments on,
when he claims that regular Jamaican norms – including conservative sexual ones –
may be temporarily suspended during the Dancehall sessions. Queer performances
are acted out in the otherwise rather homophobic Jamaican society. “Situating
Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session” further demonstrates how the
heterogeneous performative practices of the Jamaican dance crowd are monitored
and manipulated by sensori-motor engineering techniques. While mixing and cutting,
the engineer “sounds out” the audience’s experience to decide which specific sound
may serve best to address the “Crowd.”
Presenting a volume on the impact sounds – both actual and represented in language, both musical and non-structured, both vocal and instrumental, both acoustically and electronically produced – may have in these contexts, we hope to make a
contribution that complements visual and literary approaches of understandings to
culture.
Notes
1. Sounding Out in 2002, Sounding Out 2 in
2004, Sonic Interventions in 2005, Sounding Out
3 in 2006, Körperwellen. Zur Resonanz als
Modell, Metapher und Methode (Bodywaves. On
Resonance as Model, Metaphor and Method) in
2006, Sound Effects. The Oral/Aural of Literatures
in English in 2006, and Klangwelt Shakespeare
(Shakespeare’s Sonic World) in 2007.
8. Göle, Wadud, Mahmood.
9. Pinch and Bijsterveld 642.
10. Baker; Brathwaite; Gates; Gilroy; Rose;
Moten.
11. Schafer; Truax; Feld; S.J. Smith; Courbin;
B. Smith; M. Smith; Picker.
2. Baker; Mackey; Gates.
12. Seidler 399–400.
3. Brathwaite; Glissant; Mackey.
4. Edwards 5–7.
5. Edwards 5.
6. Hartman 56–57.
7. Fenton and May; Guy; Vermeersh.
13. Seidler 402.
14. M. Smith 140.
15. Bull and Back 7.
16. Koestenbaum; Kittler; Gehring; Weigel.
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Resonance – Politics –
Resistance
The New International of
Rhythmic Feeling(s)
Fred Moten
ABSTRACT
The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)
Rupert Westmore Grant, the great Trinidadian Calypsonian known as Lord Invader,
recorded “Crisis in Arkansas” in March of 1959. A couple of months later, bassist/
composer Charles Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus.” This article takes up the
convergence of Mingus’ and Lord Invader’s musical indictments of the infamous
former governor of Arkansas, who tried to block black students from attending the allwhite Little Rock Central High School in 1957, and argues that the convergence reveals
articulate divergence in aesthetic and political ideology within Afro-Diasporic culture/s
and illuminates some of what remains to emulate and correct in the tradition of
anti-colonial, anti-racist, trans-oceanic aesthetic and political endeavor.
This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities,
Cities, Men. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay,
ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather,
which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of
the light of God, in which the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld,
only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not
threatened with this annhiliation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they
move upon the same poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made
immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keepe them from sinking to this center,
Annihilation. (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 51)
The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s) | 31
At the edge of the spiral of musicians Probe sat cross-legged on a blue cloth, his
soprano sax resting against his inner knee, his afro-horn linking his ankles like a
bridge. The afro-horn was the newest axe to cut the deadwood of the world. But Probe,
since his return from exile, had chosen only special times to reveal the new sound.
There were more rumors about it than there were ears and souls that had heard the
horn speak. Probe’s dark full head tilted toward the vibrations of the music as if the
ring of sound from the six wailing pieces was tightening, creating a spiraling circle.
The black audience, unaware at first of its collectiveness, had begun to move in a
soundless rhythm as if it were the tiny twitchings of an embryo. The waiters in the club
fell against the wall, shadows, dark pillars holding up the building and letting the free
air purify the mind of the club.
The drums took an oblique. Magwa’s hands, like the forked tongue of a dark snake,
probed the skins, probed the whole belly of the coming circle. Haig’s alto arc, rapid
piano incisions, Billy’s thin green flute arcs and tangents, Stace’s examinations of his
own trumpet discoveries, all fell separately, yet together, into a blanket which Mojohn
had begun weaving on bass when the set began. The audience breathed, and Probe
moved into the inner ranges of the sax.
Outside the Sound Barrier Club three white people were opening the door.
(Henry Dumas, “Will the Circle be Unbroken?”105)
Artworks’ paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself. The movement of artworks must be
at a standstill and thereby become visible. Their immanent processual character – the
legal process that they undertake against the merely existing world that is external to
them – is objective prior to their alliance with any party.
(Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 176–77)
Rupert Westmore Grant, the Trinidadian calypsonian known as Lord Invader, recorded
“Crisis in Arkansas” in March of 1959.1 Two months later, bassist/composer Charles
Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus.”2 The convergence of Mingus’ and Lord Invader’s
musical indictments of Orval E. Faubus, the infamous former Governor of Arkansas,
who tried to prevent black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High
School in 1957, is of interest because of what it reveals of the articulate divergences
in aesthetic and political ideology that animate Afro-diasporic culture. Mingus’ politics
are complicated by something Paul Gilroy has diagnosed elsewhere as “AfricanAmerican exceptionalism” – a parochialism derived, in part, from a sense of messianic
singularity – even as the explicit political assertion embedded in calypso is something
to which Mingus’ protest impulse corresponds, and even as its musical forms and techniques are the object of Mingus’ ambivalent desire (Gilroy 1–40). Meanwhile, Lord
Invader’s pride in his and his music’s West Indian origins is infused with its own complex and problematic national politics of rhythm, even as it exhibits profound transnational solidarity. The coincidence of their attention to Faubus occurs against the
32 | Fred Moten
historical backdrop of a triangle trade in bodies and labor that Cold War politics updates
into the trilateral movement of imperial troops, a long trajectory of catastrophe that still
engenders the resistance that prompted it. In examining this coincidence, and placing
it within the context of Lord Invader’s and Mingus’ musical careers and lineages, I hope
to attend to some of what is left for us to emulate and correct in the tradition of anticolonial, anti-racist, trans-oceanic aesthetic and political endeavor.
That Afro-diasporic resistance to the very conditions of possibility of the African
diaspora often manifests itself as a kind of internal strife – between musicians and
instruments, between (and within) locales and their corresponding styles, and
between freedom and confinement in the constitution of political aesthetics – is a
matter that I would address with a kind of wary celebration. To accomplish this, I
must also consider the relation between Mingus’ political assertion, his formulation
of the idea of “rotary perception” – a theory and practice of rhythmic flexibility in the
music that he refused to call jazz – and his denigration of another great figure of the
Los Angeles musical diaspora, Ornette Coleman. An international relay of seduction
and marketing will become apparent here, one in which Mingus sees both Coleman
and the calypsonians as competitors and interlopers. Here, appositional articulations –
however vexed, however burdened by the trace of what they would appose – emerge
in (or, more precisely, as and by way of) the space between scenes, in intervals determined by barriers of sound and color.
As the acerbic lyrics he throws in Faubus’ direction show, in addition to his brilliant
musical achievements, Mingus was a genius at showing contempt. My concerns
begin with the fact that some of his sharpest rebukes are intermittently and ambivalently directed towards certain key figures in a richly differentiated set of movements
called “free jazz,” particularly Coleman.3 When especially intent upon abusing
Coleman’s musicianship, Mingus called Coleman a “calypso player.” Here are two
such instances, one from a June 1964 interview with the French magazine Jazz, the
other recalled in Tonight at Noon, the memoir of Mingus’ widow Sue Graham Mingus:
“Don’t talk to me about Ornette Coleman. There are a bunch of musicians in the U.
S. like him who are incapable of reading music and who have his particular approach.
Coleman is a calypso player. Besides, he’s West Indian. He doesn’t have anything to do
with Kansas City, Georgia or New Orleans. He doesn’t play southern music. He might
have come from Texas but that doesn’t stop his family from being calypso, the same as
Sonny Rollins’s. All these musicians have, because of their origins, a feeling that is
entirely different from ours. Sonny, at the beginning of his career, had a lot of difficulties. He copied Bird frantically. Now, fortunately, he’s found his way and got himself
together. To return to Ornette, he can’t play a theme as simple as “Body and Soul.” He
belongs, along with Cecil Taylor, to the category of instrumentalists who are incapable
of interpreting a piece with chords and an established progression. I remember trying
to play with him. Kenny Dorham and Max Roach were with me that day. We started
“All the Things You Are” but at the end of a few measures Ornette Coleman couldn’t
keep tempo or follow the chords. He was completely lost. Let him play calypsos.4”
I met Charles Mingus shortly before midnight in July 1964. I’d gone down to the Five
Spot, a jazz club in lower Manhattan, because the producer of a film I was acting in had
commissioned a jazz soundtrack from saxophonist Ornette Coleman – at least he
thought he had commissioned a soundtrack – and my friend Sam Edwards, who was
working on the film, suggested I check out the scene […].
Mingus called for a bottle of Bordeaux – his own, which he’d evidently brought from
home – and was standing so close to our stools that, as he drifted into wine talk with
the bartender, I stole a glance at his eyes. They were large innocent eyes, I thought, vulnerable and questioning, deep brown amused eyes that darted about the room while
he remained fixed on his conversation with the man at the bar. I decided to ask Mingus
whether he’d seen Ornette Coleman, the musician Sam and I were looking for, whose
free style of playing was still causing disputes among jazz fans.
“You mean the calypso player?” Mingus replied scornfully. He looked at me with
curiosity. “You his old lady?” he asked.
“His mother?” I said. I hadn’t the faintest notion what he meant.
Mingus laughed. “No, baby, I mean his woman, his lady.”
“He’s writing some music for a movie I’m in”
“You in a movie?” He seemed surprised. “With those teeth?”
Now I laughed. “It’s an underground movie,” I said. “They’re not fussy.” A missing
tooth in the back of my mouth was hardly visible – certainly it had never been singled
out by a curious stranger.
“Isn’t your daddy rich?” Mingus persisted. I looked sideways at Sam. He was sitting
straight-backed and noncommittal, staring at himself in the mirror across the bar. I
imagined he was waiting to see exactly how far down this communication failure was
headed. (S.G. Mingus 13, 18–19)
According to Mingus, Coleman exhibits an harmonic ignorance that is manifest as an
inability to navigate the music’s spatio-temporal structure. The origin of these faults
is double: idiomatic strangeness and technical incompetence. He doesn’t know
where or when he is because he comes from the wrong place, is of dubious, Antillean
origins even if he is, in fact, from Texas, even if he migrated, like Mingus, to New York
by way of Los Angeles. And so Coleman starts to fold, bending toward the center, the
absolute singularity of an inescapable point or beat. He loses force, loses drive, spiraling to nothing, to confusion. He can’t keep up, can’t return and so the very figure
of the black musical centrifuge stands in for what Mingus despises under the rubric
of the centripetal, the concentrique. Coleman’s music exhibits the deathly gravity that
goes with being out of the loop, outside the circle of occult musical understanding
and interpretive im/possibility that Frederick Douglass associates with knowledge of
slavery (Douglass 262–3),5 that Mingus associates with knowledge of the south, that
34 | Fred Moten
Henry Dumas associates with an embryonic collectivity, born of a range of exiles, that
is in part defined by the impenetrable attraction it seems to hold for a kind of
hipsterism that Dumas fictionalizes and Sue Graham Mingus autobiographically
records. But what if such rootless rootedness is the deliberate aesthetic effect and
affect of wanting out? When does the decaying orbit of centripetal force itself become
a kind of centrifugitivity? How would one know the difference? More precisely,
how would one inhabit such eccentric, such impossible, ground? This is the
essential question concerning the radical in general and black radicalism in
particular – it’s comportment towards a center that is, if not nothing, certainly not
there. But the question of such comportment cannot be dealt with by avoidance no
matter how vexing any or all particular addresses of it have been or might be.
Moreover, the absent but determinate centers of such structures are multiple. There
are many impossible origins toward which we must comport ourselves; this is what
might be called – in the full force of each of these terms – the question concerning
the scored, scarred, richly internally differentiated, authenticity of blackness. Mingus’
vexed, jealous, intolerant, ambivalent, beautifully ugly attendance to this question –
his out inhabitation of the center of the circle – is, therefore, of great interest
precisely because of its troubled and troubling nature. From the broken and unbroken
circle (of slavery) to the vexed structures of musical emancipation and subjection;
from Little Rock Central to the outskirts of town; from (Sweet) Home to Harlem: “the
thought of the outside,” in Foucault’s terms, is bound up with the centrifugal, the
fugal, the fugacious, the fugitive, the “destination out,” in Nathaniel Mackey’s terms
(Mackey, “Destination Out” 814).6 The experience of the (sparkle of the) outside that
resurfaced, according to Foucault, “at the very core of language” occurs in relation to
an upheaval that is authentic however much it is broken in the performance – at the
core of language and everywhere else – of blackness (Foucault, “The Thought from
Outside” 18).
Mingus’ anti-calypsonianism is all the more problematic if thought in relation to the
vast range of his Afro-Latin moods and modes, his Spanish tinge and turn and dinge, as
Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Reid-Pharr might say, his cante moro or cante jondo as
Mackey might say (after Garcia Lorca).7 Mingus’ spatio-aesthetic chauvinism had to do
with what he heard as a rhythmic and temporal structure whose vernacular linearity could
be said to bespeak both idiomatic singularity and elective bondage. Such dismissal of
the vernacular, which moves by placing its features under the sign of the Caribbean, is all
the more complex when seen within the context of Mingus compositions such as
“Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” “Los Mariachis” and “Haitian Fight Song” – songs
whose titles and musical character reveal a profound engagement with southern U.S.
and Caribbean Afro-diasporic vernaculars. At the same time, the supposed harmonic and
rhythmic deficits of calypso and free jazz mark a more general deficiency that Mingus
hears in Afro-diasporic music when compared to Euro-American concert music.
Sometimes it seems as if Mingus is in search of a certain capacity for freedom in music
that is to be found either in European development or Afro-diasporic primitivity, but neither in some combination of these imaginary poles nor in their deconstruction. And yet
Mingus’ proper musical home is precisely this interstitial, interarticulatory space that
“neither” or “naught” signifies. This is to say, among other things, that the nationalist
discourse on jazz is generally structured, above all, by a deep ambivalence. The way out
of the limitations of jazz turns out to be nothing other than the way back into those
limits that constitute its absent ground. There are two rhetorical strategies apparent in
Mingus’ discourse on those limits: one is the spatial chauvinism glanced at above; the
other is a kind of spatio-temporal anti-foundationalism in his musico-theoretical discourse out of which emerges the term “rotary perception.”8
Jazz biographer Brian Priestly argues that Mingus’ practice and theory of “rotary
perception” begins to emerge in an experience of the frontier, in the vexed circuits of
politico-economic, aesthetic and sexual desire that mark the U.S./Mexico border, its
cycles of conquest and conquest denial, its Afro-diasporic traces and erasures.
Mingus’ Tijuana Moods, an album recorded in late July and early August of 1957, just
a few weeks before the National Guard had to be deployed in order to escort nine
black kids into Little Rock Central, replicates that circuitry. Of one of the signature
tunes from that album Priestly writes:
Dizzy Moods, apparently conceived while driving to Tijuana, was described by
Mingus before it was ever recorded: “Try a song like Dizzy [Gillespie]’s “Woody’n You,”
for example, and make some changes; fit a church minor mode into the chord structure,” and in fact a bluesy phrase in B flat minor is reiterated throughout the D flat
circle of 4ths that constituted Gillespie’s original A section (based on the sequence of
Fats Waller’s “Blue Turning Grey” and “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling”). Mingus’ B section,
however, is in 6/4, but phrased in such a way that the 4/4 time-signature is still felt
subliminally, and it may be that the idea of adapting this polyrhythmic approach (hinted
at in the C sections of [Mingus’ composition] “Pithecanthropus”) surfaced after the trip
to Tijuana, since it is a fact that Mexican popular music is typically in multiples of three
syncopated by multiples of two. (Priestly 84)
Priestly then quotes Mingus’ long-time drummer Dannie Richmond on the rapport
they developed “in negotiating such novel terrain for jazz”:
I could see that [Mingus] stayed completely on top of the beat, so much so that, in
order for the tempo not to accelerate … I had to lay back a bit. And, at the same time,
let my stroke be on the same downbeat as his, but just a fraction behind it … So that,
when I would play on the 2 and 4, and sometimes switch it around to 1 and 3, he liked
these different kind of changes that were taking place between the two of us. And I
think it was when we first started to play something in 6 that we knew the magic was
there, and that we could within a second be out of the 6 into a smashing 4/4 and not
lose any of the dynamic level that had preceded it. (84–5)
36 | Fred Moten
This rapport was cemented, according to Priestly, in the nine months of intense collaboration in Mingus’ Jazz Workshop before the recording of Tijuana Moods. That
period came to a kind of climax when Mingus said to Richmond:
You’re doing well, but now suppose you had to play a composition alone. How would
you play it on the drums? … OK, if you had a dot in the middle of your hand and you were
going in a circle, it would have to expand and go round and round, and get larger and
larger. And at some point it would have to stop, and then this same circle would have
to come back around, around, around to the little dot in the middle of your hand. (85)
What’s at stake here – by way of Tijuana’s magic circle and broken market, by way of
Mingus’ self-described massive appetite for sexual and aesthetic control, his location of
Tijuana as a key point on the circuit on which those appetites were indulged, and his
identification of Tijuana with his experience and understanding of his own self-described
hybridities – is Mingus’ sense of the play of the centripetal and the centrifugal in this
early formulation of what he comes to call “rotary perception.”9 This new approach to
negotiating the circle and its border emerges from another border experience, from a
music whose idiomatic specificity Mingus has to learn in order to achieve or more definitively to claim the kind of grounded eccentricity he desires. This is where the
re-singularization of the Afro-US musical idiom (which we’ll come to understand as an
example of the reconstruction of techniques of feel) takes and is taken by the time of
Mexican celebration. But this is accomplished within the context of Mingus’ otherwise
distancing and denigrating remarks regarding another Afro-diasporic music.
Those remarks are inseparable from the emerging discourse on “rotary perception.”
That discourse is one of marketing as well as of a more “purely” musical exigency.
Mingus invents terms meant to compete with those that were being attached to free jazz,
especially to the music of Coleman, the calypsonian. His intervention is intended to
announce a musico-theoretical advance as well as to attract the critics and the women,
thereby fostering a dual seduction at the sound barrier. As Priestly shows, Mingus’ most
well-known exposition on “rotary perception,” which occurs toward the end of his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, comes from an interview that was ghosted into an article in a British journal called Jazz News in July, 1961 (Priestly 124).10 The article’s
formulations on “rotary perception” come right after a diatribe against John Coltrane,
and other members of the jazz avant-garde, whose innovations Mingus felt he had anticipated with a rigor that proponents of the new thing never approached. In Beneath the
Underdog, Mingus’ explanation of “rotary perception” comes in the midst of a seduction
scene at the start of a romantic relationship, a scene reminiscent of Mingus and Sue
Graham’s initial encounter. The denigration of Trane, Ornette, or more generally, free jazz
in calypso terms is part of some courtship ritual that also includes the codification of a
new musico-theoretical formulation springing from a diasporic practice that crosses borders for its (im)proper articulation, and which has its origins in a desire that is both discursive and commercial. As we’ll see, critics and historians of Trinidadian history and
culture, like Gordon Rohlehr and Harvey Neptune, are helpful in placing Mingus’ comments on Coleman within the context of the marketing of calypso in America. Mingus is
fighting a battle against two sets of invaders. These formulations on “rotary perception,”
then, are inextricably linked to the dismissal of Coleman and calypso. And, as Priestly
intimates, the dismissal is always accompanied by a trace of indebtedness:
When I first introduced the name to the press, I admit it was only a gimmick like
“Third Stream.” I was tired of going hungry and I wanted to catch the public ear but,
although the word was a gimmick, the music wasn’t … [S]wing proceeds in one direction
only – but this rotary movement is, of course, circular. Previously jazz has been held
back by people who think that everything must be played in the “heard” or obvious
pulse … [Previously people regarded the notes as having to fall on the centre of the
beats in the bar, or at precise intervals from beat to beat like clockwork. Three of four
men in a rhythm section would be accenting the same pulse][…]. With Rotary
Perception you may imagine a circle round the beat. [This is necessary because when
you are playing you visualize this. It’s not parade music or dance music. If you imagine
the circle, then with a quartet formula each member can play his notes anywhere
around the beat. It gives him the feeling that he has more trace.] The notes can fall at
any point within the circle so that the original feeling for the beat is not disturbed. If
anyone in the group loses confidence, one of the Quartet can hit the beat again. [The
pulse is inside you, only to remember the beat is important] (Mingus 124–25).11
Again, this passage, as Priestly points out, is something like a rough draft for what
goes on in Beneath the Underdog. You’ll notice, though, refinements at the level of a certain insight into the possibilities of intra-ensemblic antagonism in jazz performance:
There was once a word used – swing. Swing went in one direction, it was linear, and
everything had to be played with an obvious pulse and that’s very restrictive. But I use
the term “rotary perception.” If you get a mental picture of the beat existing within a circle you’re more free to improvise. People used to think the notes had to fall on the centre of the beats in the bar at intervals like a metronome, with three or four men in the
rhythm section accenting the same pulse. That’s like parade music or dance music. But
imagine a circle surrounding each beat – each guy can play his notes anywhere in that
circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes fall anywhere inside the
circle but the original feeling for the beat isn’t changed. If one in the group loses confidence, somebody hits the beat again. The pulse is inside you. When you’re playing with
musicians who think this way you can do anything. Anybody can stop and let the others
go on. It’s called strolling. In the old days when we got arrogant players on the stand
we’d do that – just stop playing and a bad musician would be thrown. (Mingus 251–52)
Throw the bad musician like a horse throwing a bad rider, a bad possessor. Refuse
by way of induced confusion. The bad rider is not rhythmically self-sufficient, is radically distant from the complex inside/outside relation to the circle taken on by the
ones who know. The ones who know are protected from a certain decay that standing
38 | Fred Moten
on the beat, that occupying the center of the circle, ensures. The bad rider, on the
other hand, succumbs to that disciplinary cadence and, in so doing, fails to know the
relation that he signifies. But why link calypso, with its supposedly insistent groove
and putatively simple harmonies, with the rhythmic fugitivity and atonal errancy of
free jazz, modes of dissidence and dissonance which elsewhere Mingus lauds and
which his music both prefigures and emulates? And why do it by way of both nationalist and regionalist discourse, even as one engages in critiques of the most egregious and brutal forms of American regional-nationalist vulgarity? Mingus’ work is
partly an intense – one might say typically modernist – activation of the desire for both
advance and nostalgia. The freedom that would allow unfettered musico-structural
development is tied to the forging of minimal – which could be construed as primitive –
musical forms. In the end, however, we’ll see that Mingus’ idea of “rotary perception”
corresponds to musicologist Shannon Dudley’s description of the “interactive rhythmic
feel” of calypso (the very music Mingus denigrates), in particular and Afro-diasporic
music, in general – where cometric accents coexist with the contrametric; where
those accents can be both audible and inaudible.12 Against the grain of his own
nationalist assertions, Mingus is after the discrepant drive of an international – as
well as intranational and, even, contranational – musical ideal; a spatial universality
that manifests itself as rigorously enacted and interarticulate temporal differences.
In his analysis of the rhythmic correspondences and differences between calypso and
soca, calypso’s North American- and Indian-rhythm influenced offspring, Dudley uses
“the term ‘rhythmic feel,’ instead of ‘beat,’ because it is more suggestive of the possibility that many rhythms can combine to produce a distinctive musical sensation” (270).
Moreover, in an attempt to “explain the interactive rhythmic feel of calypso” not as “a key
rhythm around which the music is constructed” but, rather, as “the consistent musical
logic and composite aesthetic effect of many parts which interact together rhythmically,”
Dudley moves toward a description of something on the order of a public sphere or workers’ circle (270). The precision of Dudley’s description can be traced back to what he
characterizes as “early scholars’ erroneous perceptions of African music”:
Erich von Hornbostel, for example, was puzzled by the absence of a regular pulse in
the recordings he listened to and theorized that such a pulse must be expressed not in
sound but in the motion of the drummer raising his hand to strike. A. M. Jones drew a
new measure line in his transcriptions of Ewe music every time there was an accented
beat, with the result that various parts of the same ensemble were portrayed as having different, and very irregular meters. (272)
But how did the perception of the absence of a regular pulse in African music become
the perception of that same pulse’s often overwhelming presence in a certain discourse on Afro-American music that is shared by many musicians and critics ranging
from Mingus to Adorno? Meanwhile, though Dudley argues that more careful observation of, and instruction in, African musical practices revealed that, “the Western
concept of meter – a commonly perceived, fixed number of equidistant ‘main beats,’
with a first and last beat, that correspond to a musical period – is not foreign to
African music,” he is also careful to point out that “[t]he traditional western time-signature” is an incomplete representation of African meter:
What the time-signature description of meter lacks is a way to differentiate between
the many patterns of accent that are possible in a musical period. Western listeners and
musicians often assume that the metric pulse will be audibly articulated and that certain
pulses will be consistently centered – for example, the first quarter note in 3/4 time, the
first and third quarter notes in 4/4 time, or the first and eighth notes in 6/8 time.
However, Mieczyslaw Kolinski points out that that way of thinking caused Jones to misinterpret Ewe music, and he reminds us that even in Western music one finds both “cometric and contrametric patterns” of accent. He asserts that “the interplay between these two
types of organization represents an essential aspect of metro-rhythmic structure.”
Kolinski’s distinction acknowledges that consistently recurring accents can be used for
more than just indicating the downbeat and weak and strong pulses of the meter. In fact,
in much African music the main beats, although they are conceived of (and often articulated in the dancers’ steps), are not audibly accented. Simha Arom refers to this phenomenon as “abstraction de mesure et du temps fort.” The distinctions made by Kolinski
(cometric versus contrametric accents) and Arom (abstract versus audible meter) help
explain how African music is understood by Africans to be characterized by regular groupings of a steady pulse, even though that pulse is not always audible. (272–73)
Dudley continues:
Robert Kauffman sums up the African perception simply and concisely when he says
that “Shona musicians […] use the more dynamically tactile term ‘feeling,’ to express what
Western musicians more abstractly call ‘meter.’ ” Of course, in European music there is
clearly more variety of rhythmic feel than what is recognized by the concepts of 4/4, 3/4,
6/8, and so on. It is just that Western concepts of meter have generally overlooked this,
focusing on the number of pulses, the subdivision, and the downbeat. To illustrate this conceptual deficiency with an example, saying a piece is “in 3/4 meter” would tell much less
about its musical character than describing the piece as having “a waltz feel.” (274)
The distinction between time signature and accent, and the interplay of temporal and
phonic difference within accent, are of great importance to Mingus and constitute, on
the one hand, what is essential to his understanding of “rotary perception,” and, on the
other hand, what he seems to refuse to hear in Coleman and calypso, namely the
absence of a regulatory mode that he both abjures and desires. Mingus thinks that in
the absence of a law of movement to break, calypso falls into the random constraint of
a death spiral. However, Dudley shows how the maintenance of the circle’s integrity
requires the legal procedure of an articulated ensemble, what musicologist Olly Wilson
calls a “fixed rhythmic group” whose “rhythmic feel is not produced by a single pattern
[…] but is a composite generated by several instruments that play repeated interlocking
40 | Fred Moten
parts” (Wilson 3–22).13 No hegemonic single pattern means no sole instrument or
player is responsible for that pattern’s upkeep. There is, rather, a shared responsibility
that makes possible the shared possibilities of irresponsibility. More precisely, attuned
and passionate response is given both in the capacity to walk and to walk away. While
freeing the individual player – say, the bass player – within the fixed rhythmic group or
rhythm section from the sole burden of keeping time does constitute a liberation from
collective temporal constraint, such escape or animation of the bottom is, itself, an
effect of law. That law is a law of (stasis in) motion and emotion, articulated in forced
migration and (con)strained revolt, whose truth is uttered in hermetic falsities and
falsettos, as the possession and dispossession of time.14
This law is a law of genre, and gender, as well. One of Mingus’ (and Coleman’s) greatest sidemen, Eric Dolphy, called his favorite of Mingus’ instruments “The French Lady.”
And both Duke Ellington and Kenny Clarke problematically assert that the “drum is a
woman.” The area that drum and bass lay down constitutes that womb-like, family circle of which Dumas speaks, foregrounding a certain maternal responsibility whose fixed
circumference Mingus would, at the same time, rupture and redouble by invagination.
He strains against a maternal responsibility that he can only abdicate by disruptively
confirming. Joni Mitchell, another of Mingus’ greatest collaborators, is “like a man”,
Bob Dylan says, because she keeps her own time, is allowed to “tell you what time it
is,” burns with that “untamed sense of control” he attributes to old-time musician
Roscoe Holcomb without commenting on the sexual ambiguity of Holcomb’s complex,
astronomical registers.15 Such self-sufficient irresponsibility is the province of men.
The rhythm section, on the other hand, is matrical, a locus where metrical antagonisms
are mediated, where the regulative and diplomatic force of the mother is always tempered by her criminally empathic breaking of the law she lays down, by her inhabitation
of the space where performance and commodification meet. This is to say that this
other hand is the independent and untimely same of the one hand; it’s rhythm is of a
sliced section or session, that other time of the ones who keep the other’s time if not
their own, who let the others take their time, who place time within that impulsive strife
of dis/possession that we call music, that breakdown or brokedown opposition located
at and as if an irruption of sound recorded by something like an accent meter.16
Bearing the constitutive impetus of catastrophic oppositional failure, Mingus’ formulations are an edifice built on the ruins of a legal discourse and legal process, the
impossible law and endlessly disrupted trial of the general economy of black maternity. What might be the sexual force of such nurturing? Mingus plays like a (play)
mother; she keeps walking, walking away: they touch and go like adjacent variations
out of one another’s time but bridged by an imperceptibly reminiscent tempo; like the
mercantile maternal machinery of a money jungle; like the broken stroll of The ([interactive rhythmic] Feel ) Trio; like The Awakening into a band. But “these are men!” says
William Carlos Williams.17 Supposedly self-possessive, they’re supposed to keep
themselves and/in their time. They don’t lose time, like the syncopic ones, the ones
for whom “swing is (‘high lonesome) sound’ ” reconfiguring synoptic view, the dis/possessors.18 Imagine the always paradoxical sovereign subject, contemplative in his
cell, tortured by the unkept, unkempt time of a musician who is, as it were, outside.
The listener loses himself and is unmanned. The listener, speaking aloud, can no
longer hear, or bear, himself. This is the contretemps of the soliloquy: having lost
myself, subject now to another’s time, I speak to myself before you, imploring me to
find me. Against the grain of the soloist’s proud time, the bass and drum lose the time
they keep, holding it right there where they almost lose their way, not doin’ no soloin’,
as “The Godfather of Soul” demands, ‘cause it’s a mother (who is impossible, who
walks away, ain’t it funny how time slips away, “slides away from the proposed,” steals
away, as life?).19 What remains to be considered is something of the order of an
extralegal process, a metrical assertion against the law that still exercises an uninstantiable matrical (ir)responsibility that is always before us, moving, still, visible, illusory, like a dot in the middle of your hand, like the drive of a French lady, a black
woman, an impossible black mother, in a crawlspace (cramped, capacious).
It is this drive that determines what Dudley calls that particular “relationship between
the fixed rhythm and the vocal part or instrumental melodies and improvisations –
what Wilson refers to as the ‘variable rhythmic group’ ” – that is characteristic of
calypso (278). Dudley argues that the calypsonian sets off the interaction of fixity
and variation by anticipating and delaying the accents of the rhythmic pattern. But
Dudley encounters a certain amount of trouble in characterizing that pattern which
presents itself with differences often enough to defy the name. This is to say that the
singer – the political soli-loquist, the (unmanned) man of words – performs variations
on a fixity that is always already in trouble. Interestingly, as Dudley points out by way
of the work of Rohlehr, in part because of the influence of jazz, many early calypso
recordings “used instrumental accompaniment that was rhythmically inappropriate to
calypso singing style” (Dudley 279).20 This irruption of a certain African-American
impropriety into the idiomatic specificity of Trinidadian calypso’s fixed rhythmic group
only redoubles the sense that the constant disruption of the proper is the condition
of possibility of rhythmic feel in general. Many calypsonians, from Lord Invader to
David Rudder, sing of “the American social invasion,” on top of the American rhythmic
invasion which is, it turns out, just another singularity from within a diasporic time
that is constituted by the geo-political disturbances of invasion and im/migration that
it is most properly understood as constituting.21
This spatial politics of the ruptured groove, of the broken circle, corresponds to those
“rhythmic nuances of the calypso singer” which are born of an originary and formal
impropriety (Dudley 284). In this sense, what musicologist Charles Keil calls “participatory discrepancies” might be best understood as transcendental clues leading to a more
accurate sense of idiom as a range of anoriginal differences. In turn, the groove might be
42 | Fred Moten
best understood as a circle of such differences in which the players might be “in synch
but in and out phase,” as Keil puts it; where the music comes fully into its own as something other than itself (8).22 In a way that is the same, and radically different, “rotary perception” is swing’s “originary displacement” (to use Nahum Chandler’s phrase), swing’s
Afro-American/Afro-Caribbean eclipse. Swing is, in other words, an international incident;
the groove is not the groove; jazz is not what it is and as it is it is it is. The music instantiates the broken circle, the brokedown (public) sphere, the indecipherably breaking
cipher, of black international fantasy.
Consider the grooved, fantastic circle and its (spatial) politics as something along the
lines of what literary critic Mary Pat Brady, in an echo of novelist Cherie Moraga, calls a
“temporal geography.”23 Brady’s criticism is indispensable to a proper understanding of
Mingus’ border work, his linking of musical influence with a mode of sexual tourism not
unlike that which he decries when it takes place on the Central Avenue of his heyday.
That criticism is animated by a critical awareness of the way the border marks and helps
to instantiate and perpetuate a collaborative process of imperial expansion that historian Edward Spicer calls “cycles of conquest,” the imperial and counter-imperial strife
that is both between the U.S. and Mexico and within them in their own shifting scales
and contours, strife that long predates 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo and that continues to trouble the forced stabilities that larcenous pact was supposed to ensure.24 To be aware of this history and truly attuned to its challenges – even
as one acknowledges the gross asymmetries of this border strife; even if one is primarily and legitimately driven by a critical and political desire to resist the current hegemonic
force of all kinds of U.S. imperial desires in their necessary articulation with what Brady
astutely describes as erotic-imperial paranoia – raises certain overwhelming questions
for the study of Mingus and of jazz. Can a politics, aesthetics and erotics of liberation be
forged from the ongoing construction of an identity that is based, on the one hand, in displacement and the resistance to displacement, and, on the other hand, in imperial conquest
and exploitation and the establishment of bourgeois personhood, however inflected by
bohemian style? Must revolutionary subjectivity also be geometric, geographical subjectivity? If it must, how will it successfully detach itself from empire’s spatial obsessions? How
are the complex dis-articulations and re-articulations of space and subjectivity productive
of theoretical insight and political possibility?
Brady addresses these questions that are, in her work, partially animated by the fact
that 1. metstizaje (and its partner, in an uneasy and complex relationship, indigenismo) –
as scholars such as Herman Bennett, Martha Menchaca and Maria Josefina SaldañaPortillo have shown – was a fundamental part of the Mexican colonial and imperial
projects even as it now has been made to operate within the framework and in the
service of profound anti-imperial and anti-colonial desire; 2. discourses of the border –
across a vast range of historical articulations – constitute something like a spatialization of mestizaje; 3. the traversing and transversing of the shifting, bridge-like
(non-)terrain between the U. S. and Mexico – or the more literal (in that they are more
extensive in their metaphorical force) spaces between Aztlán and the Valle de Mexico
or Pacific Palisades and Watts – is that spatialization raised to the level of somatic and
discursive critical method.25 Brady is interested in claiming that method for insurgent
political and intellectual practice and her work offers a rigorous exemplification of
that method – the deconstruction of a state-sanctioned imperial mestizaje meant to
work in the service of political homogeneity and colonial indigenismo that violently
imposes itself against the fugitive political force of nomads like the Apaches; the mobilizing reconstruction of the rich differentiations of the mix; and the critical deployment
and displacement of origin (or something, again, like “originary displacement”). This
movement – the most salient particularity of Brady’s critical discourse of the border,
in particular, and space, in general – is of extreme value to African American expressive
cultural criticism. A profound discourse of the cut and the groove and of their corollaries, the bridge and the circle, animates that strain of the African American tradition
that Cedric Robinson calls black radicalism.26 Something akin to a continuing excavation of the Mexican afromestiza – whose erasure is always attenuated by the insistent and irrepressible trace of her constitutive, migratory force (to which Bennett,
Menchaca and Kevin Mulroy attest) for black radicalism in particular and radicalism
in general – is a project to whose theoretical foundations Brady makes a great contribution.27 Mingus’ music also contributes to that project though work like Brady’s is
required in order to listen to Mingus against his grain so that his contribution can be
heard. Such work makes it possible to imagine – indeed, demands the imagination
of – the border and the cut, more properly, as interinanimate, so that blackness is
understood as an irreducible mestizaje (the mix as its condition, not its negation)
whose inhabitation is a nomadic bridge; and as the internal differentiation and external transversality of what Robinson calls “the ontological totality”(171). Brady’s work
is something like a cornerstone of the footbridge that would connect, say, Brent
Hayes Edwards’ analysis of “the practice of [African] diaspora” with literary critic
Rafael Pérez-Torres reading of “the refiguring” – and/or literary critic Genaro Padillo’s
reading of “the uses” – of Aztlán.28 The articulation of Aztlán and the African diaspora, amplified and distorted originarily by originarily distorted Euro-American (and,
for that matter, Asian-American) voices and forces, sounds like Mingus and forges,
however fleetingly, what historian Matt Garcia might call “a world of its own”(Garcia
189–222). Mingus’ disavowal of the Caribbean can’t be properly understood without
taking into account the vexed productivity of his musico-sexual “romance” with a
Mexico that will have always been both more and less than itself.
It is no mere coincidence that the erotic-imperial paranoia that marks the U.S.s’
and Mingus’ relation to Mexico can also be said to characterize U.S. relations
to Trinidad. The incursion of U.S. power into colonial Trinidad’s geographic, social,
and psychic space turns out to have been the vexed field within which a certain
44 | Fred Moten
Afro-diasporic international contact was performed. That contact, at least in part,
took forms such as this:
Around 9 P.M. on Friday, April 16, 1943, a storm of sticks, bottles, and stones sent residents of Basilon Street, Laventille, scurrying under their beds. The source of the missiles,
neighborhood folks would soon find out, was a group new to the community and, indeed,
new to colonial Trinidad: African American soldiers. Helmeted and bare-chested in some
cases, and bearing weapons in nearly all, the black men who belonged to the 99th AntiAircraft Regiment of the U.S. Army had set out on a seek-and-destroy mission in one of Port
of Spain’s most infamous slums. The objects of their pursuit were the community’s
self-proclaimed “robust men,” young, predominantly Afro-Trinidadian males whose
unabashed hostility and alleged hooliganism scandalized “respectable society” in the
British colony. How many “robust men” the marauding members of the 99th found remains
uncertain. What is clear is that during the course of the night, these soldiers wrought serious property damage and assaulted scores of neighborhood men. In their wake, black
Americans left broken windows and dented walls, and, by the end of what outraged municipal representatives condemned as a “wave of homicidal fury,” twenty-four local men,
including four special reserve police officers, had to be hospitalized. (Neptune 78)
Historian Harvey Neptune shows how a marauding band of African American soldiers,
perhaps in response to threats and acts against their safety and that of some of their
local female companions, sought out and attacked some of Trinidad’s “robust men.”
The “robust men” – angered not so much by the loss of “their” women to the seductive powers of Yankee soldiers and their “Yankee dollar” but, more precisely, by the
troubled decisions through which local women asserted an attenuated sexual autonomy in the face of local masculine control – acted out a specific ambivalence toward
black Americans soldiers and local Afro-Trinidadian women to which those soldiers
responded in ways that were also deeply ambivalent, ways that both reflected and
refracted the American schizo-imperial imperative to liberate by destroying.29 On the
one hand, according to Neptune, Trinidadians and other Caribbean peoples who immigrated to the U.S. viewed black Americans as the highly constrained victims of a particular and extremely violent and debilitating mode of racism to which they had not
been subjected. On the other hand, Neptune argues, Afro-Trinidadians were impressed
by the militant resistance to racism among black U.S. soldiers – manifest in the many
clashes between black and white soldiers that local blacks witnessed (with pleasure
when the black soldiers came out on top) – even though those soldiers were operating in their work and in their leisure by way of the force of massive neo-imperial state
power directed against and within Trinidad. Indeed, that power was solicited and welcomed by British colonial administrators precisely because it might also serve to suppress the island’s emergent non-white working class political mobilization.
Neptune allows us to understand, then, that the presence of black soldiers from the
U.S. produced oppressive and liberatory effects both of which were both embraced and
rejected by Afro-Trinidadian national masculinity. Afro-Trinidadian men laid claim to certain protocols and performative styles of African American masculinity that could be
deployed in challenging the slightly more subtle forms of white supremacy that served
as the foundation for the colonial order. But when the performances of African American
masculinity – augmented by the privileges of American military power and the force of
the Yankee dollar – were directed toward Afro-Trinidadian women, now constituted as
objects of liberation and mastery (which is to say desire), Afro-Trinidadian men also laid
claim to styles, protocols and rhetorics that would bespeak a national identity distinct
from (American) blackness.
The possibilities of diasporic contact and solidarity were always structured, then, by
a complex system of intramural and extramural antagonistic hierarchies, a condition
that has now only become more pronounced and more articulated. Neptune’s work
leads him toward the question of whether the black soldiers who spread around the
“Yankee dollar” induced – or, perhaps more precisely, aggravated – a proprietary,
homosocial, national misogyny. Such questioning quickly leads one to the realization
that chauvinism is neither the exclusive domain of the US component of the diaspora,
nor absent in the internal relations of any given component. In the end, what can be
dismissed too easily under the rubric of chauvinism must be thought as that which is
determined by the striated resistance to a complex of invasions and expansions.
Such thinking might allow us to contemplate more fruitfully the identificatory claim
Lord Invader makes in the chorus of “Crisis in Arkansas”:
Please take off that black bow tie – lay-oh!
And that black tuxedo,
You callin’ us names, yet you wearin’ black,
Please take off everything black off your back.30
Consider that Lord Invader invokes blackness by way of his rhythmic and phonic play on
the color black. Mingus’ reference to blackness is, as it were implied. However, Lord
Invader’s multi-syllabic irruption of accentual-metrical difference breaks and makes new
musical (rhythmic/syntactic) law in a way that Mingus would valorize. Consider also that
Lord Invader moves strenuously towards another arrangement of the social law as well,
in his critique of U.S. domestic racial policy. In his lyrics he asserts his opposition to
Faubus and, more generally, to a reactionary apparatus whose ethical and juridical dispositions were symbolized by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tardy response to
the illegal obstruction of the students’ entrance into Little Rock Central. Mingus was, at
first, prevented from any such verbal assertion of any such political opposition; Columbia
Records suppressed his lyrics for “Fables of Faubus.” It was not until a year later, when
Mingus (re-)recorded the “Original Faubus Fables” for Candid Records, that his protest
could be heard uncut.31 But even Mingus’ re-recording never approaches the canted but
explicitly identificatory claim on blackness – which simultaneously constitutes the
46 | Fred Moten
repeating ground and anarchic disruption of the song’s universalizing claims – that animates “Crisis in Arkansas.” One could argue, furthermore, that the complexity of the variable rhythmic group in “Crisis in Arkansas” – led by a vocal performance whose
accentual richness is the dissonant effect and affect of lyrical political dissidence – is
the aim of Mingus’ agonistic approach to “fixed” rhythmic performance as well. Lord
Invader packs syllables into every measure with a precision that is manifest one moment
as abundance, the next moment as economy, an interinanimation of more and less that
bespeaks musical and political fugitivity. The (sound of the) oppositional emergence that
both prompts and responds to the ongoing state of racial emergency is always non-full,
always non-simple, always on the run and not (fully or simply) on the one.
Writers Amiri Baraka and Samuel R. Delany have both explored what might be called
the political feelings that attend an escape that is somehow both from and within the
musical bar line. In “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Delany
aligns such fugitivity with the specific political insurgence of singers who move between
worlds on the tracks of an underground migratory circuit, while Baraka, particularly and
repeatedly in Black Music, pays special attention to the way Coleman exemplifies the
irruptive musical liberator’s challenge to time and tune. Lord Invader’s escape is manifest, however, as a kind of overactive cometric and contrametric inhabitation to whose
strict criminality – for instance, the intensified negation and irruptive rhythmic feel of the
two equally necessary instances of “off” in the chorus of “Crisis” – Mingus aspires,
redoubling it to ever more anarchic effect in “Fables”:
Oh Lord! Don’t let them hang us.
Oh Lord! Don’t let them shoot us.
Oh Lord! Don’t let them tar and feather us.32
Such out of time resistance to – such scarring of – scansion is laid down with the open
deliberateness of a secret agent and with such an agent’s demolitionist and abolitionist
intent against the very instruments and locale of (mean) time. But Mingus’ disruption of
regular meter can also be understood as bearing the trace of subjugation both to commercial and aesthetic regulation. One form that commercial regulation took was the U.S.
recording industry’s attempt to circulate, and to determine the popular reception of,
calypso as an imagined alternative to the political energy animating World War II black
American music. However, Lord Invader’s music reveals the deep political affinity at the
very heart of the imagined alternative. Mingus and Lord Invader share a political aesthetic
that seeks to deploy strenuous rhythmic and lyrical resistance to and within self-imposed
regulatory forms in order to facilitate flight from externally imposed regulation. Such flight
is the ongoing performance of a shared diasporic legacy that is always articulated in
close proximity to intra-diasporic conflict. African American musicians’ persistent denigration and distancing of Caribbean rhythms and sonorities and the deployment of those
same elements in the service of Caribbean disavowals of an African-American identity
that is conceived as both dominant and abject, intimate a complex, many-sided whole.
The lines of stress and lines of flight that animate the Afro-diasporic set, the Afrodiasporic gathering, comprise a terrible richness. Why must Mingus’ neo-abolitionist
drive, or the King of Ghanaian highlife E. T. Mensah’s pan-Africanist musical and political impetus, take the form and/or lyrical content of calypso? Why is radical political
desire all throughout the diaspora so often manifest as ever more complex
reconstructions and deconstructions, recoveries and concealments, of sonorities,
rhythms and sensibilities derived from a home that seems to withdraw from every
return? Why do Fela Kuti’s insistent assertion of African idiomatic specificity against the
neo-colonial force of state-sanctioned corruption and violence move with the complex
in/direction of a Bootsy Collins bass line? What are the conditions of possibility and
maintenance of a kind of permanent and unassimilable dissidence and dissonance and
why is it that such a formation seems destined to find its fullest articulation not only
against but by way of forms and resistant deformations that seem to confirm AfricanAmerican cultural hegemony in the diaspora? How do we account for the popularity of
the aesthetic and political force of this permanent dissidence when it emerges from the
U.S.? Has this specific dissonance, which is both national and anti-national, which was
born in ongoing modes of accumulative exclusion that are unique in their severity and
bred in what had been and continues to be a radical detachment from power, attained
hegemony not only by way of the circulatory system of an unprecedented cultural imperialism, but also because it continues to bear the trace of a radical, anticipatory opposition to state power that constitutes the fundamental element of an identity?
What’s at stake here is the question of comportment towards the irreducible and
constitutive specificity of a blackness that always manifests itself against the blackAmericanism that it manifests itself as. The abstract and imagined space of internationalism, transnationalism or the eternally congealed and disappearing object/s of
hybridity, with all the appeal of every other general equivalent, are not the same as a
federation of disrupted locales. However, though it is tempting to say that internationalism or diasporism have become teleological principles run amok – false and empty
universalities whose excesses align them with imperial, neo-liberal capitalism as an
ideal and as a set of commodities – such a claim would not justify some easy disavowal
of the international, the diaspora, or, for that matter, the universal or the teleological.
An irreducible utopics of The International is still to be desired, against all positivisms,
against any vulgar reduction to the empirical encounter however post- or anti-imperial
that encounter might be or appear to be, even if no one can locate it anywhere other than
in its disrupted and disruptive locales. Meanwhile, the disrupted and disruptive locale
recedes and exceeds; aggressive, improvisational assertions of a certain teleological
principle bring this into relief so that New York or Port of Spain or Lagos are understood as that which The International and its feelings make possible. At the same time,
48 | Fred Moten
locale disrupts any crystallization of teleological principle: The International is in that
it is in the local – the only and infinite possible space (effect of an irreducible deictic
bond or bind) for that impossible place, the Internation. The International markets
itself in the very disrupted locale that is disruptive of The International; landscapes
and markets, mountains and things, make accents and (time) signatures. And it’s not
difficult to point out complexities, crossings and antagonisms – the point is what to
make of them – just as it’s not enough to say this or that is an instance of internationalism. So that if this or that particular instance is understood as an irruption of
internationalism, this is interesting only in that it self-destructively raises the question: What is The International? It is a question that is inseparable from a couple of
others: What is blackness? What is black Americanness?
The irreducible and constitutive specificity of blackness-as-black Americanness;
the irreducibly vexed specificities of blackness in Afro-diasporic internationalism or in
what is valorized or hoped for in the new comparativism: both are at issue here.
Violence to these specificities, done in the name of black American exceptionalism,
intra-diasporic hegemony, the black-white binary, or their most viciously legitimate
critique ought to be resisted. This is all just to say that it should still be permissible to
study the disrupted and disruptive locales/objects of blackness-in-black Americanness,
which is what I think I’m doing when I listen to the John Donne/David Rudder/Mary Pat
Brady Trio. Moreover, such study is not only permissible but also imperative because
it makes possible some more rigorous address of the real question, namely that of the
(constitutive force of blackness in the anti- and ante-American, musico-democratic
assertion of The Black American) International. This question – which concerns what
Akira Mizuta Lippit might call the open history of the (objection to) “inalienable wrong” –
might also complicate legitimate critical and theoretical disavowals of “states of
injury” and their relation to the putative degradation of left politics or to the inability of
left politics to think and enact new political dispositions.33 Perhaps identities forged
in severe injury might have something to do with a kind of persistent resistance to
(states of) power and to taking power that not only will have clearly borne a deep
attraction to those who remain excluded from power, especially when others have
taken power in their names (i.e. the general constitution of what is called the postcolonial), but also will have served well the task of forming the genuinely new comportment, the out-from-the-outside thing, that is the aim and object of musical and
political fantasy. Such fantasy constitutes and is constituted by rigorous analysis of
the relation between blackness and the politics and aesthetics of a certain claim on
dispossession that will have animated the range of musical homelessness with which
I have here been concerned. This dispossession, this refusal, this objection – in all of
its spatio-temporal complexity, in the full range of its irregularities, in the objects and
events of the vast collection of sharp locations that link and differentiate Mingus and
Lord Invader – is intact as sung, strained, scripted, articulation, as a choreography
dedicated to the criminal movement of hips. It is, therefore, productive of new singularities (which is to say new ensembles). Blackness is the production, collection and
anarrangement of new singularities (which is to say new ensembles). Diaspora is an
archive (gathering, set) of new things productive of new things (which is to say new
ensembles).34 The Charles Mingus/Lord Invader Ensemble plays the radical spatial
politics of the broken circle, the radical temporal politics of the broken groove. It’s the
New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s).
50 | Fred Moten
Notes
1. Lord Invader, Calypso in New York,
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD 40454.
2. Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um,
Columbia/Legacy Ck 65512.
3. I want to emphasize, here, that the music
forms in question – jazz, calypso, free jazz – are
burdened by their names. Constrained to repeat
and revise given musical forms, to redouble
and to refrain from the assertion of given
political and sexual content, Afro-diasporic
musics could be said constantly to perform a
kind of antinomian anti-nominalism. This makes
Mingus’ nominative gestures, about which more
shortly, all the more problematic.
4. Jean Clouzet and Guy Kopelowicz, “Interview
de Charles Mingus: Un Inconfortable Aprèsmidi,” Jazz, June 1964. I want to thank Brent
Edwards for his help with the translation.
5. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
6. See Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot:
The Thought from Outside” in
Foucault/Blanchot, and Nathaniel Mackey.
7. See Jelly Roll Morton, The Complete Library
of Congress Recordings, Rounder CD
B000GFLE35; Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay
Man. 85–98; Mackey, “Cante Moro,” in Morris,
Ed. Sound States. 194–212; Federico Garcia
Lorca, In Search of Duende.
8. It is interesting to note here that Mingus’
fellow transplanted Angeleno, critic and
erstwhile drummer/novelist Stanley Crouch,
has recently offered Rollins a similar insult. In
response to Crouch’s assertion that when
Rollins is faced with a young audience “he
often resorts to banal calypso tunes” the
Harlem-born Rollins, whose parents emigrated
from the Virgin Islands replies, “I completely
reject that criticism and I think it was based on
the fact that he denigrates that type of rhythm
and I don’t. It’s something that I enjoy playing
and is a challenge to play, just as much as a lot
of the music we play. It’s not something I phone
in.” While Mingus aligns calypso with a lack of
musical knowledge, Crouch compounds that
formulation by asserting that calypso is also
bound up with a lack of musical effort.
Ignorance that ends in self-parodic performance
and laziness that manifests itself in a
performative ease that indexes preternatural
cheerfulness are, of course, familiar
stereotypes assigned to African-descended
peoples, ones that both Crouch and Mingus
could be said to combat via a kind of intradiasporic displacement whose circuits of
further transfer and return turn out to have
been, up to now, inexhaustible. See Stanley
Crouch, “The Colussus,” and Ashante Infantry,
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Colossus.”
9. For more on Mingus in Tijuana and a more
general overview of African-American/Mexican
musical interaction see Kun, Audiotopia: Music,
Race, and America. 43–83.
10. See also Charles Mingus, “What I Feel
about Jazz…” Jazz News. 10–1.
11. Mingus, with interpolations from “What I
Feel about Jazz…”. 10.
12. Shannon Dudley, “Judging ‘By the Beat’:
Calypso versus Soca.” 270.
13. Olly Wilson, “The Significance of the
Relationship between Afro-American Music and
West African Music,” Black Perspectives in
Music 2:1, 3–22, quoted in “Judging ‘By the
Beat’.” 274.
14. I’m thinking of two late elaborations in
Adorno of what he calls the Bewegungsgesetz.
In the first, Adorno writes:
The object of theory is not something immediate, of which theory might carry home a replica.
Knowledge has not, like the state police, a rogues’
gallery of its objects. Rather, it conceives them as
it conveys them; else it would be content to
describe the façade. As Brecht did admit, after all,
the criterion of sense perception – overstretched
and problematic even in its proper place – is not
applicable to radically indirect society. What immigrated into the object as the law of its motion
[Bewegungsgesetz], inevitably concealed by the
ideological form of the phenomenon, eludes that
criterion. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 206)
In the second formulation Adorno states:
The semblance character of artworks, the illusion of their being-in-itself, refers back to the fact
that in the totality of their subjective mediatedness they take part in the universal delusional
context of reification, and, that, in Marxist terms,
they need to reflect a relation of living labor as if it
were a thing. The inner consistency through which
artworks participate in truth always involves their
untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art
has always revolted against this, and today this
revolt has become art’s own law of movement
[Bewegungsgesetz]. The antinomy of the truth and
untruth of art may have moved Hegel to foretell its
end. Traditional aesthetics possessed the insight
that the primacy of the whole over the parts has
constitutive need of the diverse and that this primacy misfires when it is simply imposed from
above. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176–77)
15. Thanks to Alice Echols for calling to my
attention Bob Dylan’s remarks on Joni Mitchell.
See Echols, “ ‘The Soul of a Martian’: A
Conversation with Joni Mitchell, Shaky Ground:
The Sixties and its Aftershocks. Also see John
Cohen, “Liner Notes,” in Roscoe Holcomb, An
Untamed Sense of Control, Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings, CD 40144, 2003. For
more on the sexual politics and aesthetics of
the falsetto see my In the Break: the Aesthetics
of the Black Radical Tradition. 211–31.
16. Three interventions are in the front of my
mind here. Barbara Johnson speaks of “letting
the other take our time” in her “Response” to
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Canon-Formation,
Literary History, and the Afro-American Literary
Tradition: From the Seen to the Told.” Rosalind
Krauss speaks of a certain order of the
invisible/fantasmatic that Lyotard calls “the
matrix,” and which is aligned with “a beat, or
pulse, or throb […] that works not only against
the formal premises of modernist opticality – the
premises that connect the dematerialization of
the visual field to the dilated instantaneity or
peculiar timelessness of the moment of its
perception – but it works as well against […] the
52 | Fred Moten
notion that low art, or mass-cultural practice, can
be made to serve the ambitions of high art as a
kind of denatured accessory, the allegory of a
playfulness that high-art practice will have no
trouble recuperating and reformulating in its own
terms.” See her “The Im/pulse to See.” Laura
Doyle speaks of another matrix, “the racial
matrix of modern fiction and culture” that is
manifest in a “universal, race transcending
mother complex” that marks and explains the
commons, the circle, that modernism disruptively
inhabits. See her Bordering on the Body: The
Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture, 3.
17. I’m thinking of, in order to think with and
against, William Carlos William’s beautiful
misprision of New Orleans trumpeter Bunk
Johnson’s band.
Ol’ Bunk’s Band
These are men! The gaunt, unforesold, the vocal,
blatant, Stand up, stand up! the
slap of a bass-string.
Pick, ping! The horn, the
hollow horn
long drawn out, a hound deep
tone –
Choking, choking! while the
treble reed
races – alone, ripples, screams
slow to fast –
to second to first! These are men!
Drum, drum, drum, drum, drum
drum, drum! The
ancient cry, escaping crapulence
eats through
transcendent – torn, tears, term
town, tense,
turns and backs off whole, leaps
up, stomps down,
rips through! These are men
beneath
whose force the melody limps –
to
proclaim, proclaims – Run and
lie down,
in slow measures, to rest and
not never
need no more! These are men!
Men!
Williams’s romance with sound, misheard as
erect, non-commercial command of time, is cut
by an attunement to the cut, cutting force of
proclamations of recline and declining speed.
The melodic slowdown is enacted by way of the
stomp down, torn terms and turns derived from
an old, fugitive cry that speaks against what
Williams means it to signify: a national
manhood manifest in a black masculinist
musicianship it excludes by fetishizing. Williams
offers a pre-figurative mirror image of Mingus’
articulations of his own ambivalent technical
desire; Williams perceives but cannot admit the
maternity Mingus claims and disavows. See
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams:
Volume II, 1939–1962. 149–50.
Mingus own migration from Los Angeles to New
York. Lord Invader speaks of “the American
social invasion” in dialogue with Alan Lomax at
a 1946 concert at New York City’s Town Hall
recorded as Calypso at Midnight, Rounder
11661-1840-2, 1999. David Rudder criticizes
rapper Jay-Z for his unauthorized use of scenes
from Trinidadian carnival in his music videos
and for the increased presence of his music in
the Trinidadian cultural milieu, particular during
the carnival season, in “Bigger Pimpin’,” The
Autobiography of the Now, Lypsoland CD
45692, 2001. For commentary on Rudder’s
response to Jay-Z see Harvey Neptune, “Manly
Rivalries and Mopsies: Gender, Nationality, and
Sexuality in United States-Occupied Trinidad.”
90–92.
18. The formulation “swing is sound” is that of
percussionist Billy Higgins. It is recorded in
Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz
Improvisation and Interaction, 64. I have mixed
it with the phrase ‘high lonesome sound,” one
used by a host of musicians and critics to
characterize a sonority essential to music such
as Holcomb’s. At the risk of explaining away
whatever allusive clarity that may have emerged
from certain activities of wandering, digging,
leaping, leaving, giving up, turning, turning loose
and returning, let me say that I hope the range
of reference within which I am trying to operate
intimates the complex ensemble to which it is
necessary to listen in order really to listen to
Mingus and Lord Invader.
22. Charles Keil, “The Theory of Participatory
Discrepancies: A Progress Report.”
19. For more on the “motherhood” of the
rhythm section see Saying Something. 64–66.
20. See Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in
Pre-Independence Trinidad.
21. Consider the American occupation of
Trinidad during World War II; or the Caribbean
incursion into the New York musical scene after
that war; or Lord Invader’s own irruption out of
Trinidad’s second city, San Fernando, into the
Carnival tents of Port-of-Spain; or the
complicated itinerary of Ornette Coleman –
from the impossible origin that Mingus assigns
him in the Antilles to his “actual” birthplace in
Texas, through Los Angeles, to New York; or
23. See Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands,
Temporal Geographies.
24. See Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The
Impact of Spain, Mexico and the United States
on the Indians of the Southwest 1533–1960.
25. See Herman L. Bennett, Africans in
Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and
Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640; Martha
Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing
Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of
Mexican Americans; Maria Josefina Saldaña
Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the
Americas and the Age of Development.
26. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The
Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
27. See Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border:
The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian
Territory, Coahuila, and Texas.
28. See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of
Diaspora; Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlán,”;
Genaro Padillo, “Myth and Comparative Cultural
Nationalism: The Ideological Uses of Aztlán.”
29. Lord Invader sings about the putatively
emasculating force of US weaponry and U.S.
currency in his most famous song “Rum and
Coca-Cola,” stolen by U.S. comic Morey
Amsterdam while in Trinidad entertaining North
American troops on a U.S.O. tour and turned into
a huge hit by the Andrews Sisters in another
modality of imperial invasion and occupation.
For more on the genealogy of “Rum and CocaCola” see Donald R. Hill, Calypso Calaloo: Early
Carnival Music in Trinidad. 234–40.
30. Lord Invader, Calypso in New York,
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD 40454.
31. Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles
Mingus, Candid LP 9005, 1960.
32. Lyrics published in Mingus’ sheet music
collection, More than a Fake Book. 47.
33. Lippit’s phrase “inalienable wrong” was
uttered during a May, 2003 discussion on the
work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the
University of California, Irvine’s Critical Theory
Institute. Recent left critiques of a certain
tendency on the left toward attachment to injury
and to identities forged in injury take their lead
from an important work by Wendy Brown, States
of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity.
34. Lippit might say it is an archive of
shadows. Edwards might say it is an archive of
the shadow of shadows. See Lippit, Atomic
Light (Shadow Optics) and Edwards, “The
Shadow of Shadows,” Positions: East Asia
Cultures Critiques. 11–49.
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“Affirmative Resonances” in
the City?: Sound, Imagination
and Urban Space in Early
1930s Germany
Carolyn Birdsall
ABSTRACT
“Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: Sound, Imagination
and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany
This article focuses on the role of sound in producing urban space and reworking
identity formations in the early years of the Nazi regime. I analyze a case study about
the mythology created around the Nazi party martyr Albert Leo Schlageter in the
German city of Düsseldorf. By tracing the cultural events, political struggles and propaganda strategies involving Schlageter during the 1920s to the three-day festival in
1933 at the location of his death, I investigate the ways in which the Nazi Party
(NSDAP) utilized music and sound in public spaces, particularly in urban street environments. This raises questions about the status of sound as an important part of
Nazi spectacles, in popularizing mythology, and in disciplining the senses: How does
sound perform or play out certain power relations in urban space? How are forms of
embodiment produced through experiences of sound or sound-making? In which
ways can songs and musical performance be used for political purposes and to capture the popular imagination? The concept of “affirmative resonance” is developed
to address the role of sound in contexts where groups of people created resonant
spaces within urban environments, whether through collective singing and cheering,
loudspeaker technology, or in the call and response interactions between a speaker
and the crowd. In this case, “affirmative resonances” are viewed as mechanisms
that worked to affirm the legitimacy of the Nazi party, normalize social transformations, delineate patterns of belonging, and activate the “auditory imagination” (Ihde).
“Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: Sound, Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany | 57
Introduction
Albert Leo Schlageter, a former soldier and right-wing activist, was arrested for sabotage attacks on the Düsseldorf railway lines in 1923. After being sent to trial,
Schlageter was sentenced to death by the French occupiers of the German RhineRuhr area. Following his death in the early morning hours of 26 May 1923, various
political parties tried to seize on Schlageter’s memory, with Communists attempting
to downplay his right-wing allegiances in a bid to make a claim on this “service to the
German people”.1 In the following decade, the Nazi party effectively capitalized on
Schlageter, producing a range of images, slogans, and commemorative events in his
memory.2 Almost all aspects of Schlageter’s biography and status as a heroic freedom fighter were fully exploited in their attempt to create a national symbol of resistance against the French. In fact, their success in promoting Schlageter as a Nazi
patriot enabled them to fully achieve a popular account of the anti-French resistance,
which magnified his minor part out of all proportion.3
The importance of Schlageter for Nazi propaganda took on new proportions after
they came to power in January 1933. Schlageter’s role as a Nazi martyr offered an
indispensable prototype of the “new man” needed for the party’s anticipated
Volksgemeinschaft (national-racial community). As a symbol of male sacrifice for the
nation, Schlageter thus provided a model for new social relations based on the subordination of individual needs for the community. Schlageter’s key function as an
instrument of Nazi propaganda is best illustrated by the massive three-day commemorative festival in late May 1933, which was held in Düsseldorf on the ten year
anniversary of Schlageter’s death. With over three hundred thousand extra visitors in
Düsseldorf, the Nazi newspaper Volksparole described the large scale and intensity
of the event in glowing terms:
The dignity of the festival, its size and importance, made its impression on the
cityscape. No house without flags, no streets without rows of façades decorated in
greenery […]. Never before had Düsseldorf, indeed, one could say, never before had a
city in Germany seen a richly coloured spectacle as this. Words no longer suffice, the
eyes cannot grasp everything. Incalculable masses of spectators and marching
columns.4
In this excerpt, Schlageter’s national significance and transformation into a Nazi martyr is emphasized by the magnitude of the visual spectacle. Its mention of flags and
colors emphasizes a visual overstimulation of the eyes. Yet this description of sensory overwhelming also implies an auditory experience, with the loud cheers of thousands and the sounds of marching feet. This production of intense resonances and
reverberations suggest an attempt to “sound out” the entire city landscape.
Taking this newspaper excerpt as a starting point, in this article I want to establish the value of examining sound in the cultural analysis of Nazism. While significant
academic attention has been devoted to the function of visual-textual elements in
58 | Carolyn Birdsall
Nazi propaganda techniques, I turn my attention to a number of key questions about
the role of sound for Nazi spectacles, in the disciplining of the senses, and the popularizing and normalizing of mythology.5 My analysis will revolve around two key questions: how did the Nazis make use of sound for their propaganda strategies? How
can concepts of the “Auditory Imagination” and “Affirmative Resonance” aid the
analysis of Nazi ritual practices between 1923 and 1933? I will address these issues
in four steps: firstly, I will introduce and define theoretical concepts and their relevance to my case study of Schlageter. Secondly, I will employ these conceptual tools
to analyze the political attempts for an acoustic occupation of public life during the
1920s in Germany. In the third section, I will focus specifically on the late Weimar
period (1929–1933), in view of the standardization of songs and ritual practices concerning Schlageter, and the utilization of new sound technologies and distribution
channels. Finally, I will analyze the 1933 Schlageter festival as the culmination of a
number of sound-related practices and propaganda strategies, which are integral to
the attempt to perform reconfigured identity patterns, social relations, and a new
national spirit in the public arena.
Theorizing Sound and Auditory Perception
In his book Listening and Voice (1976), Don Ihde develops the notion of the “auditory
imagination” as part of an analysis of the dynamics between listening and voice, corporeal experience and cognition. Ihde identifies two important modes for the auditory imagination. The first mode occurs in the “dual polyphony” between hearing external sounds
and one’s own inner speech.6 In Ihde’s view, the act of speaking prompts another kind of
dual polyphony or feedback between speaking and hearing oneself speak:
When I speak, if I attend to the entire bodily sense of speaking, I feel my voice resonate throughout at least the upper part of my body. I feel my whole head “sounding”
in what I take to be sonic resonance. (138)
It is precisely in this resonance that Ihde detects a polyphony between the perceptual
and imaginative, a co-presence of these two modalities that facilitates the individual’s
auditory imagination. When it comes to musical sounds, Ihde argues that intense
sounds may in fact preclude the possibility of thinking. As he explains, “bodily-auditory
motion” in the presence of music can engage both one’s subject body and experiencing body, thus leading to “a temporary sense of the ‘dissolution’ of self-presence”
(134). This temporary suspension of inner speech, Ihde says, results in “auditory
interruptions of thinking” (158). According to Ihde, sounds have the potential to disrupt thought patterns and one’s sense of self.
Ihde’s theoretical distinctions offer an important foundation for understanding individual listening processes and their engagement of the body and senses. The dynamic
between voice and listening makes a strong case for the affirmative qualities of speaking for subject formation. In turn, sounds can be generalized as provoking affects and
physical reactions on listeners. In the case of Nazi rituals, there is clearly a relationship between sensory stimulation and manipulation. Yet it would be too easy to generalize the vocal-corporeal involvement of participants and crowds, with the intense
sounds and resonances of the 1933 Schlageter festival as automatically subjecting
listeners to an entranced “musical ecstasy” (Ihde). Overwhelming sounds do not automatically eradicate all possibilities for thinking and self-awareness. Ihde’s too-easy
classification might lead to conclusions about listening as an irrational or primitive
sense, an assertion made by media theorist Marshall McLuhan.7
Instead, it is necessary to acknowledge the variety of crowds and the range of
reasons for attending large scale rituals like the 1933 Schlageter festival: out of
political affiliation, social obligation, suspicion, curiosity or even a desire for entertainment. In this scenario, the silence of a crowd member might suggest refusal.
Remaining silent could infer defiant opposition, but also silent agreement or being
forcibly silenced by intimidation or violence. The same difficulty arises when trying to
determine vocal-corporeal participation as always necessarily constituting affirmation of the Nazi regime. The sounds of the crowd might not have been an expression
of support for the regime per se, but rather reflect a common knowledge of traditional
songs and melodies, or even oppositional voices and responses that were drowned
out amidst the intense sounds of the marchers and brass bands, the cheering and
singing crowds.
The various degrees of participation, subject positions and motivations for attending a large-scale Nazi festival are important considerations. To fully untangle the complex orchestrations of propaganda during the Schlageter festival – creating mass
resonances and forms of sensory overstimulation in urban space – the concept of
“auditory imagination” outlined by Ihde remains too limited in scope. To sufficiently
analyze the impact of the Schlageter festival on the popular imagination, there are
two vital elements that remain underexamined in Ihde’s analysis. The first issue is
that of space. If the success of Nazi propaganda tactics and establishment of new
rites of national loyalty are to be closely examined, it becomes essential to focus on
the party’s utilization of space. Indeed, it is in the context of the various Nazi
attempts to occupy, dominate and reconfigure social space, in the spatial arrangements of large-scale rituals, that the significance of sound can be properly understood.
The significance of spatial practices immediately raises the second, interrelated
issue of intersubjectivity. This concerns the group dynamics and power relations
involved in large-scale rituals – in other words body politics and the disciplining of the
senses.8 Since Ihde is mainly concerned with individual auditory experiences, I take
my cue here from Henri Lefebvre (1991, 2004), whose work gives equal attention
to state uses and representations of space, along with the multiple rhythms, interactions and configurations of bodies in urban space. According to this taxonomy,
bodily practices are viewed as integral to establishing selfhood, patterns of identity
and belonging, and actively participating in the production of urban space.
Therefore, to expand Ihde’s auditory imagination concept to include the significance of the body politics and spatial practices, I propose the notion of “affirmative
resonance” as a useful concept for analyzing sound.9 The phrase refers to resonance, which is an acoustics term pertaining to the frequency of vibrations within a
particular system or area. Other uses of the term refer to the richness, variety or
intensification of a sound, along with the reactions it provokes among people.10
When combined with the word affirmative – which suggests a certain optimism, making an agreement, or being in favor of a particular decision or person – the phrase is
opened up to other possible meanings.
My basic definition of affirmative resonance is when a group of people communally create sounds that resonate in a space, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of their
group and its identity patterns. This definition is open to other variations, since I want
to acknowledge the role of the individual processes, as much as intersubjective relations (patterns of collectivity and belonging). It is given different qualities when manifested through the sounds of multiple human voices, singing of songs, playing of
instrumental music, or via technological recording and transmission. Affirmative resonances can be both heard or imagined sounds, ranging from forms of acoustic presence to the acoustic symbols produced by public discourse. They variously involve
the voices, ears and bodies of listeners, and are predominantly experienced in the
public spaces of the city, in enclosed spaces or domestic environments.
The several dictionary meanings attributed to the word resonance provide a framework for my discussion of Nazi propaganda strategies and the Schlageter festival.
The definitions refer to the intensification of sounds, their richness, variety and the
reactions they provoke. In the case of Nazism, the loud cheers of massive crowds at
official events not only comprised of the affirmations of individual speaking-hearing
feedback loops, but also the intensification of the sounds recorded by the microphone, projected through the loudspeaker system, and fed back again into the microphone. This would be the illustrative example of affirmative resonance during the
Nazi era, a propaganda goal that was not entirely achieved with sound technology
during the 1933 Schlageter festival, yet realized more completely in subsequent
years of the regime. The concept of affirmative resonances, however, is the key for
identifying the increased intensity and effectiveness of Nazi propaganda strategies
between the mid 1920s until 1933. During the period from 1925 onwards, the desire
to create mass events went hand in hand with the Nazi aim to transform themselves
into a mass political movement. This will be traced as a general shift from examples
of sparking the individual auditory imagination (presence) to comprehensive
attempts at sensory overwhelming, with large-scale techniques of affirmative resonance (omnipresence). In each section I will engage with these concepts to pinpoint
how and why the sound and musical forms hold such significance for understanding
key aspects of Nazi mythology, power relations and body politics, along with reconfigurations of urban geographies, identity and belonging.
Aesthetic Occupations of Public Space during the 1920s
[The street] is the location and medium
for social encounters, the confrontation of
classes, sexes, industry, generations etc.
(Thomas Lindenberger)
During the mid to late 1920s, the Nazi party developed a number of visual and acoustic
propaganda techniques based on principles of mass persuasion outlined by leader Adolf
Hitler.11 The illustrations of acoustic presence and acoustic conflict I will now examine are
precursors to the large-scale and multiple forms of affirmative resonance that emerged
in 1933. While they might have sparked the auditory imagination of non-members or reinforced the identity of party members, these examples do not represent the possibility for
paradigmatic shifts of community values and social allegiances. Nonetheless, the propaganda strategies pursued by both the Nazis and Communist parties reveal their tactics
for attracting support and provoking fascination through sensory-corporeal activities in
urban environments, encompassing both spatial practices and body politics.
The urban street is the quintessential site for the interactions of individuals and
groups within the city. As one of the most vivid symbols of modernity in Germany, the
street was invested with revolutionary potential in the wake of World War I after
1918. This sparked new forms of urban crowd behaviour and political participation,
epitomized by the development of a Redewut (a mania for speaking out).12 The street
had wider repercussions, since not only political disputes, but also the most important cultural discourses were located:
outside of the private and intimate sphere – on the streets, in public places, in halls,
and in pubs. This applied not only to the cultural expressions of political and social
revolt but also to the various forms of commercial entertainment and diversion;
whether cinema, variety, or the department stores for ordinary folk. (Zielinski 150)
During the 1920s, central figures in the Nazi party also maintained a core belief
in the urban street as a key location for gaining symbolic power and for the
“Eroberung der Masse” (conquering of the people). Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels reaffirmed this tenet about the Nazis’ so-called Kampfzeit (period of struggle) in the 1920s, citing their shared conviction that “whoever conquers the streets,
conquers the state” ([1931] 1938).
As has been frequently observed, both left and right wing groups aimed for visual
presence in their strategies and battles for dominance of urban spaces. Particularly
during election periods, the Nazis and Communist parties relied on a range of visual
strategies to heighten their public profile. In the case of the Nazis, billboard posters,
leaflets, newspapers, flags, symbols, party uniforms and swastika badges constituted the main modes through which their party established themselves visually
throughout city streets and cultural contexts. These strategies are often attributed to
the influence of French psychologist Gustave Le Bon on Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler.
In one of the frequently-cited quotes from Le Bon’s 1895 publication The Crowd, he
claimed that crowds can only think and be influenced through images, since “it is
only images that terrify them or attract them or become motives of action” (35). This
insistence on the suggestiveness of images has constituted a powerful legacy for
contemporary accounts of Nazi propaganda and leadership principles, since visual
forms are often preferred cultural objects for analyses of Nazism.
To turn to the role of sound in the Nazis’ endeavors to figure in the popular imagination, it is important to note Adolf Hitler’s belief in the “magic force of the spoken
word.”13 Sound is suited to the task of establishing presence since it does not respect
borders between public and private life, and travels beyond the field of vision. In doing
so, sounds are able to appear in the auditory imagination, even if their source cannot
be seen. During the 1920s, the Nazis were particularly effective in developing distinctive acoustic symbols as strategies for heightening their urban presence. The Nazis
began to use their own form of greeting from the early 1920s, which consisted of the
mutual exchange of the greeting Heil Hitler! with a straight, raised right arm. In
response to the success of this acoustic symbol, left wing parties unsuccessfully tried
to establish their symbolic greetings in the early 1930s, with the social democrats opting for Freiheit!, while some communists tried their luck with Heil Moskow!14 These
belated reactions to the Nazi greeting did not catch on with other left-wing supporters
or the general public. By contrast, the Nazi greeting was a mobilization of the body and
the senses, which gave the party a striking acoustic marker of their group identity in
public life (177). The Hitler-greeting was a major mechanism for mass suggestion, for
appearing in the auditory imagination, thus simultaneously operating as an indicator
for the growing social presence of Hitler supporters prior to 1933.
Drawing attention to the presence of sounds in public life during the 1920s is crucial, given that “part of clamour of modernity is a public sonic brawling, as urban space
becomes a site of acoustic conflict” [my emphasis] (Cloonan and Johnson 31). The
first instance of sonic brawling, or battles over acoustic presence, centered around
urban streets and marketplaces, particularly on weekends, which were the tense locations for heated political debates, street battles and noisy group processions. These
events represented both an opportunity to increase their support and a provocation to
political opponents, often involving brass bands, marching and the singing of party
songs. The parties at each end of the political spectrum used occasions for sonic
brawling as attempts to “sound out” urban locations, albeit on a fairly localized scale.
During the late 1920s, however, the Nazis amplified their acoustic presence with
the growing ranks of their Sturmabteilung (SA) militaristic units. The SA groups, with
their rows of marching columns, attracted public fascination and created the impression of a stable rhythm and order. Their role as a symbol of “the Volk on the march,”
also positioned SA troops in a similar position to Schlageter, as heroic freedom fighters and embodiments of the New Man.15 At the same time, SA units relied on
“acoustic conflict,” in noisy forms of intimidation and violence. Large groups would
descend on communist areas or Jewish businesses to sing out aggressive songs and
slogans like “Jude verrecke” (Jew, rot to death).16
Thus, there are two general patterns in the creation of auditory presence. The first
is comprised by the visual and acoustic markers of the Nazi party, with their distinct
greeting and marching through city streets. The synchronized footsteps of SA troops,
in particular, provided a palpable symbol for soldierly discipline and rhythmic order,
posited as an antidote to the chaos of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, these
troops maintained an ethos of warfare and fighting for the Nazi worldview, using
sounds to mark out territories and delineate exclusionary identity patterns across
urban spaces. The latter forms of acoustic conflict can be defined as creating “landscapes of fear” (Tuan) and “racialised geographies” (McCann), since the Nazi’s political program was based on aggressive attacks on Communists and spectacles of
public humiliation and violence against Jews.
The examples of acoustic presence and acoustic conflict discussed here point to
the variety of ways that the Nazi party used sound to attract attention and make an
appearance in the auditory imagination of both supporters and non-members during
the 1920s. Although there were many attempts at visual and acoustic occupations in
public life – involving corporeal and spatial practices – the propaganda strategies discussed here do not come close to the acoustic intensities, mass participation or
organizational capacities achieved in 1933. Indeed while there were still significant
amounts of “acoustic conflict,” with other political and institutional forces countering
the Nazis, it was not yet possible for the party to achieve mass contexts for “affirmative resonance.” The gradual shift from the Nazi’s appearances in the auditory
imagination towards mechanisms of affirmative resonance will be explored in the
next section, in relation to songs, publicity techniques and sound technologies during the late Weimar period.
Publicizing Songs, Sounds and Schlageter
Fascism was not an alternative to
commodity culture, but appropriated
its most sophisticated techniques.
(Susan Buck-Morss 309)
I now turn to focus specifically on the late Weimar period (1929–1933), in view of a
number of important developments that brought the Nazi party closer to creating the
conditions for mass “affirmative resonances” in public spaces. The central elements
of consequence here are the Nazi party’s standardization of ritual events involving
songs and speech, the utilization of new sound technologies and publicity forms, in
addition to the specific commemorative songs and memorial structures about
Schlageter. Each of these elements are essential to the party’s appeals to the
senses for promoting the Volksgemeinschaft as an experience, and realizing the
mass nature of their political movement.
With the increased profile of the Nazi party as a major political presence during
1931 and 1932, their attempts at acoustic presence and occupations of public life
grew in intensity. One of the key methods with which the Nazi party harnessed their growing ranks of supporters in the late Weimar period was through fortnightly local gatherings, known as Sprechabende (speech evenings). In large cities these evening
gatherings were attracting between one and five thousand people on a daily basis
(Paul 126). The focus on speeches during these events reflected Joseph Goebbels’
assertion that the spoken voice was more effective than the written word, given that
word-of-mouth would enable their propaganda to be “passed on and recited hundreds
and thousands of times” (18). This observation from Goebbels, as one of the key figures in Nazi propaganda, attests to the emphasis they placed on listening experiences of spoken voice and sounds as a means for generating enthusiasm for
the party.
By this later period, the Nazi party strove for further public notice through bold
propaganda and election campaigns, characterized by strategies for a spatial occupation and perhaps even a “shrinkage” of public space, as Ulf Strohmayer has suggested (150). Although officially banned from making radio appearances, in 1932 the
Nazis took the initiative to charter a plane for Hitler’s election campaign. His flights
between public lecture events in various German cities were marketed with the slogan Hitler über Deutschland (Hitler over Germany). Along with the posters and slogans for this media event, both a book and propaganda film of the same name
positioned Hitler as a statesman looking down over the nation from an omnipresent
position.17 As the only candidate to try to traverse between several large cities each
day, Hitler’s physical presence across the nation was projected as achieving an imagined spatial dominance.
During election campaigns, the Nazis also tried to heighten their acoustic presence
by exploiting the new opportunities made available for record album releases. After
1928, the party began to distribute songs as commodities for consumption, with record
releases of militaristic and party songs, along with Hitler’s Appell an die Nation (Call to
the Nation), that was released and sold prior to the 1932 elections.18 This pattern
demonstrates a growing presence of the Nazi party in the public’s auditory imagination,
made possible through mass-produced recordings of songs and speeches. Through
their marketing of songs through record releases, the Nazi party was taking advantage
of a newly emerging publicity system during the late Weimar period, based on new configurations of popularity and publicity. When describing the popular phenomenon of
Schlager (hit song) in the same period, Brian Currid summarizes this trend as the emergence of a “commercial mode of national fantasy.”19 Thus, the mass consumption of
national mythology through listening experiences was already underway prior to the Nazi
takeover in 1933, offered to the public as a media experience with new sound recording and distribution practices.
In 1932, the Nazi’s use of media distribution channels took a new turn, with the
availability of a new sound device at their disposal: Lautsprecherwagen, which were
purpose-built vans with loudspeakers attached to the outside. These vans were
rented during election campaigns, as a means for attracting the attention of citizens
with Nazi speeches, songs and party slogans (Paul 198). This represents an expansion of the principle of acoustic presence, since it enabled a significant intensification of sounds in support of the party. As a supplement to the strategies described
in the previous section, these loudspeaker vans now opened up the possibility for
penetrating public and private spaces with amplified sounds. Furthermore, this use
of a mechanically reproduced and amplified version of the party’s songs and
speeches represents an expanded attempt to compress and fill urban space, as a
vivid precursor to the propagandistic uses of radio after 1933. Loudspeaker vans
also intensified the possibilities for “acoustic conflict” described in the previous section, since the vans provided the party with new opportunities for intimidation tactics
against Communists and Jews. Thus, the use of loudspeaker vans was an important
development for the Nazi’s desire to achieve forms of acoustic dominance in the public spaces of cities, with the potential to mechanically drown out the sounds of their
political opponents.
I now return to the Nazi party’s desire to orchestrate sensory experiences and
facilitate the consumption of national myth. By the early 1930s the Nazi party had
standardized their use of songs and Christian-liturgical style rituals during gatherings
or large events, such as the “National Socialist Days of Celebration.”20 The party
used such events to form impressive commemorative traditions, appealing to participants with group experiences of singing, solemn ritual and emotional climaxes.
The standardization of song and incorporation of Christian-liturgical elements is
illustrated by the 1932 publication of an instruction book by F.H. Woweries. In the
book, Woweries offers a prototype for the necessary procedures of Nazi event programs as follows: opening choral piece, poem recital or chant, choral song Kein
schön’rer Tod der Welt, a short speech, orchestra piece, ceremony for new Hitler-Youth
members; orchestra piece, a closing chant and rendition of the second national
anthem Die Fahne hoch! (Raise the Flag!).21 The structure of the program alternates
between song, music and spoken texts, between chorus, recitations and chants.
Revolving around these various rituals and forms of participation, these events
included the ceremonial induction of new youth members into the Volksgemeinschaft.
Equally as important are the two songs included in the program, which both mourn
the death of “fallen comrades” and idealize male heroism for the nation.22 These
commemorative rituals, already established before 1933, provide clear indication of
the strategies, rhythms and sensory stimuli incorporated into Nazi events designed
to perform a sense of group participation in the nation’s rebirth.
Nationalistic songs and anthems, with uplifting lyrics and bombastic melodies, are
particularly useful as propaganda, given their ability to harness feelings of optimism
and belonging.23 Prior to the Weimar Republic, popular music had proven to be
an effective source of political mobilization during World War I (Watkins 213–26). One
of the most popular tunes during the war was the song Wacht am Rhein, which
locates the Rhine river as historically German (not French) and personifies it as a
brave soldier standing in defense of the national border. Likewise, one of the most
striking features of the Schlageter myth is the way it was embedded into national significance through song and ritual practices in lead up to 1933. Nazi song practice
was primarily based on the coupling of simple, emotive music with strong, unambiguous lyrics, often from well-known poems (Meyer 569). In the late Weimar period,
former comrades and members of the nation-wide Schlageter-Gedächtnis-Bund set
about to rework well-known songs in Schlageter’s memory.24 Several of these
melodies were World War I or soldier songs, including Wacht am Rhein, which were
given new verses.
Among the numerous songs in circulation about Schlageter during the Weimar
period, was a new song written by Nazi propagandist Otto Paust,25 titled “Song of the
Lost Troops”26:
Rhine, Ruhr and Palatinate.27 And – dungeon’s darkness,
Sentence and prison! Trouble, unable to rest –
Golzheimer Heath.28 Schlageter’s death.
Flaming blaze. Dawn! Do you remember?
The Third Reich’s first soldier!
You kept the faith! You were the living deed.
You are the Reich. You are the nation,
You are Germany’s faith, the son of the Volk.
The song performs a noticeable shift, moving from the despair about the prison sentence for Schlageter, through to his death at dawn as the scene of rebirth for the
nation. The first stanza gives a short and stylized account of Schlageter’s death and
addresses Germans with the question “do you remember?,” to prompt not only
remembrance but perhaps also as a test of patriotic loyalty. The second stanza
addresses Schlageter as the “Third Reich’s first soldier,” and a symbol for Germany’s
struggle in the face of defeat and occupation after World War I. The song, then, situates Schlageter both as a myth of origin and “the son of the people.” In this way, it
becomes easier to discern how such songs were drawn on for rituals and rhetorics
about unconditional loyalty to the nation, a discourse that the Nazis simultaneously
used to reposition Communists and Social Democrats as unpatriotic traitors
(Fischer 2).
Two other significant Nazi appropriations of traditional melodies included the seventeenth-century folksong Kein schön’rer Tod der Welt and the popular song Zu
Mantua in Banden, written in 1831. The historical references in Zu Mantua in Banden
represent a striking parallel with the Schlageter myth. The lyrics to this melody were
written about Andreas Hofer, who fought against Napoleon’s French armies in the
early 1800s. Hofer was arrested and shot to death by a French firing squad, and this
resemblance to Schlageter is emphasized in the lyrics of the Schlageter-Song:29
With the sounds of drum roll
To Benrath on the Rhine,
A thriving life came
To an abrupt end.
Albert Schlageter, German hero
French anger cut you down
You died for Germany’s honor.
They forced you to your knees
Out of baseness and malice,
The wish to die standing,
Was dismissed with a sneer.
Twelve shots cracked at once,
Comrades, let it be known in the German Reich
Here fell an officer, a German officer.
With aching hearts
And suppressed anger
We saw your life end
And the pouring of precious blood
With your unbroken male pride
Staying as stable as German oakWood, in a mighty heroism.
German Andreas Hofer,
You pearl of German loyalty
Your luster will never fade,
Will always be renewed.
All of Germany swears, despite its woes,
To show their gratitude for your martyrdom:
Revenge will be mine!
These lyrics, written during the 1920s, represent a similar attempt to Paust’s mythologizing of Schlageter. The song begins by describing drum rolls and the twelve shots
of the French firing squad. These are two important illustrations of the acoustic symbols used frequently in the poems, songs and rhetorics about Schlageter’s death.
These symbols were attributed with further significance in the lead up to 1933, as
the French gunshots were commonly portrayed as a call to arms prompting
Germany’s so-called national awakening. In the second stanza, Schlageter’s heroic
behavior is pitted against the depravity of the French military. His example as a manly
ideal and German soldier is then compared to the longevity and dependability of an
oak tree in the third stanza – as upright, unyielding and principled. In the final stanza,
the protagonist addressed as “you” in the previous stanzas is overlaid with the persona of Andreas Hofer. This doubling up of these two figures integrates Schlageter
as heir to a lineage of male German patriots, thus reconfirming his role both as a
myth of origin and a projected future for the model of a new man under National
Socialism. The final part of the song functions as a pledge of loyalty, ending with the
theme of revenge, and stressing the necessity for action. In this manner, nationalistic songs represented an important mobilizing force for the Nazi idea of a “people’s
community.” The lyrics place semantic emphasis on action as central to the Nazi’s
own objectives as a political Bewegung (literally, “movement”), and repeatedly appeal
to the auditory imagination when citing gunshots as the acoustic symbols and triggers for Germany’s national rebirth.
The lyrics of the Schlageter-Lied were submitted by a former comrade of Schlageter
to the Düsseldorf Historical Museum, as part of a compilation begun in 1931 to create a “Schlageter Corner” in their permanent collection.30 From 1932 onwards, a
Nazi-dominated team began preparations in Düsseldorf for a Schlageter-GedächtnisAusstellung (Schlageter memorial exhibition), which was opened during the 1933 festival.31 The calls to memorialize Schlageter’s memory intensified after 1927, when a
prominent circle of Düsseldorf citizens, including Catholics and conservatives, called
for donations to their Ausschuss für die Errichtung eines Schlageter-Nationaldenkmals
(Committee for the Erection of a National Schlageter Memorial). The committee also
lobbied the German Chancellery throughout 1927 and 1928 to assist them in building
a memorial at the location of Schlageter’s death at the Golzheim Heath, yet Chancellor
Wilhelm Marx expressed concerns at the nationalist and anti-French motivations of the
committee, given the then-fragile diplomatic ties with France.32 The monument was
finally built in 1931, some fifty meters from the site of Schlageter’s death, according
to the plans of Düsseldorf Professor Clemens Holzmeister (see image 1). The monument was overwhelmingly dominated by a towering iron cross, at a height of thirty
meters, with a memorial tablet listing over one hundred dead men from the resistance
to the French occupation.
Two aspects of the memorial were ideal for the Nazi mythologizing of Schlageter.
Firstly, the Christian overtones of the cross were suited to the Nazi’s use of Schlageter
as a Christ-like symbol of heroic sacrifice. Surrounded by open fields, a concrete construction in front of the cross was partially below ground and circular in shape. This second aspect had the desired effect for an inclusive congregation of the people, spatially
reconfigured as “a community, the people gathered within” (Taylor 191–92). Indeed, for
the Nazis in Düsseldorf, the site was the perfect locations for repeated ritual gatherings,
seen as further consolidating “the feeling of predestined solidarity of the new
Volksgemeinschaft.”33 While the Nazi party only exercised a partial role in the use of the
memorial site in 1931, its significance was considerably expanded in the mid 1930s
with a massive building project under Nazi directives. The 1937 Schaffendes Volk exhibition integrated the memorial site with the Schlageter-Forum, a grand columned
entranceway, incorporating both a large number of pavilions and a Schlageter-Siedlung
(housing estate).34 Thus, the spatial dimensions of the Schlageter memorial were complementary to the Nazi’s will to create mass rites of national loyalty, or in other words,
for achieving affirmative resonances.
Hence, during the late Weimar period the mass publicity strategies of the Nazi party
were characterized by a frenzy of propaganda and political agitation, striving towards
principles of sensory overwhelming and spatial omnipresence. The party drew on a
Christian ritual and symbolic framework, elevating each gathering to the status of an
“event.” They took advantage of sound technologies and song practices as devices for
widely circulating and popularizing their nationalist cause, heightening the possibilities
for acoustic presence in public spaces. In this process, Schlageter’s death was emphasized as the awakening of the nation, facilitated by the acoustic symbol of gunshots.
With the establishment of memorial groups, a museum collection and memorial site,
Schlageter’s memory and significance was consolidated in Düsseldorf’s urban landscape. The symbolic and physical dimensions of the memorial site offered a sacrosanct
space, which could easily lend itself to the nationalistic eulogizing, body politics and
spatial practices of 1933. In the next section, I examine how the Nazi party, once in
power, integrated these various strategies with their new control over public events and
cultural production. I outline a number of ritual events prior to the Schlageter festival,
before moving to the range of ways in which the party uses the Schlageter mythology
and its commemoration to orchestrate large-scale techniques of affirmative resonance.
Schlageter Memorial Festival
Participation in a mass demonstration at a
time of great public exaltation […] implies some
physical action – marching, chanting, slogans,
singing – through which the merger of the
individual in the mass, which is the essence
of the collective experience, finds expression.
(Eric Hobsbawm 73)
In his 2002 memoirs, historian Eric Hobsbawm conceded that he could no longer
recall many details of his participation in a large Communist political demonstration
in Berlin during early 1933. Instead, what he clearly remembers is the experience of
collective singing with “intervals of heavy silence,” his trance-like state and the
exalted feeling that “we belonged together” (74). In his description, Hobsbawm picks
out the physical movement of marching in the city, and the shifts between speech,
song and silence, as key factors for drawing individuals into inclusive mass rituals,
characterized by its spatial and bodily practices. While the experiences described by
Hobsbawn were situated within a Communist tradition, this example illustrates how
the intersections of crowds, group rituals and urban space can contribute to the collective performance of a group identity.
To turn first to the early months of Nazi rule, a number of large public events
staged by the party are equally revealing as establishing social legitimation and inviting popular participation in the Nazi’s conception of Volksgemeinschaft (nationalracial community) as a panacea to class divisions in German society. On the day that
the Nazis seized power, 30 January 1933, one million supporters took the streets of
Berlin in a nighttime procession with torch lights, which proceeded past the German
chancellery and through the triumphal archway of the Brandenburg Gate. A number of
official rituals were organized in the four months prior to the Schlageter festival,
which were public holidays and the occasions for whole day broadcasting programs
under new Nazi radio administrations. One of these, Der Tag von Potsdam (Day of
Potsdam), was held on 21 March 1933 to replace the annual German Reichstag celebrations and appropriate the key ceremonial site of the former Prussian monarchy.
Some weeks later, on 1 May 1933, the international worker’s day was similarly transformed into Der Tag der Arbeit (Day of Labor), an occasion described as performing
the symbolic destruction of the German labor movement (Elfferding 1987).
A third major event in this short period was the national public holiday created for
Adolf Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1933. After a whole day of national celebrations for
Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday in Berlin, the highlight of the evening was the premiere
and radio broadcast of a new theatre play Schlageter, with Hitler and high-ranking
party officials in attendance.35 The play, which was written and staged by Hanns
Johst, used every opportunity to portray Schlageter as a Nazi hero and “first soldier
of the Third Reich.”36 Even in the final death scene at dawn, Johst put the propaganda slogan “Germany Awake!” into Schlageter’s mouth. Positioned upstage with
his back to the audience, Schlageter faced the guns of the firing squad (which were
also pointed at the audience) (see image 2). In this climactic scene, with the sound
effects of French car engines and headlights shining towards the audience, his character’s last words were “Germany! One last word! One wish! Command! Germany!
Awake! Catch flame! Burn! Burn beyond imagining!” (Johst 135). At this moment gunshot sounds rang out, and the bright spotlight shining in the audiences’ eyes went
out, leaving the audience in the dark.
This represented an important acoustic moment for the audience members, with
the question of patriotism ringing in their ears. In the dark silence that ensued,
German audiences were left with the image of Schlageter’s sacrifice, left to think
about the necessity of taking action and fighting for the nation. After this pause, the
applauding audience joined in song for the two national anthems Das Lied der
Deutschen and Die Fahne hoch! (Strobl 308). This was the climax of a public holiday
and rituals for Hitler’s birthday, where not only the acoustic symbol of the gunshots
reconfirmed Schlageter’s importance, but also with the affirmative resonances of
collective singing of both national anthems, whether participating as theatergoers or
listening as part of the radio audience.
In this example, it becomes clear how the Nazis were able to expand on their earlier strategies, using specific forms of acoustic symbols and acoustic presence to
appeal to the auditory imagination. On the one hand, the whole day radio broadcasts
replicated the acoustic symbols and the sensory stimulation of the songs, sounds and
heightened anticipation of the public events. These broadcasts are illustrative of the
Nazis’ desire to bridge private and public spaces through radio and other media, insofar that “networking private and public experience within an expanded frontier of
national space became an important political point of legitimation and control”
(Bathrick 4). On the other hand, in the appropriation of familiar public events and a preexisting knowledge of songs for collective singing, the Nazis’ could engage crowd participation in songs, chants and sound making. In this sense, even if crowd members
felt like autonomous subjects engaged in acts of self-expression, the elements of
these speaker and crowd encounters marked the merging of “expression and repression [within] the same mechanism” (Koepnick 46).
Ultimately, through the realization of sensory overwhelming and spatial omnipresence, these party rituals enabled the creation of affirmative resonances that could
sound out the entire public space of the city, saturating the ears and bodies of the
people. Moreover, these ritual practices supported new characterizations of urban
space, with its Endlose Strassen (endless streets) and Ewige Strassen (eternal
streets), replacing an earlier characterization of “die freudlose Gasse” (the joyless
street) in the economic crises of the twenties and the early thirties.37 Such positive
notions of streetscapes were boosted by plans for a national Autobahn network,
which performed the additional function of promising to network the nation in the
form of transport routes (Vahrenkamp).
The expanded significance of acoustic presence and acoustic symbols, of corporeal and spatial practices is central to the three-day Schlageter festival held in
Düsseldorf from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 May 1933. Like the festivals described
above, the attendance of crowd members was in part obligatory, such as for the
eighty thousand local Hitler-Youth members, who were required to attend the event.
For most of the other crowd members their participation was voluntary, since the festival was popularized and normalized as a tourist event, with souvenirs and commodities for consumption.38 In the lead up to the festival, German radio stations
broadcast radio plays and biographical accounts about Schlageter. Visitors could
attend the opening of Johst’s Schlageter play or screenings of the film Blutendes
Deutschland (1932), which restaged the story of Schlageter and the rise of the Nazis
through newsreel footage. On the first day of the festival in Düsseldorf was the official opening of the Schlageter memorial museum and exhibition, which went on to
tour in other major cities competing to partake in the popular enthusiasm for
Schlageter-related events (Fuhrmeister 7–8).
In addition to the postcards and pins available for sale, a significant number of biographies and commemorative books were published during 1933 and 1934, which further
encouraged the consumption of national myth. One example of the insistence on
Schlageter’s national significance can be found in the afterword to a collection of his letters, edited by Friedrich Bubenden (1934). Bubenden emphasizes the simplicity of
Schlageter’s prose, before situating his story in acoustic terms. Schlageter is positioned
as true patriot who listened to “the call” of the unknown soldier in post war Berlin and
who could hear “the subterranean rumbling […] of the Ruhr” during the anti-French resistance.39 Towards the end of this text, Bubenden stresses that Schlageter was an example to the German people in his devotion to the nation, as “a man of action and not of
words,” who continued to struggle, rather than “sinking into non-militant contemplation.”
The call for a national awakening and creation of a Volksgemeinschaft was performed via a number of acoustic means during the Schlageter festival. On each of the
three days of the Schlageter festival, different uniformed groups with thousands of
members marched through the streets of the city. By the first day of the festival, the
Ehrenfeuer (memorial flame) had already been burning at the memorial site for five
days. A national memorial broadcast for all school children took place between ten
and eleven a.m., with a radio play about Schlageter written for the occasion.40 That
evening, at seven p.m., the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne broadcast a special
edition of the daily Stunde der Nation (Hour of the Nation), in honour of Schlageter.
Immediately following this classical concert program, another Schlageter radioplay
(based on Johst’s production) was broadcast from Berlin until half-past nine. In
Düsseldorf, one hundred airplanes circled over the city at five p.m., while a bronze
bust and plaque were unveiled in the district court, where Schlageter had been sentenced (Knauff 174). Later that evening, the Schlageter memorial group arranged a
concert event for long-time party members in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle (concert hall),
with a chorus singing a range of songs from Richard Wagner, World War I and folk
repertoires.41
The second day of the festival celebrations, titled the Schlagetertag der HitlerJugend (Schlageter Day for the Hitler Youth), involved eighty thousand local school
children in a march to the memorial site in Golzheim (Baird 37). Hitler Youth members met at seven p.m. and went to the empty factory halls, which would serve as
mass accommodation facilities for the festival. After assembling with torch lights and
flags at nine p.m., the youth groups marched through the city to the Schlageter
memorial, where they had a ceremony of hymns, brass bands and speeches.
Positioned as the new members and future of the German Volksgemeinschaft, for
both boys and girls, Schlageter was projected as the embodiment of the role that
youth could play in the rebirth of the nation. Furthermore, the enthusiasm for marching as part of the Volksgemeinschaft generated in many of its young members has
been described in one memoir as something that “pulled us along – namely, the compact columns of marching youths and waving flags, eyes looking straight ahead, and
the beat of drums and singing. Was it not overwhelming, this fellowship?”42 For some
younger members, the intensity of these experiences and the ubiquity of Schlageter’s
persona earned him the status similar to contemporary pop idols.43
The last day of the festival, Sunday 28 May, involved the most impressive performances of affirmative resonance. The day began at six a.m. with a Großes Wecken, a
large reveille through the city, which was designed to wake up all civilians in the early
hours of the morning.44 This was a re-enactment of the acoustic symbol of the gunshots at Schlageter’s death, literally performing the “wake-up call” that would prompt
both remembrance and the awakening of the nation. During the course of the morning, one hundred and eighty-five thousand uniformed participants marched through
the streets, reordering them and sounding them out, amidst the cheers and participation of the crowds. These interactions reflect a ritual and sensory re-education of the
people, achieving affirmative resonance in the singing as well as the rhythms of marching, enabling a symbolic territorial claim on the city that performatively rejected the
earlier presence of French foreigners in this urban space. Moreover, postal authorities
installed a telephone system with two hundred and fifty extensions around the city,
and no expense was spared in providing loudspeakers for crowds and reporters.45
At ten a.m., all the marchers reached the Schlageter memorial. After the party
leaders and special guests had entered this hierarchically divided space, a choir
began to sing Franz Schubert’s hymn Heilig ist der Herr accompanied by one hundred
musicians. Amidst this religious sentiment, two priests (catholic and protestant)
mounted a risen platform, covered in swastika flags, from which they could each give
a speech about Schlageter to the assembled masses, before the Niederländischen
Dankgebet was played (Knauff 184). Just after eleven a.m., Prussian Interior Minister
Hermann Göring gave a forty-five minute speech, broadcast across the whole country, where he cited the same acoustic symbol of the gun shots that had made such
an impact at the premiere of Johst’s Schlageter play a few weeks previously:
When the shots rang out ten years ago at dawn at this spot, they were heard
through the German night and awakened the nation in her weakness and humiliation.
In those days the memory of Schlageter inspired us and gave us hope. We refused to
believe that his sacrifice had been in vain. Schlageter demonstrated in the way he died
that the German spirit could not be destroyed. Schlageter, you can rest in peace. We
have seen to it that you were honored here and not betrayed like your two million comrades. As long as there are Schlageters in Germany, the national will live.46
In this speech, the acoustic symbol and imagined sound of Schlageter’s death was
again positioned as the spark reigniting the nation and its awakening, as the precondition for a new Volksgemeinschaft. Amidst multiple sounds and activations of
affirmative resonance, Göring’s strategic use of the acoustic symbol of gunshots
reflects a more general attempt to transform a deeply divided society, previously
characterized as a “people of music,” into an “acoustic völkisch community”
(Trommler 68).
Once Göring’s speech ended, it was followed by a full two minutes of silence,
which was observed across the whole country. Amidst the sounds of Ich hatt’ einen
Kameraden (I once had a comrade), Göring and other party leaders descended to the
empty lower area of the memorial to lay wreathes adorned with swastika flags (see
image 3). At the end of the ceremony, the Düsseldorf Gauleiter (regional party leader)
Florian gave a speech, before participants joined in singing both national anthems.
After these ninety minutes of memorial rituals in Golzheim, the group of one hundred planes circled over the memorial site. Hitler Youth groups marched through the
city streets, carrying flags and singing, before gathering for a lunch by the Rhine riverbank. From one p.m. onwards the uniformed SA and SS (Schutzstaffel)47 groups
reassembled and marched southwards through the city, saluting party leaders in the
old city centre, before arriving for another assembly outside the Düsseldorf town
theater.48 After this gathering with its rituals and song, the seventy thousand
uniformed SA and SS members returned to the northern banks of the Rhine, where
they could buy food and alcohol outside the Düsseldorf sports stadium (Rheinstadion)
(see image 4). The official party event beginning at five p.m. inside the stadium
included a sports and horse-riding display, musical accompaniment and party
speeches. For those at home, a Hörbericht (listener’s report) was broadcast nationally
at the same time, with an hour-long earwitness account of the day’s event by a
Siemens factory worker.49 After this two-hour event, concluding again with the two
national anthems, the SA and SS squadrons returned through the city for a number of
concert events and smaller music performances scattered around various inner city
locations and taverns. The conclusion to the festivities came in the late evening, with
a concert of Prussian marches by one thousand musicians beginning at nine p.m.
from the opposite banks of the Rhine (Oberkassel). At ten p.m., cannon shots were let
off to announce a light display, with a giant reconstruction of the memorial cross with
the text Schlageter lebt (Schlageter lives).50 This visual and aural spectacle closed
with aerial fireworks exploding over the heads of the spectators (see image 5).
The commemorative festival in May 1933 was undoubtedly the high point in the
Nazis’ use of Schlageter as a national symbol of heroism. Although Schlageter’s
memorial site was incorporated into subsequent attempts to transform Düsseldorf’s
topography, his mythology never regained the momentum evident in the decade
between 1923 and 1933. Schlageter was an indispensable model for the new man
deemed necessary by the Nazis for their anticipated Volksgemeinschaft. Indeed, with
Schlageter the Nazi party was able to manipulate the recent humiliation of the French
occupation as a means for inciting pledges of national loyalty. As I have demonstrated,
in order to achieve this goal the Nazis kept the public in “a permanent state of excitement” in the early months of 1933 (Mosse 366). They invited popular participation in
spectacles of national loyalty, which appropriated familiar elements from Christian rituals, traditional songs and music practice, through tourism, commodity consumption
and memorialization.
Ultimately, the resulting forms of suspense, sensory stimulation and vocal-corporeal
participation offered to the public can be best understood as large-scale practices of
affirmative resonance. The value of this concept is that it has opened up the interrelations between sensory overstimulation and discipline, for understanding the power and
pleasure involved in rituals of “sonic dominance.”51 Affirmative resonance, furthermore, has provided a way to account for the expanded geographical dimensions of
large-scale rituals, from their geometrical organization of bodies to the use of sound to
permeate and produce rhythm to urban spaces. In these large-scale Nazi rituals, there
was a notable expansion of their reliance on forms of acoustic presence and acoustic
symbols. The appeal to the auditory imagination, with the symbol of French gunshots,
was reproduced through national radio broadcasts, theatre performance and published
material. The significance of these imagined sounds to the nation’s “reawakening” was
literally re-enacted during the Schlageter memorial festival, with a noisy reveille through
the city streets, and reinforced with Hermann Göring’s speech for the massive crowds
at the memorial site.
In conclusion, the concept of affirmative resonance ultimately offers a number of
critical aids for an historical investigation of sound. The most significant foundation
for writing such a history is the recognition of the spatial, imaginative and intersubjective dimensions of sounds in cultural contexts. That is to say, sound is marked by
its ability to reverberate in spaces, to travel and fill spaces, and reach beyond the
field of vision. In response, the researcher is confronted with the sensory and embodied nature of historical experience. Attending to spatial qualities of sound, therefore,
brings with it the realization that every history must also have a geography. In terms
of the imagination, close study of song and musical practices reemphasizes the
potential of sounds as a powerful mobilizing agent for emotions and physical reactions. Given that the affective qualities of sound and music have historically raised
issues concerning political manipulation, it is not surprising that the researcher is
drawn to questions of intersubjective relations. In order to account for both the individual and group relationships with sounds, it is essential to start with a model for
individual patterns of listening and speaking as per Don Ihde’s concept of the auditory imagination. Such a model provides an important departure point for analyzing
how sound can intervene in group dynamics and collective patterns of identity, in
reconfiguring social bodies and reordering urban spaces.
Notes
1. Part of Schlageter’s appeal was his
youthfulness, since he was twenty-eight at the
time of his death. See Karl Radek, “Leo
Schlageter: Der Wanderer ins Nichts.” Die Rote
Fahne 26 June 1923, reprinted as “Leo
Schlageter: The Wanderer in the Void,” in Kaes
(312–14).
2. Their official name was the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(NSDAP), which translates as the National
Socialist German Workers Party.
3. See Fischer (2–3). Following Germany’s
inability to meet the extensive financial
reparations outlined in the Versailles Treaty of
1919, French military troops occupied
Düsseldorf, Duisburg and surrounding areas in
1921. French and Belgian forces occupied the
rest of the entire Ruhr-Rhine region in 1923, and
it was only with significant international pressure
and the “Dawes Plan” that the controversial
occupation came to an end in mid 1925.
4. “Von Schlageter-Denken zu Hitler-Tat.”
Volksparole 29 May 1933, quoted in Koshar
(181).
5. For two specific analyses of Nazi visual
propaganda, including leaflets, posters,
streetlamps, flags and other symbols, see
Herding and Mittig (1975) and Thöne (1979). A
growing interest in sound during twentieth
century Germany, mainly focused on film sound,
can be found in recent publications by Lutz
Koepnick (2002) and Erica Carter (2004), along
with an edited volume by Nora M. Alter and Lutz
Koepnick (2004). In the case of the Schlageter
myth, two excellent sources are Fuhrmeister
(2005) and Baird (1990), which focus primarily
on visual-textual phenomena.
6. Ihde divides “inner speech” up into two
further subcategories of “thinking as language”
and “thinking in language,” terms taken from
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of
Perception (1962).
7. This link made by McLuhan between listening
and passivity has since been criticized by a
number of sound theorists, including Leigh Eric
Schmidt (2000) and Jonathan Sterne (2003).
8. This concern with the politics of the body is
most commonly associated with the work of
historian Michel Foucault, who introduced the
term “biopolitics” to account for a mode of
government or a set of techniques that involve
pervasive mechanisms of control over subjects’
bodies (Foucault History; Power).
9. The term “affirmative resonance” was
originally a phrase made in passing by media
scholar Cornelia Epping-Jäger in a discussion
about sound technology during Nazism, which
she did not theorise in further detail (2004).
10. See Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary Unabridged of the English Language
(1986) for the entries for resonance.
11. The Nazis’ belief mass propaganda and
mass psychology is most vigorously asserted in
Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf (1925),
written while in prison during 1923.
12. Stefan Grossmann, “Gegen die Redewut.”
Vossische Zeitung 15 November 1918, quoted
in Fritzsche (100). See also Nolan (1981) and
Tobin (1985) for two accounts about Düsseldorf
during World War I, with regards to mounting
class tensions and subsequent revolutionary
activities in the city streets.
13. See the first section of Mein Kampf (1925),
where Hitler also mentions Albert Leo Schlageter
as an important hero for the Nazi movement.
14. These greetings translate into English as
“Freedom!” and “Hail Moscow!”
15. Hanns Ludin, SA-marschierendes Volk
(Munich 1939), quoted in Campbell (662). A
number of propaganda slogans and campaigns
emphasized the role of the SA marching
columns for the Nazi’s desire for a new national
spirit and a national identity based on male
heroism.
16. Historian E.P. Thompson cites these
practices as drawing on pre-existing practices
of humiliation and blackmail from the early
modern period known as Katzenmusik (524,
531). See also Der Völkische Beobachter
[supplement ‘Der SA-Mann’] 30/31 December
1928, in Paul (140).
17. See Hoffmann and Berchtold (1932). The
propaganda film is sometimes referred to as
“Hitler’s Flight over Germany” (1932).
18. Der Völkische Beobachter 15 July 1932,
quoted in Paul (198).
19. In Currid’s engaging analysis of Schlager
music, films and star-actors, he ultimately
deduces that the multiple movements and
cultural functions of the Schlager result in a
politics that is “radically undecidable” and
escapes clear cut distinctions between music
as either resistance or domination (175).
20. These special occasions included Adolf
Hitler’s birthday, official party days, 1 May
(National Day of Labor), and 9 November (a day
of mourning party members who died in the
1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich).
21. F.H. Woweries, NS-Feierstunden: Ein
Hilfsbuch für Parteistellen, SA, SS, HJ, NSBO.
Mühlhausen, 1932 (21), quoted in Paul (130).
22. “Die Fahne hoch!”, commemorating the
dead Nazi party member Horst Wessel, became
the second official national anthem in 1933. Its
lyrics re-emphasize the “determined footsteps”
of SA troops marching in file through the city
streets, fighting for freedom, and remembering
former party members.
23. For a similar discussion in relation to
Communist China in the 1930s and 1940s,
see Hung (903–5).
24. This Schlageter Memorial Association was
right wing in orientation and was comprised
mainly of members of the Nazi party.
25. Otto Paust was an editor for Joseph
Goebbels’s Berlin party newspaper Der Angriff. It
is undoubtedly problematic to analyze the song
lyrics translated into English, and without the
sounds of the melody. However, the lyrics
provide some insight into the mythologizing of
Schlageter’s death and its rendering as a
significant national event.
26. The original German lyrics of Paust’s song
“Das Lied vom ‘Verlorenen Haufen’ ” are
as follows:
1. Rhein, Ruhr und Pfalz. Und –
Gefängnisnacht. / Urteil und Kerker! Verstört,
verwacht – / Golzheimer Heide. Schlageters Tod.
/ Leuchtende Lohe. – Morgenrot! / Weißt Du es
noch?
2. Des Dritten Reiches erster Soldat! / Dir gilt
die Treue! Denn du warst Tat. / Du bist das
Reich. Du bist Nation. / Bist Deutschlands
Glaube, Volkes Sohn.
This excerpt is from Otto Paust, “Deutsche
Verse,” cited in full in Glombowski (443–44). I
would like to thank Jay Baird providing me with
this reference and English translation (see also
Baird 13).
27. This region is known as Rheinland-Pfalz in
German, covering the areas around Koblenz,
Mainz and Trier.
28. The location of Schlageter’s death was the
Golzheimer Heath, an empty area of land near
the Nord-Friedhof (cemetery), and near the
banks of the Rhine River in the northern part of
Düsseldorf.
29. The original German lyrics of the
“Schlageter-Lied”:
1. Bei dumpfen Trommelwirbel / zu Benrath an
dem Rhein, / da ging ein blühend Leben / um
jähen Tode ein. / Albert Schlageter, deutscher
Held, / Franzosenwut hat dich gefällt, / Du
starbst für Deutschlands Ehre.
2. Man liess dich niederknien / Aus
Niedertracht und Tücke, / Den Wunsch aufrecht
zu sterben, / Wies man mit Hohn zurück. / Zwölf
Schüsse krachten alsogleich, / Kameraden, wißt
im deutschen Reich, / Hier fiel ein Offizier, ein
deutscher Offizier.
3. Mit schmerzzerrissem Herzen / Und
stillverhaltner Wut, / Sah’n wir dein Leben enden
/ Und fließen teures Blut. / Dein ungebroch’ner
Mannesstolz / Blieb fest wie deutscher Eichen /
Holz, im starken Heldentum.
4. Deutscher Andreas Hofer, / Du Perle
deutscher Treu, / Dein Glanz kann nie
verblassen, / Wird immer werden neu. / All
Deutschland schwört, trotz aller Not, / Zum Dank
für den Mätyrertod: / Die Rache sie ist mein!
Bundesarchiv (National Archives, Berlin)
R/8038 “Schlageter-Gedächtnis-Museum” 12
(267).
30. Bundesarchiv (Berlin) R/8038 “SchlageterGedächtnis-Museum” (1–19).
31. Among the items from the early 1920s
sought by the team members, many of whom
joined a committee for a permanent Schlageter
Memorial Museum in 1934, included were
flags, photos, badges, and witness reports.
32. See correspondence between Chancellor
Marx, Governor of the Rhine Province Dr Horion,
and Committee members Dr Wilms-Posen and
Constans Hilmersdorff. Bundesarchiv (Berlin)
R43 I/834 Fiche II (47–57). Just prior to
Schlageter festival in 1933, Hitler accepted the
invitation to take on the role as
“Schirmherrschaft des Ausschusses für das
Schlageter-National-Denkmal” (Patron of the
Committee for the Schlageter-NationalMemorial).
33. Rudolf Wolters, “Die Bauten des Dritten
Reiches.” Deutscher Wille, Aufbau und Wehr –
Jahrbuch. 1937. 138–48, quoted in Schäfers
(119).
34. See Stefanie Schäfers’ Vom Werkbund zum
Vierjahresplan (2001) for a detailed
examination of the Schaffendes Volk (Productive
People) exhibition. Schäfer outlines tensions
between various organizing parties, along with
the economic, aesthetic and propaganda
dimensions to the event.
35. Those present in the Deutsche Theater
(Berlin) included Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels, prominent propagandist Albert
Rosenberg, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, and
Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, along
with writers Emil Strauss and Wilhelm Schäfer,
and conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Max
von Schillings (Rühle 61).
36. Hans Johst was a former soldier and
playwright, whose popularity with the Nazi party
resulted in his appointment as the president of
the Reich Chamber of Literature in 1935. The
play is dominated by a conflict between
generations, with the younger characters such
as the young August, exclaiming that “we young
people, who stand by Schlageter do not stand
by him because he is the last soldier of the
world war, but because he is the first soldier of
the Third Reich!!!” See Johst (85), quoted in
Mosse (118).
37. Die freudlose Gasse is the title of G.W.
Pabst’s 1925 film, which was part of the
“street film” genre in this period. See Anthony
Sutcliffe’s chapter “The Metropolis in the
Cinema” (1984).
38. Due to the large numbers of visitors
registered to attend the event, Düsseldorf
residents were asked to provide free
accommodation, along with donations of food
and tobacco goods from large companies in the
local area (Weidenhaupt 480).
39. Friedrich Bubenden, ed., Deutschland muss
leben: Gesammelte Briefe von Albert Leo
Schlageter (1934), quoted in Mosse (112–16).
40. “Programm,” Werag (Westdeutschlands
Heimat-Funkzeitschrift). 8:21 (21 May 1933):
33. School principals were given guidelines to
make a speech prior to the broadcast, which
should be staged as a special celebration.
41. See Schlageter File, Slg. Personen 3796,
Sammlung Rehse, Bayerisches
Hauptstaatsarchiv (Munich), cited in
Baird (37).
42. Inge Scholl, “To be part of a Movement!”
(1961), quoted in Mosse (271).
43. See Paul Rothmund, Albert Leo Schlageter
1923–1983: Der erste Soldat des 3. Reiches?
Der Wanderer ins Nichts? Eine typische deutsche
Verlegenheit? Ein Held? (1983: 1), in
Fuhrmeister (6).
44. Letter from Interior Minister Frick to
Prussian Minister Hermann Göring, 8 May 1933.
BArch R43 I/218 Fiche 6 (266). The letter
includes a program with the official events
planned for the Schlageter commemoration.
48. Already several prominent areas in the
inner city were given new names in April 1933.
One side of the Königsallee was renamed
Albert-Leo-Schlageter-Allee, while the
Corneliusplatz was renamed Albert-LeoSchlageter-Platz until 1945. Two other central
locations were renamed as Adolf-Hitler-Strasse
and Adolf-Hitler-Platz. See Klemfeld (31).
45. “Die Schlageterfeiern in Düsseldorf: Das
endgültige Programm,” Ratinger Allgemeine
Zeitung. Friday 26 May 1933. 62: 122 (7);
Memo to Oberbürgermeister – Propagandaamt
[Lord Mayor – Propaganda Department], 26 May
1933. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf III 739, 27.
49. Werag (Westdeutschlands HeimatFunkzeitschrift). 28 May 1933. 8:22 (12).
46. This quote was published a few days later
in the newspaper Der Angriff, 29 May 1933,
cited in Baird (37).
51. Julian Henriques develops the concept of
sonic dominance with relation to the Reggae
Sound System in Jamaica. See Henriques’
contribution to this volume. My use of the word
power here is less in terms of his description of
a dynamic and creative activity, but rather
authoritarian power relations and practices
of body politics in urban environments.
47. The SS (Schutzstaffel) was the name given
to the elite paramilitary group, which developed
out of the SA during the 1920s, under the
direction of Heinrich Himmler.
50. “Die Schlageterfeiern in Düsseldorf: Das
endgültige Programm,” Ratinger Allgemeine
Zeitung. Friday 26 May 1933. 62: 122 (7).
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“You Can’t Flow Over This”:
Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic
Illusion
Marisa Parham
ABSTRACT
“You Can’t Flow Over This”: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion
This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written by the avant-garde
Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a poem written and performed by
Ursula Rucker. By using the aural to disrupt expectations set up for us by the visual,
each text shatters the visual, and reveals something important about the kinds of
silence identification in the visual requires. Though radically different in form from
each other – Kaufman’s letter was written to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963,
and Rucker’s poem appears on a 1995 rap album – both artists turn to the ear to
subvert the eye, using sound to disrupt fantasies about race, gender, and power in
the larger social scenes in which their texts originally appeared.
Introduction
… Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved –
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children –
women, deviants, witnesses – in desert sand.
[…]
and the ghosts – their hands clasped for centuries –
“You Can’t Flow Over This”: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion | 87
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into this absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life – this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
– Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-one love poems, V”
… the colors of an earthquake are black, brown, and beige, on the Ellington
scale, such sweet thunder, there is a silent beat in between the drums.
– Bob Kaufman, “Letter to the Editor.”
To be made apparent, sound requires amplitude and therefore, by necessity, the
silencing of other elements in any given field. This does not mean that silence is the
opposite of sound, for moments we might experience or conceptualize as silent in
fact signify our unawareness of other kinds of sound. As the musician and essayist
John Cage discovered in his well-known anechoic chamber experience, our very acts
of living produce sounds of which we spend a lifetime unaware: in a space of
absolute silence, one would hear the circulation of fluids and the passing of electrical currents through one’s own body. Much as “invisible” does not mean “absent,”
“silence” at worst names a failure on the part of an observer to fully apprehend a
presence, even as that presence gives texture to, makes possible, the apparent and
audible. Never an absence, silence is the rest and the interval. Filling the space
around every recognizable sound, it is powerful and generative; it is. Without it, as the
Beat poet Bob Kaufman tells us, “there is no drum, no beat” (Kaufman 97).1
Yet even as we know that in music theory silence is easily conceptualized as
sound’s constitutive obversion, we also know that, vis-à-vis the social, “silence” almost
always denotes oppression and suppression. In this essay, I bring together two texts,
a letter to the editor written by the avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The
Unlocking,” a poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker. By using the aural to disrupt expectations set up for us by the visual, their texts shatter the visual, and reveal
something important about the kinds of silence identification in the visual requires. In
Kaufman’s letter this disruption occurs between the written text, literally the words on
the page, and its sound, the transformation of the written in the act of reading.
Nothing is what it at first seems, and Kaufman uses this disruption to move his letter
past the mimetic and into the performative – making his words do what they say rather
than say what they do. Rucker, meanwhile, uses sound to decouple a spoken narrative
from the images that it creates for its listener. By doing so, Rucker allows for the emergence of a figure not only excluded from the dominant discourse in which she appears,
but who may not exist outside of that discourse, simultaneously absent and at the
88 | Marisa Parham
center of the narrative. Though radically different in form, each text turns to the ear to
subvert the eye, using sound to disrupt fantasies about race, gender and power.
I. Beats
In a recent interview, the artist Michael Bowen offers some insight into how
Kaufman’s “beat” also connotes a rhythmic violence:
Beat was a police term for the route that the patrolmen were assigned to walk everyday they worked. It is ironic that beat patrolmen and beat artists existed in a horrible
opposition to each other […] The cop on the beat and the beat on the street, that’s one
way of describing the world I lived in with […] Kaufman in 1955’s San Francisco.
(Bowen)
As a black street performer and rights activist who was often the target of police violence and state oppression, Kaufman – supposedly the original beatnik, and named
so for his frequent run-ins with police – was absolutely familiar with the kinds of violences through which one might be silenced. Indeed, the passage in the epigraph
above is quoted from a “letter to the editor” Kaufman sent to the San Francisco
Chronicle in 1963, after returning from jail to find he had been evicted from his home
and blacklisted.
There is something particularly compelling in Kaufman’s decision to post his letter
to a city newspaper. As an artist, Kaufman was committed to extemporaneity; much of
his poetry survives today as collected transcriptions of impromptu recordings and jots
on napkins. This time, however, Kaufman made an exception. Having been served
notice, Kaufman returned the favor in-kind, and in this way his “letter” finds as much
meaning in its performance of itself, as a message to a public forum, as it does in its
content. With his letter, Kaufman registers his mistreatment at the hands of state
authority. Making state violence visible to the masses was a critical strategy for social
change during the Civil Rights movement, but it is important that even as Kaufman follows a formal process important to democratic discourse – making one’s voice heard,
demanding recognition of one’s violation – he nevertheless refuses to make his notice
in any language familiar to processes of registration or documentation.
There is a tension between its peripatetic interiority and its nonetheless declarative participation in public discourse, a discourse courted by virtue of the text’s
status as a letter and also in its references to popular contemporary texts. His
letter references Duke Ellington’s masterwork, “Black, Brown, and Beige,” resonates
with e.e. cummings’s imagist poem “l(a… ” and names Allan Sillitoe’s 1958 The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.2 Though vastly different in form and execution, all three texts work against perceived ideas of representation, each articulating
representation as only possible in representations that are performed as presentations of the self per se. Yet even though each text might be understood as generated
in contradistinction to any mainstream, each text nonetheless broadened the
conceptual field in which it originally appeared, through that same resistance:
Ellington’s work excavates an ignored African American history; cummings’s poem creates a picture of its own meaning; and the plot of Sillitoe’s text culminates in a statesponsored runner’s refusal to finish the race that will win him freedom from prison.
All three texts reflect what Kaufman refers to in his letter as “oneliness”:
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is due to the oneliness of the Long
Distance Runner, that uniqueness that is the Long Distance Runner’s alone, and only
his. The loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is the only reason for the Long
Distance Runner’s existence. (Kaufman 96)
In its use of sound, Kaufman’s letter offers a minimally penetrable interiority. In its
first sentence, the heaviness of “loneliness” generates a regressive assimilation, as
it seeps “loneliness” into “oneliness,” thus making it difficult not to sound oneliness
as only-ness. This reinforces the graphic attachment of oneliness to loneliness, even
while it sonically resonates with alone and only. “Uniqueness,” meanwhile, sonically
and graphically references the previous terms in its suffix, but also snaps the tone,
offering a center-point for the sentence’s chiastic structure, and thereby foregrounding the potentially mispronounced, but also now conceptually-enlarged oneliness. By
leaking possible meanings across discrete words, sound accomplishes something in
this paragraph that writing alone cannot. It brings a sense of the melancholy in
Kaufman’s assertion, a sense that, even as the runner experiences oneliness – this
unity of self – his peace is nonetheless haunted.
The running that brings the runner to oneliness can never get the runner away
from loneliness, which means that there is a disjuncture between the act’s accomplishment and its inauguration, insofar as oneliness is technically the opposite of
being alone or only. However, out of this disjuncture emerges a new possibility for
meaning and language. His later observation that “[t]he colors of an earthquake are
black, brown, and beige,” speaks to this upheaval, “sweet thunder” though it may be.
Out of the chasm emerge newly recognized possibilities for recognition, reception for
the silent beat:
That silent beat makes the drumbeat, it makes the drum, it makes the beat. Without
it there is no drum, no beat. It is not the beat played by who is beating the drum. His is
a noisy loud one, the silent beat is beaten by who is not beating on the drum, his silent
beat drowns out all the noise, it comes before and after every beat, you hear it in beatween. (Kaufman 97)
By the end of the letter, which might be read inductively, the beat emerges, infiltrating the surrounding language. Kaufman’s writing of between as “beatween” offers a
revelation. Much as the colors of social upheaval would be brown, black, and beige,
Kaufman’s ostensible neologism has not introduced anything that was not present
before; he has only excavated a prior, albeit buried, reality. Kaufman’s letter displays
an important ease of movement between sound and text as the graphic “beatween”
90 | Marisa Parham
only makes the passage’s beat, its rhythm, more apparent. The beat, as Kaufman
has it, is exactly what a between is, a space of meaning. As Amor Kohli has pointed
out, “The ‘silent beat’ exists in the third space between the heard and not-heard; it
is the ‘guerrilla action.’ It is also a constitutive element in the repertoire of the jazz
musician, part of what Robert O’Meally calls ‘games of color and space’” (Kohli
180). With his letter, Kaufman demonstrates how the silent and invisible might be
understood as energizing the very systems of meaning from which they have been
ostensibly (not) removed.
II. Fronts
In his lifetime, Kaufman experienced silence in the most empowering ways, in poetry
and in his silent political protests, and also in its most sinister applications, from his
repeated stints in solitary confinement to the relative silence surrounding his contributions to the Beat movement, jazz poetics, and as a critical ancestor to the spoken
poetry movement. For the remainder of this essay, I turn to a listening of Ursula
Rucker’s “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem that appears at the end of The Roots’
1995 rap album, Do You Want More??!?. Rucker has some important resonances with
Kaufman, of whom she is an heir. But I particularly hear this resonance in her commitment to speaking experiences that would otherwise go unnamed, and also in her
poem’s manipulation of the graphic and sonic to create the disruptions that make
possible such moments of naming.
At its release, Do You Want More??!? met with immense critical and a fair amount
of commercial success, becoming a mainstay on college and independent station
playlists. Its status then as an underground alternative project, and its status today
as a rap classic, is mainly due to two innovations that blurred boundaries between
rap music and other kinds of black performance – The Roots’ use of live instrumentation and Ursula Rucker’s spoken-word contribution to the album, and each of these
choices made important cultural interventions. Rucker’s poems appear on several of
The Roots’ albums. They are invariably about barely speakable acts – gang bangs,
child sex abuse, incest – and her representations of such acts are graphic, some
might even say excessive or pornographic, for instance her portrayal of an infant
being raped. Cinematic, each poem tells a story in graphic detail, often through a
strangely distant, yet also deeply intimate third-person narration. The eeriness of the
narration comes out of a primary contrast between the formal cool of Rucker’s even
and smooth delivery and the explicit and often gruesome details that make up the
content of each poem. This explicitness also works to signal the listener away from
the pornographic. As Suzanne Bost has argued, Rucker’s focus on the material
details of exploitation removes “any pleasure out of the spectacle by rendering it
hyper-real, disturbing audiences by forcing them to witness these shocking images in
vivid detail” (Bost 15).
“The Unlocking” begins with a skit, a telephone conversation between two men, on
whom we are eavesdropping. Skits are common to rap albums, and by beginning her
poem this way, Rucker lures her listeners into a certain mode of listening, asking them
to expect business as usual: maybe a joke, maybe a rant, maybe a scene from a movie.
And indeed, the skit that sets the scene for “The Unlocking” is made to sound like any
other. Its diction and pacing are intentionally unremarkable; it’s just some dudes talking.
Their voices are tired, if not vaguely bored, until the opportunity for sex – which here
seems nothing more than something to do – revitalizes them. This vitalization is
particularly striking in light of the absolute vagueness in which the subject of their
conversation is cloaked:
[phone dialed and rings]
Friend: Hello?
Caller: Yo who dis?
Friend: Yo this [edited out]
Caller: Yo whattup man?
Friend: Yo whassup dude?
Caller: This the Black Ill [muttering] you know what I’m sayin’
Like a black barred face on a newscast, the editing out of the friend’s name contributes to the skit’s reality-effect. The muttering around the Caller’s name, which is
not edited out, elicits suspicion. The conversation continues:
Friend: Oh whassup G?
Caller: Y’know, yo
Friend: What?
Caller: We down in the studio yo
Friend: Word?
Caller: Yo we got a jawn
Friend: Yo, is she live?
Caller: Yeah she’s live
Friend: Sup wit her?
Caller: Some jawn I use to talk to … Sometimes I used to knock off
Friend: Word? how she be swingin’?
92 | Marisa Parham
Caller: Oh yeah she’s swingin’ like that? y’know it’s on! [laughter]
Friend: Oh WORD?
Caller: I called a couple other heads and shit y’know
Friend: Aight, who else who else – who else widdit?
Caller: [laughing]
Friend: I mean she widdit LIKE THAT?
Caller: Yeah you know!
Friend: Ain’t no bullshit?
Caller: The whole Reservoir Dog squad n shit, we gon’ be eight deep
[…]3
It has become common for groups of friends or colleagues to refer to themselves with
names taken from popular culture, in this instance Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent 1995
Reservoir Dogs, which is revered in some hip-hop communities as sort of an ultimate film
about men living lives of violence. Here, Rucker’s use of the film citation situates the
recording studio, which is where the men in Rucker’s skit are meeting, as a homosocial
space – a space referenced toward men and used to consolidate relationships between
them. In Reservoir Dogs, the character’s homosociality is mediated by violence, and it is
therefore not unfair to imagine that this violence will make an appearance in this text as
well, despite the jocularity with which the skit begins. Again, it is important that this conversation sound patently normal, that it be no different than one you might hear in a skit
common to any rap album. Such skits often skirt boundaries of playfulness and excess,
but ultimately end in joke or non sequitur. In hindsight, I imagine that in my first hearing
of this segment, being jaded and familiar with rap album conventions, I would have soldiered on, at best bemused, very likely annoyed, and, probably, barely listening.
But then something might have changed, for at the end of the conversation, the
“Like NOW?/Yeah come through now!” nags. The immediacy of the statement makes
it suddenly more difficult, for me at least, to imagine when the joke will arrive.
However, almost as soon as the suspicion sets in, I realize that I have been tricked,
for what I am faced with is something altogether different. It is a poem, unexpected
in its form and sound and delivered in a woman’s voice – the first female voice heard
after almost two hours of rapping and talking:
I the voyeur,
Peer,
as she begins her,
Ritual.
Paying sexual ties for few and untrue
Words of admiration,
Translation:
Sucker ass
lines
of trash
With the narrator’s referral to herself as “I, the voyeur,” Rucker immediately forefronts
matters of viewing and performance in the poem. And by narrating the scene we ourselves are waiting to hear, waiting to “peer” into, the listener’s own voyeurism is also
made apparent. The authority in her voice reinforces the sonic shift between the skit
and the poem, drawing our attention to a silence that by necessity would have gone
otherwise unamplified, and therefore unacknowledged. Once it is heard, however, we
are asked to understand how such silences trace the underbelly of the kinds of
power, particularly gender power, that rap often asks its audience to celebrate. As a
sonic intervention, “The Unlocking” reminds the album’s audience of everything they
don’t hear, on that particular album and in popular music in general.
Rucker’s introduction of narration into the scene frames the sex act at the center
of the narrative. This framing in turn sets up the narrator’s description of the sex act
as a ritual, as a performance. Referring to the woman’s act as a ritual, further distances us from her, and we are not alone in this distance, for the men in the scene
also never see her outside of her ritualized position, can never “quite see above/her
mound.” Further, her silence in the text might be understood as analogous to others’
inability to see past her use to them: “a pound of flesh is all she was,/no name no
face or even voice.” Spoken near the end of the poem, this line reinforces her silent
effacement, which was first established for us during the opening skit, in its reference to her as a “jawn.” “Jawn,” a Philadelphia corruption of the more commonly
used “joint,” is an absolutely generic and all purpose slang-term, used as easily for
a pair of shoes as it would be for a random woman on the street.
Through her use of a narrator, Rucker splits her listener’s attention between that
narration and the scene being narrated, and a closer consideration of this split offers
some insight into the poem’s dual allegiances to sound and image. Our “watching”
of the unnamed woman, locked into her ritual of sex and degradation, is both a result
of Rucker’s poetic style and also of the great prevalence to the portrayal of such
scenes in rap music and in American popular culture in general. Accordingly, “watching” becomes the best term for our observation of the poem’s action because the
poem generates meaning via its evocation of other such episodes of watching female
bodies in sexual action. What makes the scene harrowing is not the men’s bluster –
their Reservoir Dog self-aggrandizement and the hyper-sexualized nature of their
gang-bang party – it is that this scene is absolutely generic. (We might think back
94 | Marisa Parham
here to the boredom in the men’s conversation at the beginning of Rucker’s text.) The
terms of the scene precede the scene, thus revealing alongside its material violence
the possibility that women’s lives have no meaning outside of that violence:
Bend over bitch, you know this is what you were born for;
to dig those soft and lotioned knees into the floor –
and take it in
that sweetly spread ass
like a real pro whore.
There is an incongruity here between Rucker’s description of the woman’s “soft and
lotioned knees,” which connotes attention to the self and care for the body, and the
cruelty of the speaker’s demands on that body. Further, his command, that she take
it like “a real pro whore,” might be read to suggest that she is not actually a whore.
This is hinted in several ways throughout the poem, and is supported especially in
the poem’s opening claim that she trades sex for words (not money); in the later revelation that she had previously been in love with one of the men; and also in the fact
that the caller in the skit refers to her as a girl he “used to talk to,” “talk to” being
slang for dating (and itself in juxtaposition to “knock off,” which merely suggests
casual sex).
The possibility that the woman performs this ritual/service for love or “admiration” changes the dynamics of consent in this scenario and thus brings into question
the skit’s insistence that she is a “swinger,” that she is down “LIKE THAT” (my
emphasis). Early in the poem, then, we are introduced into violence, a violence we are
made to understand is cloaked from its perpetrators:
Her subsequent screams seemed to praise
Sent messages of pleasure and pain to his fuck-tainted brain
“Fuck-tainted” signifies the blindness and deafness of the perpetrator. It could also,
however, be understood as signifying the men’s weakness and delusion – though it is
vitally important to understand that this second interpretation is only made possible
by the narrator’s presence. Her ability to speak about their act renders their fuck
impotent because it reveals as a front the narrative frame they have built-up around
that fuck.
This invalidation is a function both of the content of her critique and also of the
sonic impact of her female voice. In this sense, the narrator not only peers in on the
scene, but, more importantly she is soon revealed as a peer to the woman at the center of her narration. Further, because our gaze is aligned with that of the men, and
because that gaze has been revealed as blind – insofar as the listener knows that
the men cannot hear Rucker’s voice – we must therefore join them in their unwitting
role reversal. Unlike them, however, we see ourselves being watched, even as we,
fuck-tainted, are powerless. Where the men only hear silence, in the sense that they
are caught up in the acoustic illusion by which they only hear their own fantasies in
her screams, where they have silence we, the listeners, have – hear – critique. As a
condition of our growing consciousness of our role in the scene, we are allowed a
new perspective on the scenario:
But her screams masked laughs at his dumb ass
As he quicker comes,
then Third and Fourth One
just as dumb
Invite themselves to join in
“Just as dumb”: by this point the listener will also come to realize that the music is
specifically accompanying the narrator’s perspective, as shifts in the musical track
join the narrator in her mockery of the men, at times offering shadows of movie
sound effects that emphasize the narrator’s commentary. The effect of this alignment is to further invalidate any possibility for the audience to hear the scenario as
being that which the men imagine it to be. As the listener is moved more fully into the
aural, they are left in the visual. Again, this is not to say that the men do not hear anything, but rather that what they hear are sounds of themselves vis-à-vis their own fantasy of the scene in which they are participating. Throughout the poem we hear
echoes of the scene as the men hear it, as we would hear if we were not privy to the
narration. Faint and deeply backgrounded, these sounds of moaning, groaning, and
laughter are all sounds we would expect to hear, if our experience of the scene had
been otherwise.
Caught up in the visual fantasy of sexual violence and its meaning, “fuck-tainted,”
the men are deaf, however, to what is really happening. This ignorance also renders
them effectively dumb, as Rucker recuperates her ersatz victim by making it clear
that she has been released from any emotional relationship to the men’s words:
So one goes North, the other South
To sanctified places where in-house spirits
will later wash away all traces,
of their ill-spoken words and complacent faces
Much as the woman’s body will easily wash away any trace of the men’s arrival, of
their “ill-spoken words,” and their “lewd, aggrandized sexual endeavors,” the narrative has clearly turned. The fact of the eight men, initially menacing in their sheer
96 | Marisa Parham
quantity, have been now reduced to a series of jokes. By the time the next man, number five, approaches, the frame has completely slipped away:
but suddenly, he, – stops mid-thrust.
[pager rings/narration pauses for a beat]
Seems she nameless to cuz,
got his stuff in a death cunt clutch
He fast falls from the force of her tight pussy punch
Just like the rest of that sorry ass bunch
Now here comes Six ready to add his inactive shit to the mix
Here, the ringing of the pager, which echoes the ringing phone at the beginning of the
skit, breaks a narrative frame already giving way under the weight of the narrator’s
growing sarcasm.
Having now fully enlisted the sympathies of the audience, Rucker/the narrator
asks us to join in on the joke, as each man’s approach is made more comical than
the last. This begins in the stanza above with the almost comic-book sensibility of the
woman’s genital counterattack, and continues into the next encounter with the narrator’s continued evisceration of each man’s self-avowed sexual prowess:
So he proceeds to poke and prod
with clumsy finger and wack sex slinger
“Condoms make me last longer,”
Wrong.
‘Cause her, motions of snatch, however detached, from the situation
cause his pre pre PRE-ejaculation
Here, there is also a shift in the back track, as we faintly hear a man coming to
orgasm quickly and without control. After this last set of sounds, this track further
recedes, not to re-emerge until the end of the poem. This audible marker of the narrator’s growing authority also further works to improve our vision of the woman having sex, to consolidate our sense of her power over the men. As the narration gains
momentum through its doubled assonance (“snatch”/“detached;” “situation”/
“ejaculation”), the stanza’s comic energy is released in the description of the weakened man’s failure to complete his act over her.
The acceleration brought on by this rhythm, and the humor it reinforces, also
breaks down some of the distance between the narrator and the scene she is narrating, which is particularly interesting in relation to the narrator’s insistence on the
detachment of the woman having sex. Speaking of this detachment is a dangerous
move, for much of the narrative hinges on the woman not in fact being a whore. But
Rucker is careful to signal other ways of understanding this moment. The most likely
alternative is made audible in the lessening formality of her narrator’s diction: in
the stanza above we hear it in the “‘Cause her motions,” and in the following one
we hear it in the “she just wastin’” (my emphases). These moments briefly bring the
narration closer to gossip or shit-talking – a woman’s blues remedy to the men’s selfaggrandizement:
It seems she just wastin’
good pussy and time on dudes like Number Seven
who ain’t learned their lesson
By giving the woman agency over a part of her, along with her mouth, that has otherwise been taken over in the narrative as a space of sexual domination, the reference
here to “good pussy” begins the work of recuperating any suspicion about the previously noted detachment. Like her time, there is a sense here that her sex is hers to
give. Rucker further develops this sensibility in the next lines, which articulate the
woman as divine, powerful, and self-possessed:
He wants to enter the flesh, divine,
by dropping a kind of semi-sweet line
“Your honey hole so fine and mile deep; I’m gonna leap
into you like an ocean do you right and make your head spin”
So he jumped in and then,
he drowned
Got lost and found in her tart canal
The poem approaches surreality in its graphic and ribald humor, made more striking
in its contrast to the scenes of degradation with which the poem begins.
By the end of Reservoir Dogs, each of the men is revealed as fundamentally inept,
and it is their ineptitude that seals their violent deaths. One cannot help but wonder
if this crossed Rucker’s mind as she wrote the violent end to her poem, when the
woman, now armed, makes literal the power her narrator has been exercizing over the
men the entire time. The previously silent and potentially defiled lips part, and the power
of her speech act is as much figured in the cool and style of her violence as it is in
the gun itself:
So poised, she rises
Phoenix from the flame
Finally bored with their feeble fuck games
She smooth reaches behind her and takes straight aim
98 | Marisa Parham
at eight shriveled up cocks with a fully loaded glock
Parts lips, not expressly made for milking dicks
and then, she speaks:
“Your shrieks of horror bring me bliss I must admit
The thought that I could shred your tips with eight quick flips
excites me,
see y’all fuck with the pussy, but I fuck with your minds
Lack of soul and respect is the crime
This … was a set up …
now tell me what – what’s my name?”
[gun cocks]
An exercise in cool, Rucker’s poem ends with two references, one visual and one
sonic. The reach behind visually references Pam Grier at the end of the movie Foxy
Brown, when Foxy returns to avenge her boyfriend’s death. In the film, Foxy poses as
a prostitute to infiltrate the villain’s stronghold. At the end, she enters their domain,
seemingly unarmed. When a fight erupts, she reaches back into her Afro and pulls
out a hidden gun, persevering over the pimp and drug lord. The poem’s second reference is in the woman’s final line, “now tell me what – what’s my name?” The line
references one of hip-hop’s most common and well-known strategies for self-assertion over narratives and the listeners thereof. The question brings its speaker to the
center of any narrative, and as well dares anyone to speak in the same narrative.
The question is always rhetorical; if one were unsure about answering, the cocking of
the gun would confirm silence as a choice.
Notes
1. In “ ‘A Hard Rain,’ Looking to Bob Kaufman,”
Aldon Lynn Nielsen has a nice piece that reads
Kaufman’s “silent beat” against Miles Davis’
“In a Silent Way,” noting how the “occasional
silences” of Davis’ drummer, Tony Williams, on
“It’s about That Time,” “set the stage for the
fuller use of his drum set that comes later in
the piece, while at the same time providing a
jazz musician’s rhetorical underscoring of the
composition’s title; the piece is about that time.
Kaufman’s silent beat that comes before and
after every beat asserts itself in the spaces
between the words of his letter, as his periods
of silence and speaking presence punctuated
the life of San Francisco through the decades,
as the silence surrounding him punctuates
Beat histories even now” (Nielsen 137–38).
2. Sillitoe’s text was also released as a Free
Cinema movement film in 1962. It is unclear
which is being referenced in Kaufman’s letter.
3. Lines are my transcription. “Friend” and
“Caller” are my designations. Brackets
throughout mark my editorial comments on the
aural text.
Bibliography
Bost, Suzanne. “‘Be deceived if ya wanna be
foolish’: (Re)constructing Body, Genre, and
Gender in Feminist Rap.”Postmodern Culture
12.1 (2001).
Bowen, Michael. “Bob Kaufman the Beat Saint
of San Francisco, Narrated to R.W. Bruch.” Ed.
R.W. Bruch. Stockholm Sweden 2006.
<http://www.beatsupernovarasa.com/thebeats/
archives.htm#04>
Kaufman, Bob. “[Letter to the Editor].” Cranial
Guitar: Selected Poems. Ed. Gerald Nicosia.
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House P, 1996.
Kohli, Amor. “Saxophones and Smothered
Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for
Redemption.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 165–82.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “‘A Hard Rain,’ Looking to
Bob Kaufman.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 135–45.
RESERVOIR DOGS (USA: Quention Tarantino 1993).
Bruch.” Ed. R.W. Bruch. Stockholm Sweden.
2006. <http:/www.beatsupernovarasa.com/
thebeats/archives.htm#04>.
cummings, e. e. “l (a…).” Selected Poems. Ed.
Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright, 1994.
Ellington, Duke, and Mahalia Jackson. Black,
Brown and Beige. Columbia, 1958.
Foxy Brown (USA: Jack E. Hill 1974).
100 | Marisa Parham
Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “Twenty One Love
Poems.” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose:
Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism. Eds.
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
Rucker, Ursula. “The Unlocking.” The Roots – Do
You Want More?!!!??! Geffen Records, 1995.
Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner. New York: Knopf, 1960.
Incantations: Gender and
Identity
Reciting: The Voice of the
Other
Mahmut Mutman
ABSTRACT
Reciting: The Voice of the Other
The voice seems to have a unique place in Islam and especially in the Qur’anic recitation. Through a discussion of Levinas’s concept of God, and Althusser’s theory of interpellation, it is argued that the monotheistic religious experience has to do with a hearing
of the voice of the other, which involves a struggle between an inaudible noise or voice
and its control in a rational sentence. Further, since the Qur’an’s first command is
“recite” and reciting is a fundamental method of learning the sacred text, the event of
hearing gains a different dimension in Islam. As the Moroccan psychoanalyst Abdelkebir
Khatibi shows, the prophet Muhammad’s sacrifice of his own voice or signature, creates
a singular idiom in which a lost writing or voice encrypts the sacred text. The noise of a
lost voice continues to haunt and encrypt the sacred word. I posit this voice as feminine
and question the patriarchal foundations of the Islamic and monotheistic narratives.
Introduction
The last two decades witnessed a rapidly growing literature on religion and the religious in the humanities. With only a few exceptions, the usual reference for religion
is either Christianity or, more infrequently, Judaism. There is a consistent pattern,
which makes the Judaeo-Christian tradition the instance or the site of an analysis of
the religious. Such a pattern demonstrates that we are living in an intellectual and
political culture that could be described as Eurocentric. This is further reinforced by
the marginalization of other religions, including Islam, in the departments of so-called
Reciting: The voice of the Other | 103
area studies – a specialization that requires the learning of languages. I do not have
to remind one of the political world in which we live today, a world in which two Muslim
countries are under occupation and Islam is other-ed in ways that resemble the antiSemitic aggression of the 1930s. It is rather sad to see that political intelligence as
well as scholarly learning is still fascinated with the so-called “universal form of the
subject” that is found in Christianity.1
If we are speaking of questions of sound, voice, or noise today, it is difficult not to
hear the distant and noisy voice of Islam. Although this voice is brought nearer to us
in the prime time news as the event that interrupts our normality, it is also distant for
the same reason, as a sign of disturbing otherness. Bearded and armed men in
strange garb, women under seclusion, visions of the desert and dust, bombs and
ruins… In the face of these familiarly strange images, which must be called “strategic” in Michel de Certeau’s sense (35–36), one is tempted to render the voice of
Islam intelligibly audible. But does this temptation not belong to the same media,
which, in its scheduling and production of “rated” audiences, produces informative
documentaries involving native voices as well as the prime time news, and also to
the higher education system with its benevolent area studies departments and
research institutes? It is time to remind ourselves of Edward Said’s fine warning that
orientalism will not blow away once the truth about it is understood (6). Speaking of
audibility, that which is audible is so because it has a proper form, free of noise. But
what if we find in the very heart of the so-called true and proper Islam, of that which
is proper to Islam, a constant preoccupation with and therefore an inescapable failure of audibility itself? A lesson for the subject, perhaps.
The Primal Word
As a revealed religion, Islam itself begins with Muhammad’s hearing of the voice of
the other, the angel Gabriel who gave a command: “Read, in the name of your Lord!”
(Surah, 96, Verse 1)2 The first meaning of the Arabic word “iqra” is “read.” It also means
“recite” and it is often translated as to “read,” to “recite” or sometimes to “proclaim.”
I suggest that we hear the word as to “read/recite” in order to be able to link this primal
scene of Islam with the Islamic practice of learning the Qur’an by reciting and chanting
it. The proper word for the latter practice is “tajweed” (“recitation”). Reciting or reading the Qur’an is an essential aspect of the pedagogy of the Qur’an course, which
produces the Muslim subject.
Although the command refers the addressee to a text in the making, can it also be
heard as an instance of Islam’s acceptance of previous religious monotheisms and of
the Abrahamic tradition in general, the voice of the Other as One and the Same?3 In
the linguistic register, this is an example of performative contradiction. The command
implies a text that is both there and is yet going to be produced; it refers to an uncanny
“before” that is going to be performed in the future. In the historical register, the text
104 | Mahmut Mutman
signified by the command is not just in the past, but it will have to be invented. But it
is also true that, having many references to the previous texts of Old and New
Testament, the Qur’an places itself firmly in the biblical grand narrative. Interestingly,
in spite of its unconditional acceptance of Abrahamic narrative, something like the
kind of conflictual exchange between Judaism’s “Law” and Christianity’s “Grace,” that
is, something like Islam’s differential place vis-à-vis the other revealed religions, has
never been granted to the last religion in the historical narrative of ethical monotheism. It is as if its word of revelation had no value in the history and economy of revelation, as if it did not read or did not even know how to read the biblical narrative.
In the beginning then, a reading as reciting, a re-citing, a repetition or doubling, not
one but two words or voices: the one who commands and another who reads. Attending
to the imperative of this command, I suggest that we read/recite it as referring to an
uncanny “before” which is demanded to be performed and given shape in the future as
a reading or book. It is a pure command, which recites itself as one recites it.
Levinas: Event and Transcendence
How are we going to read or hear this command, the voice of the Other? Emmanuel
Levinas’s philosophy has become a model in the interpretation of the revelation of the
Other. Rather than offering a detailed presentation of Levinas’s readings of Descartes’s
Third Meditation (Totality and Infinity, 48–52) or his analyses of the revelation or placing of the Other in the Same (God, Death and Time, 121–224), I would like to offer a
brief critical account of his approach through Lyotard’s attentive reading in his
Differend (110–18). Lyotard’s reading emphasizes that what is at stake in Levinas’s
argument is an announcement or address which is violent, traumatic and expropriating in character. Its precise nature is that it expels the self from the instance of
addressor to that of addressee. The dispossessed self will then try to take hold of
itself by forming another sentence which enables it to frame and overcome the dispossession. It will re-gain the position of the sender so that it will be able to legitimize (or refuse) the disrupting command of the other. But the second sentence
cannot put an end to the prior event of dispossession which has a force to prescribe
prescriptions; it is only an attempt to master it, and in mastering it, it forgets what
Levinas calls the transcendence of the Other. It is cognitive and descriptive, articulating a truth, prescription described, whereas the first one has a pure proscriptive
force, taking hold of the self prior to the possibility of description. The first sentence,
which Levinas calls ethical, immediately creates an obligation. It is this strange, prior
ethical obligation that is forgotten in the second cognitive and descriptive sentence.
The voice of the other is heard before it is listened to. It is something that happens
to the self or the subject. But, if the subject transforms itself from being an
addressee to an addressor in the face of a violent expropriation, what leads us to
assume that there is a voice addressing or interpellating me in a sentence? Is it not
the self’s attempt to produce a cognitive mastery, which has to take the form of a
sentence, and clear the prior noise by giving the violent force of event a description,
attributing it to a subject as Other and turning it into a command or law?
In the trajectory of Levinas’s thought, it is possible to follow a movement from the
alterity of what he called the “there is” in his early work on the human face and on
the voice of the Other in his later works. This is important because, in early Levinas,
the “there is” (the pure event of existing that is left after everything is reverted into
nothing) makes itself felt through a feeling of the “world in pieces” or “a world turned
upside down” (Existence and Existents 21), that is clearly an overturning event.
Further, what makes itself felt in this way is audible for Levinas. But this is a strange
audibility, quite out of ordinary indeed. The “there is” is not only “the impersonal field
of forces of existing” (Time and the Other 46), which “no longer composed a world”
(Existence and Existents 59) but also it is “a rumbling silence,” “something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were noise,” […] “a noise returning after every
negation of this noise,” and an unstoppable music (Ethics and Infinity 48, 49).
In Levinas’s later work however, this overturning event, the dispossessing force of
the event of existing, is given meaning and intelligibility by a concept of the transcendence of the Other.4 This is Levinas’ criticism of ontology in favor of ethics as primary philosophy. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s follows Descartes’s demonstration
of the transcendence of the infinite with respect to the I, while this is at the same
time related with the notion of the face of the Other in conversation. The face
“bring[s] us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung (sense giving)” (Totality
and Infinity 50). In his later series of the lectures, God, Death and Time, Levinas’s
search for a God outside of what Heidegger calls onto-theology is indeed a search for
“a new model of intelligibility” (137). The placing of the idea of the infinite in us is
called “heteronomy,” “inspiration,” or “prophecy which is not some kind of genius but
the very spirituality of the spirit” (142). He emphasizes that the meaning and intelligibility of the transcendence of the Other is of a unique kind. It is before cognition or
knowledge (211); and it is not that of a content, or of the “Said” of discourse, but of
“Saying”: escaping both objectification and dialogue, God is “a third person or Illeity”
whose “command, to which, as a subject, I am subjected” and which “comes from
the understanding that I hear in my Saying alone” (203 – my emphasis). Levinas further argues that the word “God” is an excessive utterance that prohibits itself and
does not allow its meaning to be conceived in terms of presence or being. This is why
its thematization in a cognitive and descriptive sentence cannot erase its proscriptive force, as Lyotard underlines. Yet such a prohitibion, i.e. this sense of a God prohibiting its own being, is still tied to meaning and intelligibility by Levinas. If the Other
is incommensurable in Levinas’s philosophy, Lacoue-Labarthe is quite right in describing this as the idea of a “vertical incommensurability” (“Talks” 30). In so far as the
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voice of God is understood in its transcendence, it must have intelligible form. With
this passage from the “there is” to the Other as God, what is at stake now is no
longer simply an overturning and expropriating event which decomposes the world;
on the contrary, it is the promise or word of order, even if delayed or prohibited. One
hears and does not hear a “rumbling silence,” but how can one miss a command?
Are we then supposed to say that, contrary to such an approach, the originary
expropriating event is not linguistic, that it should have nothing to do with language?
Rather than taking a quick decision, I am reminded of Althusser’s reading of Spinoza’s
theory of prophecy: “[…] these incredible prophets” Althusser writes, are “men who
climb the mountain at the summons of the Lord but who only understand in the thunder crash and lightning flash some partially incomprehensible words” (10). For
Althusser it is the community who tells them what they have heard, and all understand
except “the imbecile Daniel” (who represents resistance to ideology as internal to it).
As a volunteering imbecile, I cannot not hear that the event of “interpellation,” the socalled voice of the other, is never without a good deal of noise which the hearers or
readers are bound to clear up. Can we think of the citationary structure of monotheism as noise, between thunder crash and incomprehensible words, supposedly in the
uncanny and undecidable passage between nature and language? Citation, recitation,
quote or mention are perhaps indissociable from noise. And the question has always
been: how to avoid it? It is in this sense that the self tries to master the violent event
of the hearing of the other in a cognitive and descriptive sentence.
This mastery has to do with the composition of a form, that is supposed to clear
up the reciting throat. Its articulation can be found in the following account by everyone’s sophisticated orientalist Louis Massignon, who is, unlike Althusser, faithfully
committed to the originary purity of the voice and vision:
The experience of inspiration begins in Islam with the “internal upheavals” felt by
Muhammad at the beginning of his prophetic mission. According to Aisha, the prophet
of Islam first had a vision of isolated, luminuous letters (several examples are cited at
the head of certain chapters in the Qur’an) and simultaneously an audition of isolated
sounds; the letters corresponded to the sounds, as with the child learning to spell. Then
the prophet, having learned to spell, was enabled to recite inspired sentences. They
were “breathed” into him by the Spirit, Ruh, a vague word which can designate the
angel as well as God or the Prophet himself. (74–75, my emphasis)
“Internal upheavals,” i.e. the opening of an unknown, noisy and destabilizing
“before” in the event of hearing is immediately lost in such confident belief in the perfect correspondance between letter and sound, in the clarity of meaning as vision
and the child as the metaphor of an innocent beginning. Recitation is conceived
within a restricted economy of mimesis, that is to say, as recitation of a pure and
clear originary form, of an audible or readable sentence, that has to forget the violence of hearing, its strangely obligatory and interpellative force.
Haunting: The Lost Book
As an alternative to Massignon, I follow Gayatri Spivak’s advice and offer the
Morrocan psychoanalyst and writer Abdelkebir Khatibi’s fascinating reading of
Muhammad’s biography in his essay “Frontiers.”5 Khatibi’s problem is Freud’s dismissal of Islam as an “abbreviated repetition” of Judaism, an imitation, which lacks
a “murder” in Moses the Man and the Monotheistic Religion. According to Khatibi,
Freud, who was a professional outsider, showed that there is a borrowing of names
in the origin: the founder of Judaism and of the monotheistic law, Moses, was an outsider, an Egyptian.6 However, in discarding Islam as a mere repetition of Judaism,
Freud turned it into a frontier of his theorization. Khatibi’s aim is to use the singular
adventure of Islam as a “frontier position” by turning a psychoanalytic account of
Islamic imaginary into a problem for psychoanalytic narrative.
Developing an original psychoanalytic account, which draws upon the prophet’s
biography (just like Freud did for Moses), Khatibi asks how Muhammad the orphan,
the one without proper family romance, was to maintain the proper name. As the revelation in the form of the letter was illegible to Muhammad (though legible to his wife
Khadija), he had to sacrifice his signature, “gave it as offering to Allah” (17).7 The message arrives through the figure of an apparition who speaks, ordering Muhammad to
recite it, to read it without understanding it. Khatibi shows that there are two voices
who are unified, according to a symmetrical and circular logic, to transmit the same
message. Allah the addressor is the other voice of Muhammad, whereas the addressee
is Muhammad the prophet as recognized by witnesses. Muhammad occupies sometimes one place sometimes the other. (The apparition is the voice of a created text.)
Identifying himself with the message of the Book written by no one, Muhammad is
inhabited by it and becomes the Book, which he can neither read nor write. Khatibi
emphasizes that, since there is the illegible as soon as there is writing, Muhammad
sacrifices his signature by attributing the Book to the Other – an unusual murder.
Khatibi calls the sacrificed book “the lost book.” In Muhammad’s unconditional subjection to the letter, to its unity and transcendence, another letter is hidden. Following
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of cryptonymy (The Wolf-Man’s Magic
Word, The Shell), Spivak interprets Khatibi’s analysis as “transform(ing) the historical
pathology of Islam into a negative cryptonymy – the encrypting of the sacrificed signature as something that cannot be avowed” (“Psychoanalysis” 54–55). The result
of the sacrifice would be, as Spivak emphasizes, “the consolidation of the difference
at the origin of monotheisms” (55). In Khatibi’s words, “the unicity of Allah and of the
Arabic language marks this frontier, in the Islamic imaginary, as the founding signature, the emblem” (17).
Depending on our prior discussion, we might say that Muhammad’s mastery takes
the form of a circular address, which is structurally under threat of separation. The
power of Khatibi’s reading is in its opening of the illegible pages of the lost book.
108 | Mahmut Mutman
Recitation here is not learning to spell as in Massignon, but rather the unification of
two voices that remain separate in imitative repetition, even though it seems to obey
the circular logic of communication or address. What Khatibi calls the lost book or
Spivak the encrypted signature, is like Levinas’s “noise returning after every negation
of this noise,” an uncanny “before” or past haunting and discontinuing language.
Recitation is circular, hermeneutic, and dialogical on the institutional and pedagogical level where it works as a power relationship between the imam and the student in the Qur’an course. The technique of learning is the same as that of the
Ancient Greeks: the breaking up of utterances into memorizable, imitable and manageable units, which give form to the voice as the “Gestalt” of the audible. As recitation is also chanting, an Islamic typography as phonography stamps, marks and
seals the voice in the letter: “Move not thy tongue concerning the Qur’an to make
haste therewith. It is for Us to collect it and to promulgate it: But when We have promulgated it, follow thou its recital (as promulgated)” (Surah 75, Verses 16–18). It is
the recitation manual, which controls and tames the tongue. But, as an instance of
mimesis, recitation cannot be reduced to a mere effect of such techniques of governing, shaping and disciplining the voice, since, as we learn from Jacques Derrida,
“imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless
it is in some way at fault or rather in default” (Dissemination 139). The noise of the
event, of the lost writing continues to haunt and encrypt the sacred word of the self.
What makes a language what it is and is not, this flow of voices and silences, always in
plural, is also irreducibly singular, as it includes all kinds of “intonation, elocution, tone,
inflections, melisma, rythm, even timbre (or what Barthes calls ‘grain’)” (LacoueLabarthe, Typography 59). In this second sense, recitation is indeed what Jacques
Derrida would call an “infrastructure”, i.e. a structure of generalized writing: “the
irreducible complexity within which one can only shape or shift the play of presence
or absence: that within which metaphysics can be produced but which metaphysics
cannot think” (Of Grammatology 167). There is no hermeneutic/dialogical circle without this “infrastructural” process; for instance, the play of interpretation is usually
based on the “proper” recitation of a certain word.
The generalized recitation cannot be artificially separated from recitation in the
narrow, pedagogical sense. Their positive conflation is a permanent enabling of the
social text. Speaking of the voice in the context of mimesis, Lacoue-Labarthe
reminds that “the voice, the lexis concern not only psyche, desire […] but equally an
investment that is social, historical, cultural, aesthetic – in short ethical, in the strict
sense of the word ethos” (Typography 160). It is the social condition, the suffering of
the world as it is known and lived, which throws the poor, the oppressed, the alienated and the submitted (“muslim” in Arabic) into the beyond, into “the soul of a soulless world” in Marx’s well-known phrase. There a language is finally found, it seems:
the word is fixed, the tongue is bound, in a beyond that is sanctified by the letter of
the sacred text. The genealogical transformation of alterity into identity can not dissolve the singular passing of the voices of the submitted, each of whom should be
hiding or crypting the wound of a broken letter/voice in submission to the letter. What
is commanded in and by this transformation or translation should survive the command and should maintain a silent echo, vibration or resonance, which somehow
departs from it: sounds of an unspoken, unknown language. I imagine that, in every
Qur’an course, there must be children of the kind Deleuze and Guattari mention in a
different context, those who are “skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the
sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself” (Kafka
21), in a playful “recitation which strips them of their identity” (The Logic 3).
Reciting: Spectres
That which survives in resonance is ghostly, spectral. Is recitation not also spectralization or ghost-calling? Following Jacques Derrida’s insight (Specters 62–63), I would
like to argue that maintaining a certain noise, a haunted voice is an ethical thinking
of the eventfulness of the event. In her essay on Derrida’s concept of the spectre,
Gayatri Spivak discusses Assia Djebar’s novel, Far From Madina, and describes it as
an instance of ghost-calling or spectralization (“Ghostwriting”). Djebar reads Muslim
chroniclers of the first three centuries of Islam who write about the Prophet’s lifetime
(Ibn Hisham, Ibn Sa’d, Tabari) and finds the names of thirty-three women on the margins of these texts. To apply Benjamin’s well-known expression, “reading what was
never written” (Benjamin 336), she creates a world for each of these women by questioning what happened and providing alternative interpretations and possible, though
unactualized, paths of development of events. I should like to expand the sense of
reciting here, to one of its oldest meanings as narrating. Since Djebar herself took
the Qur’an course as a child (as we already learned from L’amour la fantasia), her
reciting of the Islamic narrative in Far from Madina can also be described as an echo
or resonance: by vibrating women’s words and names around themselves, she
touches a future in the past. As Spivak explains in another essay on Ovid’s story of
Narcissus and Echo, like Echo who repeats but with a difference (to Narcissus’s
question “why do you fly from me?” Echo replies “fly from me”), Djebar turns her
weakness into the deconstructive power of differing from the utterance she is subjected to recite (Spivak, “Echo”). In Spivak’s words, her re-citing “opens up a liminary
time into a counterfactual possible world” (“Ghostwriting” 79).
Especially with the prophet’s youngest daughter Fatima, we read Djebar’s “counterfactual narrative” at its strongest. Literally interpreting the prophet’s saying (“From
us, the prophets, no one shall inherit! What has been given to us, is given as a gift!”
[Djebar 67–68]), the new Islamic rule refuses Fatima’s share of inheritance. Djebar
turns her into an “Islamic Antigone” who challenges the Muslim polis. Spivak emphasizes Djebar’s struggle “to reconfigure the past, to imagine the ancestors as ghosts”
110 | Mahmut Mutman
(“Ghostwriting” 81). Djebar imagines that Fatima might have unconsciously wished to
be a boy: “To be both her father’s Daughter (for the affection) and his Son (for the
continuity)” (49). This is why, she muses, Fatima must have married Ali, her father’s
adopted son, which was almost marrying her own self and thus drawing closer to the
impossible right of inheritance. But then she stops and asks if this is “to form too
free an idea of Fatima” (Djebar 49). Spivak underlines Djebar’s cautious use of imagination: “the ghost named Fatima has no more than an anticipatable reality” (81).
Djebar carefully conducts the “gender-deconstructive force” of her imagination to
open “a fissure in what is merely history, and the ghost can dance in the fault”
(Spivak, “Ghostwriting” 82). If Djebar does not merely let her imagination go without
setting it limits while continuing to exercise it, what is the result she might be wary
of? I would like to further explore the status of what Spivak calls “the radical counterfactual future past”.
This is a concept with a long history in the analytic tradition.8 The first counterfactual definition was actually given by Hume, even though it was due to a confusion.
He failed to distinguish a regular definition of cause (“an object followed by another”)
from a counterfactual one (“if the first object had not been, the second never had
existed”). If analytic empiricist philosophy had to spend a serious effort in order to
manage the ineluctable reference to unactualized possibilities, this was mainly in the
context of the question of causation.9 A significant part of this effort has the aim of
controlling a form of thinking that is not based on a simple, stable and homogenous
reference. Imagination gets dangerously close to rational thought by multiplying the
reference in terms of other worlds and unactualized possibilities. In so far as this
multiplicity of universes is countable, the relationship between them would have to
be one of continuity (for example, we have counted thirty three women). But it is also
one of discontinuity at another level, for “the world in which Fatima raises an objection to the Islamic rule following her father’s death” is counterfactualizing a narrative
that is already regarded as stable and homogenous (that is “the world in which
Fatima does not raise an objection to the Islamic rule following her father’s death”).
Following our concept of recitation as differing echo, we can read Djebar’s strategy as
subjecting the narrative form to the uncanny force of discontinuity. This is not merely
discontinuing the narrative in the sense of simply giving it up or denying it and telling
another narrative, but it is a recitation that, to make a neologism, “de-cite”s what it
recites. Gaps in what happened, in the facts of history, open up a future.
In the preface, Djebar writes that she used her power of interpretation (“ijtihad”)
in the Islamic tradition, and she is not necessarily unfaithful to the way narratives are
generally told or recited. For instance, Far from Madina opens with the death of
Muhammad: a problem, or a disruption in the normal course of life as the narrative
rule of beginning. The first sentence reads: “He is dead. He is not dead” (Djebar 3).
Thus, even there, in the beginning, which announces the disrupting event, there is
suspense, an oscillation which gives us a discontinuous sense of time. But the narrative does not follow a regular pattern of unfolding of a conflict and its resolution. If
it did so, it would have to be the story of finding an appropriate successor to the prophet,
and it would have to find a political model in the stories of these ghost women.
As Spivak warns, Djebar’s “rereading of a past for a future – a future anterior – […]
is not a formula for a future present. The ghost dance cannot succeed as a blueprint”
(“Ghostwriting” 79). If Fatima is a “model,” then the model is spectralized and the
stories are multiplied. Various beginnings are woven into the apparently single grand
story of Islam, as if its disappearing ends are disseminated all over the desert. It is
as if the past moved by leaving gaps, discontinuously, going backward and forward
and then backward… The novel ends by going back to the very beginning of the
monotheistic narrative, to the other woman in the beginning, Hagar. Women’s stories
are regularly interrupted by “a voice” (and nothing guarantees that it is the same
voice). Others, the “rawiya” (woman reciters or story-tellers) intervene; there is a
“pause” before the last part. Most important of all is the spectral status of all the
characters and voices in the novel. It is the discontinuous nature of Djebar’s narrative that produces an overall effect of a multiplication of ghosts, of voices.
The representational economy of recitative mimesis keeps producing the form of
a sentence, vision or narrative. I would like to call it an “onto-typology” that finds its
ultimate paradigm in the contemporary fundamentalist urge to preserve the letter in its
unity and clarity, in the imprint of its stamping force on the surface of the body, of the
throat. By re-opening the gate of “ijtihad” Djebar opens our ears to the vibrating and
differing echo of the receptive surface. Her re-citing and re-counting (by “de-citing”)
asks if it can make the “aphonie” of these stifled voices reverberate in our ears, and
if especially the tympan of our ears can accommodate such bare audibility of a rumbling silence, of a noise returning, resonating after every negation of this noise.
Rather than referring to a mere deviation from a given route, she takes us back to a
future implied in the ghostly subjunctive, the contingent verb in the origin (“if she
were […] ”), in the womb of a narrative where every newborn child is born into a spectral crowd of voices. What we need to attend to here is that Djebar’s narrative strategy does not assume a mere lack of origin but brings up the spectral and cryptic
status of the originary event and of the very event of origination of stories. It is the
haunting noise of this spectrality that is to be controlled and given form in the continuity and consistency of the sentence and vision as understood by Massignon. Such
is the complicity of orientalism and fundamentalism. Djebar’s novel does not offer an
alternative history, another factualisation or actualisation, but, while keeping the narrative form on the one hand, most delicately undoes it on the other. Otherwise, as
Spivak warns, the work of imagination would turn into its opposite: the re-installation
of a pure origin. Djebar does not finally read the lost book of monotheism; she only
moves in its gaps for a future to come rather than the future present.
112 | Mahmut Mutman
I am reminded here of Khatibi’s insistence on the prophet’s first wife Khadija’s
importance as the first scribe of the Qur’an. Before this displacement of the scene of
revelation, one cannot not ask: in between voice and transcription, what was the
message Muhammad lost in order to state another, to the wife who read the sign of
election on his and her bodies? If this is unsayable, it is perhaps not merely
repressed. It is the ever written secret with which the Muslim Man/Subject can only
negotiate by attending to the echo of his recitation.
Khatibi also writes that the three social figures Muhammad had to fight were the
seer (the soothsayer), the possessed and the poet – the first at least a female figure. Most important of all, I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe writes, speaking
of the dangers of mimetic narrative according to Plato: “[…] mythical or mythopoetic
contents, or, quite outright, “old wives’ tales” … are all the more formidable and powerful (which must be translated as: their mimetic power is all the stronger) for the fact
that they are without author, anonymous, and spoken, that is to say, recited, in
nobody’s name” (“Talks” 32, the first emphasis mine). Are women merely the
medium, the reciter or the scribe?
Dual Words
If it is not a question of merely affirming plurality, but of discontinuing the continuous,
then how should this very discontinuity be maintained or reproduced anew? The problem returns. If Fatima is the voice of contention, of interruption, then Aisha, the
prophet’s young wife, is the voice of recollection, of the taking-care, the survival of
memory. They are like the “dual words” in Arabic language, or the dual voice, the two
sides of recitation: maintaining and interrupting, same and other. Djebar calls these
women “the daughters of Hagar” (273–79). We are now called to recite the grand
monotheistic narrative itself, its very beginning. In the Abrahamic narrative, Hagar is
Abraham’s handmaid who was exiled and went as far as Mecca (and in the Qur’anic
version Abraham follows her). Djebar’s narrative ends by returning to this exiled
woman in the beginning of the grand monotheistic narrative. In her version, Hagar is
driven out and driven mad in her search for water for her son Ishmael (Abraham’s
other child, the future father of the Arab nation), dancing, wandering back and forth
between the two hills where the Ka’ba, the center of Islam, would be built later.
Djebar’s passage depends on a beautiful play on the words Hegira (emigration), hajra
(sunstroke) and Hajjar (Hagar’s archaic pronounciation) – a reciting, a return of what
crypt, what noise? In the ending scene of the novel, a voice calls all believers:
All believers, men and women alike, once a year,
or at least once in a lifetime,
daughters of Hagar and sons of Ishmael, join together,
to re-enact the scene of Hagar’s madness
Hagar’s madness is the noise, which keeps passing through the voice of the
Abrahamic grand narrative, the revealed religions of ethical monotheism. Islam’s socalled historical pathology is also of this lineage. It can be read otherwise, in terms
of a singular loss of singularity, a loss which remains open to a re-marking of the
alterity in, as well as of, its inheritance.
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Notes
1. This is particularly valid for Žižek (2001,
2003). For the recent literature on religion, see
Asad (1993, 2003); Badiou (2003); Žižek
(2001, 2003); De Vries: (1999, 2002, 2005);
Derrida (1995, 2002); Henry (2002); Vattimo
(1999). With the two exceptions of Asad and
Derrida, in all of these works, the reference is
Christianity.
2. I am using three different translations of the
Qur’an by Yusuf Ali, Pickthal and Shakir.
Although this is narrated in Surah 96 in the
Qur’an, we know that it is Muhammad’s first
encounter with the angel and the first message
he received from him.
3. The well-known orientalist Catholic thinker
Louis Massignon was strongly influenced by
Islam’s acceptance of the whole Abrahamic
tradition and wanted to convince both
Christianity and Islam to reconsider themselves
in a new Abrahamic narrative, in his writings as
well as in his well-known project of Badaliya.
Massignon was an administrator of French
colonialism in the Middle East and later a
supporter of Algerian national liberation.
4. For instance, in his interview with Philippe
Nemo, Levinas says that this tendency was
already in his early work: “I distrust the
compromised word ‘love,’ but the responsibility
for the Other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me,
as early as that time, to stop the anonymous
and senseless rumbling of being. It is in the
form of such a relation that the deliverance from
the ‘there is’ appeared to me. Since that
compelled my recognition and was clarified in my
mind, I have hardly spoken again in my books of
the ‘there is’ for itself. but the shadow of the
‘there is,’ and of non-sense still appeared to me
necessary for the test of dis-inter-estedness”
(Ethics and Infinity 52). It is not clear however
how the shadow of the ‘there is’ and of nonsense are necessary for the test of the social
relationship. It is precisely this kind of question
that I am posing here.
5. I thank Burcu Yalim for her translation of
this essay.
6. In his most recent work, late Edward Said
offered an insightful reading of Freud’s
relationship to the non-European: Freud and the
Non-European.
7. When Massignon referred to the second
wife Aisha’s account in the above citation, he
was actually referring to Aisha as the later
narrator, the verbal chronicler of Islam. Khatibi
refers to Khadija as one of the first witnesses.
8. A continental equivalent is Leibniz’s
notion of the “incompossible,” which is
extensively discussed in the works of
Gilles Deleuze (1989, 130; 1990, 169–80;
1993, 59–75; 1994, 47–48). The concept of
the incompossible signifies a world, which is
in contradiction with the compossible or
existing world, but not contradictory in itself.
Hence “an Adam who did not sin” (or “a
Fatima who resisted”) is perfectly possible
but it is not possible at the same with “an
Adam who sinned” (or “a Fatima who did not
resist”), hence it is an incompossible.
Deleuze emphasizes the possibility of a
narrative in which incompossibles can exist
together. In our reading, this would have
to be a narrative that works discontinuously,
by interrupting itself.
9. David Lewis’s pioneering analysis of
counterfactuals based on possible world
semantics is regarded as the most important
contribution (1973).
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Disturbing Noises – Haunting
Sounds: Don DeLillo’s
The Body Artist
Sylvia Mieszkowski
ABSTRACT
Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s
The Body Artist
Autistic, childlike and genderless Mr. Tuttle seems to be gifted with glossolalia, since
he speaks in other people’s voices. Or he might be a ghost. While Don DeLillo’s
novella The Body Artist (2001) tells the story of its protagonist Lauren’s traumatization and subsequent regaining of subjectivity, this article develops a reading of Mr.
Tuttle as Lauren’s “sonic symptom.” As a projection of her psyche, the “sonic symptom” is the first step Lauren takes on the way to healing herself after her husband’s
unexpected suicide. Her second step back to agency takes the shape of a seemingly
obsessive-compulsive interaction with the computerized voice on an answering
machine. The repeated calling, hanging up, calling back, hanging up without leaving
a mess/age – this article contends, assisted by Sarah Kofman, Jacques Lacan, Kaja
Silverman and Slavoj Žižek – is a mediated, up-dated and – most importantly – aural
version of Freud’s predominantly visually organized fort/da-game.
Introduction
Dealing with Don DeLillo’s novella The Body Artist (2001), I would like to explore how
voice – in variously gendered and technically mediated forms – helps to (re)constitute
psychic identity during a process of mourning.1 DeLillo’s third person narrative tells the
story of body artist Lauren Hartke, who is the book’s protagonist and its focalizer. Since
the reader is, most of the time, directly dependent on her perceptions, Lauren’s observations, impressions and thoughts are a filter, which cannot be avoided and thus must
Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist | 119
not be ignored in analysis. The plot is mainly set in an old house in the middle of
nowhere, at a coast some distance from New York, which has been rented for a holiday.
Lauren spends a few months there – first with her husband Rey, then without him, but in
the company of an obscure childlike stranger, who, after a while, vanishes just as mysteriously as he had appeared. Two insertions, which mirror each other, as far as position
is concerned, interrupt the plot. The first of these, located between chapters one and
two, is an anonymous obituary for Lauren’s husband Rey, who – as it turns out to the
reader’s as well as to the protagonist’s complete surprise – has killed himself. The second insertion, located between chapters six and seven, is signed by Mariella Chapman,
who is a writer and, moreover, Lauren’s best friend. Her text is a cross between an artist’s
interview and a review of Lauren’s latest performance called Body Time, the piece she
works on while staying on in the old house after Rey’s death. From a narratological point
of view, Mariella’s text stands out, since it is the only section that allows the reader a
glance at Lauren from the outside. On the level of the plot, three major events shape the
course of this carefully constructed novella. As the obituary informs the reader, Rey
shoots himself in his first wife’s New York apartment directly after the opening breakfast
scene with Lauren. The second event takes place at the end of chapter two, when Mr.
Tuttle, who is perhaps the second main character, is introduced. The third event is the
performance of Body Time, of which we learn indirectly, in Mariella’s article.
Using the sentence modifier “perhaps” seems to be inevitable when describing this
text. This is a result of the two levels on which The Body Artist operates. It offers two
paths of interpretation, which may, respectively or simultaneously, be opened in the
reading process. It may, on one hand, be read as a “realistic” text with Lauren and
Mr. Tuttle as its two main characters. On the other hand, it may be read as a modern
ghost story, with Lauren as the only protagonist and the inexplicably appearing and disappearing Mr. Tuttle as a kind of specter or, to use the psychoanalytic term, a symptom
created by Lauren’s mind. I shall, first, briefly outline the “realistic” reading, concentrating on Mr. Tuttle’s and Lauren’s own vocal sound effects. Second, I shall develop a
reading of Mr. Tuttle as a sonic symptom of Lauren’s traumatized psyche, using concepts by Sigmund Freud, Sarah Kofman, Kaja Silverman, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques
Lacan as the cornerstones of my argument. The Body Artist, in my view, keeps oscillating between its “realistic” and its “ghost story” aspect. Since the novella itself refuses
to be reduced to merely one of these, to clearly decide for one interpretation at the cost
of the other, would lead to a loss. My aim is, therefore, to offer a reading of The Body
Artist as a “fantastic”2 text, which not only contains both sides, but also carries the
notion of oscillation between them, refusing to opt for only one correct interpretation.
Noise – Voice – Chant
If one opts for the “realistic” line of interpretation, the plot unfolds in the following way:
After Rey’s suicide Lauren discovers a mysterious, seemingly autistic stranger whose
120 | Sylvia Mieszkowski
presence in the house seems to have been announced by a peculiar sound, “the noise.”
Having nick-named the stranger Mr. Tuttle, Lauren finds out that this childlike man is able
to (re)produce her own, and even dead Rey’s voice. She tries to get Mr. Tuttle to “do Rey”
(71) in front of a tape recorder, while starting to work through her loss. She does so by
setting up a new performance piece about which the reader learns more in the second
insertion, Mariella’s review. During Body Time, Lauren uses Mr. Tuttle’s tape-recorded
voice while impersonating different characters, and while changing her body accordingly.
Beginning with her voice, Lauren transforms from undisputed, if implicit, femininity to
ambiguous, almost genderless masculinity. Even before we learn any details about the
performance, Mr. Tuttle vanishes as suddenly and inexplicably as he had appeared, leaving Lauren alone in the “house full of echoes” (Gorra 21).
The novella’s “tone” as well as its “tonus,” its tension, are set in the scene of
Lauren’s and Rey’s last ever conversation. During this dialogue “the noise,” which
may be read as an index to Mr. Tuttle’s as yet unknown presence in the house, is
mentioned for the first time:
“Weren’t you going to tell me something?”
He said, “What?” […]
“You said something. I don’t know. The house.”
“It’s not interesting. Forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it.”
“It’s not interesting. Let me put it another way. It’s boring.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“It’s too early. It’s an effort. It’s boring.”
“You’re sitting there talking. Tell me,” she said. […]
“It’s an effort. It’s like what. It’s like pushing a boulder.”
“You’re sitting there talking.” […] “You said the house. Nothing about the
house is boring. I like the house.”
“You like everything. You love everything. You’re my happy home. […]”
“Just tell me. Takes only a second,” she said, knowing absolutely what it
was. […] “Just tell me okay. Because I know anyway.”
He said, “What?” […]
“I know anyway. So tell me.”
“You know. Then fine. I don’t have to tell you.” […]
She said, “The noise.”
He looked at her. He looked. Then he gave her the great smile […].
“The noises in the walls. Yes. You’ve read my mind.”
“It was one noise. It was one noise,” she said. “And it wasn’t in the walls.”
“One noise. Okay. I haven’t heard it lately. This is what I wanted to say. It’s
gone. Finished. End of conversation.”
“True. Except I heard it yesterday, I think.”
“Then it’s not gone. Good. I’m happy for you.”
“It’s an old house. There’s always a noise. But this is different. Not those
damn scampering animals we hear at night. Or the house settling. I don’t
know,” she said, not wanting to sound concerned. “Like there’s something.” […]
“Good. I’m glad,” he said “You need the company.” (18)
This dialogue, always teetering on the brink of failure, exhibits the futility, even the
impossibility of dialogue. The role that sound plays in The Body Artist is always tied
up with the way communication does or does not work. Described as a sound that is
recurring, random, undifferentiated and difficult to locate, “the noise,” contrary to
what one might expect, does not disturb or interrupt conversation, but rather, by providing a topic, brings it into being – even if it fails.3
When Lauren discovers Mr. Tuttle, it turns out that, having been announced by “the
noise,” he also seems to “produce noise” rather than “make sense.” This has to do
with his unusual relation to language. For a start, Mr. Tuttle refuses to make use of
its denotative function and thus seems unable to use it for the purpose of straightforward communication. Lauren describes him as “impaired in matters of articulation
and comprehension” (97), as “a retarded man sadly gifted in certain special areas,
such as memory retention and mimicry, a man who’d been concealed in a large
house, listening” (100). Mr. Tuttle produces a particularly rich, poetic form of language. Rhythmically organized and characterized by rhyme and repetition, it forms an
important part of the novella’s “phonotext.”4 For Lauren this kind of language is
“singing” or “chant,” the reviewer Stephen Amidon calls it “truncated, babbling
speech” (53). Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, one could describe it as the “egocentric discourse of the child,” which shows a lack of reciprocity:
The child, in this discourse, which may be tape-recorded, does not speak for himself,
as one says. No doubt, he does not address the other, if one uses here the theoretical
distinction of the I and the you. But there must be others there […] – they [the children]
don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak, if you’ll pardon the expression, à la
cantonade.5
This is what Mr. Tuttle sounds like:
Being here has come to me. I am with the moment, I will leave the moment. Chair, table,
wall, hall, all for the moment, in the moment. It has come to me. Here and near. From the
moment I am gone, am left, am leaving, I will leave the moment from the moment. […]
Coming and going, I am leaving, I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall
all will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have
seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me. (74)
Although Mr. Tuttle’s sentences do not instantly yield their meaning they are far from being
completely devoid of it, as is implied by critic Philip Nel when he refers to Mr. Tuttle’s chant
as “pure speech” (746). As David Cowart points out, “DeLillo often flirts with the
Wordsworthian conceit of the child as bridge between one world and the next, and he has
commented more than once, in interviews, on his sense that infantile babbling is structured” (205). The chant may lack the one clear denotation, but instead of being nonsense, these phrases carry multiple connotations and offer a wealth of meaning. The
isotopic use of “leaving,” for example, mirrors Lauren’s process of mourning her husband’s death. What causes Lauren’s (and the reader’s) problems of understanding is not
that there is no message, but rather that the sending of several messages simultaneously results in what information theory calls “noise.”6
Some of Mr. Tuttle’s sentences signal a breakdown of conventional communication. The circular structure of sentences like “Say some words to say some words”
(55), for instance, is set against the linearity and teleology we expect of non-literary,
everyday language. The same is true for the frequent tautologies that make Adam
Begley describe Mr. Tuttle as talking “like Gertrude Stein on a bad day” (12). Although
Mr. Tuttle’s words are, of course, difficult to understand and never limited to one
meaning, they may be analyzed and interpreted. Most of his sentences are the result
of two operations which Freud diagnoses as the major forces at work in our
dreams – namely displacement and condensation –, and which Lacan describes as
“the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier,” as “the two aspects
that generate the signified,” as the “determining effects for the institution of the subject” – namely metonymy and metaphor (Lacan, Écrits 285). An example for phonetically organized displacement/metonymy would be the principle behind a chain of
signifiers like: wall, hall, all, here, near, here, where, see, be. By semantically organized condensation/metaphor I refer to the compression of various meanings into one
phrase. The recurring formula “It is not able” (34/66) for example, reverberates with
at least three possible translations: it combines a statement of individual inability (in
the sense of “I am not able”) with a statement of general impossibility (in the sense
of “It is not possible”) and the assessment of fundamental meaninglessness (in the
sense of “It is pointless”). Another example of condensation would be the phrase
“Talk to me. I am talking.” Structurally, its tautological circularity opposes the teleological linearity, which characterizes every-day exchange of information. As far as content is concerned, this one phrase incorporates sentences like “talk to me I’m
listening” or “You asked me to talk to you, so I am talking” or “I am talking to you,
why don’t you talk to me.”
The second element, that makes Mr. Tuttle’s manner of speech peculiar, is that he
does not always use the same voice, but sometimes speaks in the voices of other
characters. His ability to reproduce these voices, however, is not limited to their sonic
profile, or to what Jonathan Sterne calls “the voice strictly speaking” (Sterne 122).7
When Mr. Tuttle talks in foreign tongues, he also speaks the words that belong to the
voices he uses. Thus, like a “human tape recorder” (Cowart 203), he reproduces
parts of Lauren’s lines and then, even more disturbingly, parts of dead Rey’s lines in
their respective voices:
She sat at the table and watched him and then she knew completely in the first electric exchange because the voice, the voices were not his. ‘But we don’t need it now this
minute. I’ll get it when I go. Ajax. That’s the stuff. There’s nothing to scour right now.’ She
listened and it was her. Who the hell else. These things she’d said. […] This is what she’d
said to him before he got in the car and drove, if only she’d known, all the way to New York.
[…] It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey’s voice all right, it was her husband’s
tonal soul, but she didn’t think the man was remembering. It is happening now. (86–87)
Mr. Tuttle does not stop at re-enacting what has been spoken as if it was in the present. He goes far beyond what any mechanical device for recording and replaying
voices could possibly do. I am referring to the third peculiar element, the genuinely
“fantastic” aspect of Mr. Tuttle, who seems to have a special relationship with time.
But contrary to a tape recorder – which would be limited to replaying what has been
said in the past – Mr. Tuttle produces words that have not yet been spoken. Lauren
describes this as his ability to paradoxically “remember the future.”8 The three chapters grouped around the novella’s core relate how Lauren, fascinated by Mr. Tuttle’s
“chant,” tries to get him to speak into a tiny Dictaphone:
The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to
follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement. And
some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this is the
point, this is the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling
upward in your skull. (75)
This language is described as so overpowering in its sound that it disables vision and
thus – by making “blind” – induces an even more intense way of listening: a form of
listening that lies beyond concentration and borders on the dissolution of self or consciousness. Tom Paulin claims for sound to have “all sorts of ontological meanings
for us. It is to do with our dwelling in the world, with our being” (Paulin 36). If it is true
that sounds are intimately connected to “being-in-the-world,” then it should be possible to read the sounds that Mr. Tuttle produces as indicators of his ontological status. Regardless of whether one opts for an interpretation that treats Mr. Tuttle as a
realistic character or, as I shall do in the next section, as a product of Lauren’s psyche, the novella presents him as occupying a highly unstable position in both time
and space, which is largely an effect of his phonetically displaced, metonymically gliding, and as a result, semantically condensed language.
Voice – Gender – Loss
As indicated above, there is another way to read DeLillo’s text than the “realistic”
interpretation I have just offered. This second reading does not accept Mr. Tuttle as
a character on the same level as Rey or Lauren or Mariella, but claims that he is a
“ghost,” a product of Lauren’s traumatized psyche. In order to make this reading
plausible, I shall first demonstrate how the novella withholds all definitive proof of Mr.
Tuttle’s actual existence. Secondly, I shall highlight the moments that point towards
Lauren’s traumatization.
The Body Artist has a very withdrawn extradiegetic-heterodiegetic third-person narrator who leaves the reader almost entirely dependent on the focalizer. Nobody, apart
from Lauren, ever sees this nameless stranger she calls Mr. Tuttle.9 The “noise” in the
house is heard by Rey as well, but although a connection between this disturbing sound
and Mr. Tuttle is suggested, there is no actual proof that Mr. Tuttle does really cause it.
It could well have other sources – the text leaves it open. Apart from the two inserted
passages, the reader does not have access to any information that has not first been
filtered through Lauren’s consciousness. But Lauren, and the novella makes this quite
clear, is a totally unreliable focalizer. From the very beginning, she is shown to have a
lively imagination, she empathizes with people she reads about in newspaper articles
and imagines characters and details about their lives. One day, she “knows all about”
a man she drives past in a car – only it turns out that this “man” is nothing but a pile
of painting tools she has mistaken for a person.10 Moreover, Lauren is a perception
junkie, who not only observes, it seems, in a very detailed manner at all times, but who
simultaneously reflects on how insufficient even concentrated perception is:
She noticed how water from the tap turned opaque in seconds. It ran silvery and
clear and then in seconds turned opaque and how curious it seemed that in all these
months and all these times in which she’d run water from the kitchen tap she’d never
noticed how the water ran clear at first and then went not murky exactly but opaque,
or maybe it had not happened before or maybe she’d noticed and forgotten. (18)
Lauren is forever “noticing” the world around her in a “curious” way. But as the quotation shows, she becomes frequently aware that she “had never noticed” some
things before which nevertheless surrounded her all the time. Her attempts to
describe to herself what she sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels are impressive in
their search for precision. Yet at the same time she often overshoots the mark, has
to revise or correct or even take back what she thinks she has perceived: “The birds
broke off the feeder in a wing-whir that was all b’s and r’s, the letter b followed by a
series of vibrato r’s. But that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t anything like it” (17). After
Rey’s death she not only doubts the precision of her perception, or the adequacy of
her description, or the reliability of her memory, but even her physical ability to see
properly: “She decided to find an optometrist because she thought she’d seen something a number of times, or once or twice, out of the corner of her right eye, or an ophthalmologist, but knew she wouldn’t bother” (76).
But if Lauren is an unreliable focalizer, because the reader – and even she – cannot
trust her senses, then the only “proof” that seems to remain of Mr. Tuttle’s existence,
are the recordings of his voice which Lauren integrates into her performance piece. As
readers we learn from Mariella Chapman’s text, the second insertion in the novella, that
the recordings form part of Body Time. During the interview Lauren suddenly speaks in
a voice, which Mariella recognizes as identical with the recorded voice used on stage. I
shall come back to this scene, but in preparation, would like to look at the one in which
Lauren experiments with her voice for the first time:
For a while she stopped answering the phone, as she’d done intermittently since the
first days back, and when she began to pick it up again, she used another voice. […] At
first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody’s, a generic neutered human, but
then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird
humming on her tongue. (101)
The voice transmitted over the phone line becomes the medium through which the
speaker’s gendered identity is assigned by the listener. Lauren’s “normal” implicitly
female voice (curiously enough, the reader is never given any description of its sonic
quality before it changes) becomes first “another voice,” a disembodied voice,
“nobody’s” (literally no body’s) voice. Then it becomes “a generic neutered human”
voice (human, but genderless), before it is described by a male pronoun: “his,” “his
voice.” Despite being grammatically marked as masculine, this sound lacks all characteristics traditionally associated with a “male” voice. Instead, its attributes connote air-filled lightness, frailty, fragility, and thus project a de-gendered,11 then an
ambiguously re-gendered identity, which later on in the performance will be supported
by the change apparent in the rest of Lauren’s body. Apart from transporting these
qualities, the humming bird simile, once more, brings together the notions of movement and sound. In a passage already quoted above, the “b’s and r’s, the letter b followed by a series of vibrato r’s” (17) caused by a flock of birds already introduced this
connection on the phonological level. Here, it is taken up again on the semantic level.
Now the vibration of the single imaginary humming bird’s wings corresponds to the
vibration of Lauren’s vocal cords. By being “like a bird humming on her tongue” (not
in the back of her throat, where the vocal chords are located), the simile also points
towards an element of artificiality in this voice. It is a product made by the body
artist, by an artist’s body.
Just how able Lauren’s body is “to do things other bodies could not,” (105) becomes
clearer when her visible transformation follows the audible change of her voice. Again,
the first step is one of erasure; not of specific timbre, this time, but of color:
This was her work, to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and
to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance. She had a face
cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself. She cut off some, then
more of the hair on her head. It was crude work that became nearly brutal when she
bleached out the color. In the mirror she wanted to see someone who is classically
unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bed of familiar effect, a spook in the
night static of every public toilet. (84)
This passage is not as explicit about the fact that this erasure is also a process of
deleting a markedly feminine gender identity, which finds its pars pro toto in Lauren’s
hair that is cut off and bleached of its “natural chestnut luster” (103). Feminist criticism has shown that the traditionally feminine position within a patriarchal framework is staged as the object of the (male) gaze.12 Underlying Lauren’s transformation
is the refusal to be passively staged in order to be seen. Instead, she actively stages
herself to be – and herein lies the radical quality – “someone who is classically
unseen,” to be “looked through” rather than looked at.13 The narrator’s description
quoted above is complemented later on by Mariella’s who picks up on the “shocking
transformation,” describing how Lauren “is not pale-skinned so much as colorless,
bloodless and ageless” (103). The text does not add “genderless,” but instead comments on the effect Lauren’s erasure of gender markers produces. She has transformed herself into a screen, which allows projections of different genders:
Hartke’s piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage, gesturing
in the stylized manner of Noh drama, and it ends seventy-five minutes later with a
naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something. I saw two
of the three performances and I have no idea how Hartke alters her body and voice.
(105)
During her interview with Mariella, Lauren’s own experimentation with voice, which this
time it is not mediated by a possibly distorting phone line, reaches a climax. Mariella
identifies the voice Lauren uses as the one that is associated by the reader with
Mr. Tuttle: “Then she does something that makes me freeze in my seat. She switches
to another voice. It is his voice, the naked man’s, spooky as a woodwind in your closet.
Not taped but live. Not lip-sync’ed but real” (109). Again, the notion of “switching” suggests artificiality, even technology, which is further supported by the simile which
likens the voice to the uncanny (“spooky”), muffled and out of place (“in your closet”)
sound of an instrument (“woodwind”). On the other hand, the artificiality is counterbalanced by the immediacy of the “live” performance. The quotation continues:
I can almost believe she is equipped with male genitals, as in the piece, prosthetic,
of course, and maybe an Ace bandage in flesh-tone to bleep out her breasts, with a
sprinkle of chest-hair pasted on. Or she has trained her upper body to deflate and her
lower body to sprout. Don’t put it past her. (109)
Lauren’s de-gendering and re-gendering, which remains explicable as an artificially
produced effect on stage (prosthetic, Ace bandage in flesh-tone, chest-hair pasted
on), becomes uncanny in the restaurant. And it is the sonic, rather than the optical
dimension that is responsible for this. As the sound effect changes from lip-syncing
to live, the imagination of a visible gender-transformation follows the audible. There
is no visible maleness on Lauren’s body, only visible lack of femininity. But there is
an audible quality that makes Mariella imagine Lauren with male genitals. Gender in
DeLillo’s novella is first and foremost staged as a sound-effect.
Mr. Tuttle as a symptom
At first, the tapes used on stage seem to indicate that Mr. Tuttle must really exist,
since his voice was recorded on the Dictaphone. According to the realistic or mimetic
reading, Lauren, the body artist, has apparently taught herself to reproduce the
sounds produced by his voice box. This is not implausible, since we learn that
Lauren’s body has been “taught […] to do things that other bodies could not” (105).
But a closer look reveals that the passages which mention the tapes, do not constitute any proof of Mr. Tuttle’s existence. It is, for example, important to note that the
voice’s identification as “the naked man’s” is Mariella’s, and that Mariella has never
seen or heard Mr. Tuttle. She only knows him as a character Lauren changes into during her performance.
The tapes, I would like to argue, do not only fail to provide evidence for Mr. Tuttle’s
existence, but, quite to the contrary, they actually produce uncertainty about his status. They do so, because at the very moment when Lauren reproduces Mr. Tuttle’s
voice in the restaurant, the tape presumably produced during Lauren’s sessions with
Mr. Tuttle and then used on stage loses all possible evidential value. Another interpretation now emerges. If Lauren can speak “live” in the voice that was heard as a
recording during the performance, it is perfectly possible that the voice on the tape
is and has always been produced by Lauren herself. But if that is so, the recording
changes status: it is then no longer a piece of circumstantial evidence for Mr. Tuttle’s
existence as a human being, but for his existence as a symptom created by Lauren’s
psyche with a voice produced by Lauren’s own vocal apparatus.
Having pointed out, 1) how Lauren is installed as an unreliable narrator, 2) how
proof for Mr. Tuttle’s existence is withheld by the text, and having suggested that 3)
Mr. Tuttle is not a real person, but a figment of Lauren’s imagination, and 4) that “his”
voice (including “his” imitation of Lauren’s and Rey’s voices) is actually produced by
her voice-box, other questions arise. Why does Lauren’s psyche produce this symptom? To which of her needs does Mr. Tuttle’s existence provide the answer? What triggers this striking psychic reaction? In order to answer these, I would like to point
towards two passages – one towards the end of the novella and the other on its very
last page. The first of these deals with Lauren’s attitude as a mourner, with her way
of experiencing loss and grief following Rey’s death:
Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? […] Why
shouldn’t his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why
should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him
within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.
(116, my emphasis)
The emphasized sentence is important, because it signals a need and, subsequently,
a (psychic) activity on Lauren’s part. The need is to keep Rey present, the activity is
“to place him within reach” despite his demise – by reproducing his voice, his “tonal
soul” (87). Thus, Mr. Tuttle is the construction that allows Lauren to have what she
needs for psychic stability: Rey’s presence in absence.
The second passage that I would like to bring to attention provides an answer to
the question where the energy for producing such a striking symptom as Mr. Tuttle
comes from. The very last page of the text reveals a prior death in Lauren’s life,
which, up to this point, has remained concealed by Rey’s suicide. Suddenly, completely out of the blue, the reader is informed that: “Her mother died when she was
nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her” (124). These three sentences
provide the only information on the death of Lauren’s mother. It is remarkable that
Lauren, who is usually staged as the one who perceives and describes what she perceives in obsessive detail, lacks the ability to verbalize an event as important as her
mother’s death and its effects on her. She is almost completely at a loss for words
and the few words she does use seem to be someone else’s: “It wasn’t her fault. It
had nothing to do with her.” Lauren seems to have no direct access to her memories
of her mother’s death. And it is this complete lack of access that defines her as traumatized in Freud’s sense. So Rey’s death covers up another death. The experience of
loss caused by his suicide calls back a previous, possibly even greater loss that was
also sudden, unexpected, and which rendered Lauren powerless too.
Laura Di Prete takes up this surprising reference to the protagonist’s dead mother
as well. For her reading of Mr. Tuttle she introduces Nicolas Abraham’s concept of the
“phantom” as a “metapsychological construct ‘meant to objectify, even under the
guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s live’ ” by which, she adds, “Abraham
addresses the phenomenon of secrets, silences, and traumas of others buried within
the self.”14 According to Di Prete, the reference to Lauren’s mother’s death
[…] hints at once at an early trauma not completely worked through and the possibility of transgenerationally transmitted secrets, conflicts, and traumas within the
mother. The silence around the death of her mother seems to frame the other more
central silence around the death of her husband. (Di Prete 92)
While I fully agree with her first conclusion (early trauma not worked through), and to
a large extent with the third (link to husband’s death), I have difficulty assenting to the
second (mother’s trauma transgenerationally transmitted to Lauren). One reason for
this is that the text does not offer any information at all about the mother’s possible
trauma which she may have passed on to her daughter, since the three sentences
quoted above, are all the information the text provides. The second, more important
reason has to do with Abraham’s concept of the “phantom” itself. Admittedly, it seems
very useful for analyzing The Body Artist, especially because Abraham provides a link
to Mr. Tuttle’s speaking in others’ voices by claiming that “it [the phantom] works like
a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography” (Abraham
173, Di Prete 89). But Di Prete’s otherwise inspired reading ignores one point
Abraham is quite explicit about: “Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an
object of love, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would
be the case with melancholics or with all those who carry a tomb in themselves”
(Abraham 171–72). Mr. Tuttle, however – and Di Prete herself agrees15 – does seem
to be related to the loss of an object of love (Rey), or rather the loss of two objects of
love (Rey, Lauren’s mother), and he does seem to be an effect of as yet unsuccessful
mourning, albeit one, which enables Lauren to leave melancholia behind and enter
mourning. Thus, rather than follow her reading of Mr. Tuttle as a “phantom,” I would
like to suggest an interpretation of him as a sonic symptom, a manifestation of a
process of overcoming an individual, rather than succumbing to a transgenerational
trauma.
The more useful point of theoretical reference Di Prete introduces in her article is
the link between traumatic haunting and the uncanny voice that Cathy Caruth provides in the introduction to Unclaimed Experience. Going back to the third chapter of
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Caruth reminds us that Freud picks Tasso’s
story of Tancred16 as his model for “a compulsion to repeat which overrides the
pleasure principle” (Freud, Beyond 22) and proceeds to base her trauma theory on
Freud’s reading of this tale:
Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so
trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but
rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not
known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on. (Caruth 3–4)
Forging a link between Caruth’s trauma theory and The Body Artist is a brilliant move
by Di Prete. I fully agree to both the proposed parallels17 between the medieval knight
who kills/wounds his beloved twice and the contemporary woman that loses the person closest to her twice, and the diagnosis of the novella’s emphasis “on the internal
nature of this conflict, on the presence in Lauren’s psyche of a foreclosed knowledge,
internal, yet unassimilated” (Di Prete 91). Using the same material, I would like to
draw another conclusion.
If one goes back to Caruth’s introduction, it does indeed read as if it had been written with the novella in mind. For the nine-year-old Lauren, her mother’s death is the
“wound that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until,” in Rey’s death, “it finally imposes itself
again,” and the trauma “returns to haunt the survivor later on” through Mr. Tuttle
(Caruth 4). In first coming across the sentences “Her mother died when she was
nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her,” (124) mainly the last two
phrases seem remarkable. They sound like the remaining impressions of something
someone back then might have told the nine-year-old girl by way of consolation: “It
isn’t your fault. It has nothing to do with you.” Although the text refuses to disclose,
whether the mother died of illness, had an accident or committed suicide, we learn
of Lauren’s justified or unjustified sense of guilt/responsibility, precisely through its
seemingly unnecessary negation. Whether there was a choice/action/desire
involved on young Lauren’s part to get rid of her mother or not, whether there was the
possibility of the wrong choice, the wrong or refused action, a desire necessarily
denied by the super-ego leading to guilt or not, remains a secret. Both options,
though, couple Lauren’s mother’s death closely with Rey’s death – because they
occur suddenly, because they are unforeseen, and because they provoke a strong
affective reaction in Lauren, who is left by both in a position of total powerlessness,
asking herself whether it really “was not her fault.” Caruth, however, reminds us that
Freud chooses a narrative as a paradigm for his concept of “the compulsion to
repeat,” where the hero does, albeit unwittingly, kill/hurt his beloved. If it makes
sense to link The Body Artist to Tasso’s story, the latter provides a better tool in arguing for an unwitting involvement of Lauren’s than for making a case for transgenerationally transferred trauma when it comes to explaining why the mother’s death is
mentioned on the novella’s last page.
As early as 1893 Sigmund Freud suggested “hysterical patients suffer from
incompletely abreacted psychical traumas.”18 Taking her cues from Freud and Lacan,
Elisabeth Bronfen has convincingly argued in The Knotted Subject that every hysteric
is a traumatized character who mainly communicates her trauma. If one wanted to
describe what happens to Lauren in psychoanalytic terms, Rey’s death is an event
that repeats the actual traumatic event that has not been properly abreacted. It is
from this prior death that Rey’s suicide derives a traumatic force so great it necessitates a psychic reaction as drastic as the fantasmatic creation of Mr. Tuttle. It is
tempting to turn Bronfen’s thesis around and reason that since Lauren is traumatized, and since in creating Mr. Tuttle she also communicates her trauma, she must
be a hysteric.
But before one even has the chance to build an argument on this inversion,
DeLillo’s text itself suggests this very interpretation, and instantly undermines it ironically. Just before the three sentences about her mother’s death, Lauren’s thoughts are
given as: “Maybe it was all an erotic reverie. The whole thing was a city built for a dirty
thought. She was a sexual hysteric, ha. Not that she believed it” (124). I cannot tackle
the question here, whether the ironic gesture constitutes one of those “false leads”
which, according to Bronfen, are amongst the most prominent characteristics of the
hysterics’ tales in Freud’s case histories. The question, for whose gaze this “false
lead” – if it is one – may have been laid out, remains to be explored in another context. What is interesting, though, is that, triggered by Mr. Tuttle’s sudden disappearance, Lauren herself is trying to interpret him in a way that only seems to make sense
if she does no longer believe him to be a person. David Cowart attributes Mr. Tuttle’s
disappearance partly to his having “fulfilled his function as a heteroclite muse” (204)
for the body artist, which is to inspire her to produce Body Time. While sharing the view
that Mr. Tuttle vanishes because he has fulfilled a specific function, I suspect it to be
one of healing rather than one of inspiration; or, perhaps, one of healing through inspiration to produce art as a way of working through. Certainly, the dissolution of the
symptom seems to point to the success of Lauren’s work of mourning: “She stood a
while […] and felt the emptiness around her. That’s when she rocked down to the floor,
backed against the doorpost. She went twisting down, slowly, almost thoughtfully, and
opened her mouth, oh, in a moan that remained unsounded” (123). At first, this
“unsounded moan” may seem surprising. After all, one might expect that successful
mourning might be linked to a “finding of voice.” Here, however, the opposite is the
case. The text couples the symptom with the voice, with noise, and with sound, while
the symptom’s dissolution goes hand in hand with emptiness and silence. But maybe
what the novella stages here, is less an inability to articulate than the freedom from
the need to give voice, to keep r/evocalizing Rey’s voice.
Radio – Dictaphone – Answering Machine
Media play an important role in many of Don DeLillo’s books. The Body Artist is no
exception here: the newspaper, the telephone, the computer and the radio are all
introduced on the first few pages. Later on, the internet, the webcam, the answering
machine and the Dictaphone – all of which form part of the performance Body Time –
complete the spectrum. Each of the three main characters has a special relationship
with one sonic medium. Curiously, it is not so much through the content communicated, but mainly by being switched on and off that the radio, the Dictaphone and the
answering machine feature prominently in the text.
During the breakfast scene alone, the radio is mentioned sixteen times. Rey
switches it on, searches for a station, criticizes the program, switches it off, on, off
again and – after Lauren has switched it on once more – off. Being in control of the
medium, and thus of the establishment and/or breaking off of this stream of sound
from the outside world, seems to be more important to Rey than the content of the
information communicated. After Rey’s death, a similar game of control takes place
between Mr. Tuttle, Lauren and Rey’s Dictaphone. Mr. Tuttle is the one who mainly
keeps switching it off, while Lauren patiently switches it on again and again, in order
to record his voice while he is “doing Rey.” The important question now seems to be
who of the two is in control of the medium.
There is an important difference between these two scenes, which has to do with what
the respective media do to sound. The radio is a broadcasting device, and controlling it
means being able to initiate/regulate/end a stream of incoming sound. The Dictaphone,
in contrast, is a recording and playing-back device. It cannot produce anything that has
not been fed to it before, but it is able to both receive and emanate sounds. Since it has
these two different functions, there are also two different kinds of control related to
switching the medium on and off. Switching off the playing-back function is similar to
switching off the radio, since it puts an end to emanating sound. It is also different, however, since in contrast to the radio’s sounds, the Dictaphone’s sounds may be already
known and they are repeatable. Thus, switching off the playing-back function means putting an end to having to listen to what one already knows. Switching off the recording function, which is what Mr. Tuttle keeps doing, has another implication, namely the refusal to
have uttered sounds made available for their uncanny repetition as sonic “ghosts.”
Lauren’s sonic medium is the answering machine, to be more precise, her friend
Mariella’s answering machine. As the plot progresses, acoustic repetition – not only
on the level of the plot, but also on the text’s performative level – gains importance.
This becomes most obvious in Lauren’s relation to the answering machine. The synthetic voice’s audio-Lego – “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / tone” – fascinates her almost as much as Mr. Tuttle’s chant:
The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but
deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How
strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up
and called back. One voice for each word. […] She hung up and called back. (67)
[….]
She called Mariella and got the machine. She listened to the recording and hung up
and then called again and hung up. She called several times over the next day and a
half and listened to the recorded voice and did not leave a message. When she called
again and Mariella answered, she put down the phone, softly, and stood completely
still. (70–71)
I would like to suggest that this passage may be read as a sonic variant of Freud’s
fort/da-game. Although we are not looking at a male child whose mother is temporarily absent, but at a grown woman who is trying to come to grips with a permanent loss, there are essential parallels between the two scenarios. In “Beyond the
pleasure principle” Freud describes witnessing one of his grandsons at the age of
eighteen months:
This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small
objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the
bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o,” accompanied by an
expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account
were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the
German word “fort” [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use
he made of any of his toys was to play “gone” with them. One day I made an observation
which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around
it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at
its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully
throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time
uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its
reappearance with a joyful “da” [there]. This, then, was the complete game: disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly
as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to
the second act.
In a footnote he adds:
One day the child’s mother had been away for several hours and on her return was
met with the words “Baby o-o-o-o!” which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned
out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of
making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which
did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirrorimage “gone.” (Freud, Beyond 14–15)
Freud himself offers two readings of this scene: first, he interprets it as the child’s
attempt to free himself of the passive role which only permits him to suffer from his
mother’s abandonment. By symbolizing the loss and willingly repeating it in his game
he gains agency, ensuring at least that he is in control as to when the abandonment
takes place. In his second interpretation, Freud emphasizes that the game is a manifestation of the child’s defiance of the mother who abandoned him. According to this
reading, the child takes his revenge on the mother via her substitute, by doing to it
what had been done to him (Freud, Beyond 15). In both cases the reel functions as
the mother’s representative.
Sarah Kofman provides an interpretation of this scene that is useful for analyzing
Lauren’s repetitive game with Mariella’s answering machine within the framework of
Freud’s fort/da-game. In Kofman’s words the alternation of calling and putting down
the receiver is Lauren’s “symbolic invention that allows […] to master this absence
through an affective discharge […]” (Kofman 77). Within this model, the synthetic
voice on the answering machine is a substitute for Mariella. But within Lauren’s psychic economy, Mariella herself is only a substitute for Lauren’s object of desire, dead
Rey. Of course, one could follow this chain of supplementary objects even further and
argue that, according to psychoanalytic theory, Rey too is nothing but yet another substitute for Lauren’s first object of desire, namely her mother. The absence overcome
by Lauren’s game with the answering machine is not, then, Mariella’s absence, but
really Rey’s or Lauren’s mother’s absence, or even the fundamental lack which constitutes the subject. After Rey’s death there is neither “sobbing [n]or shrieking” (Kofman
77), these two being the alternative ways of discharging affect, according to Kofman.
Instead, Lauren’s “symbolic invention makes possible the structuring of [her] fantasy
regarding [the mother’s] presence and absence” (Kofman 77). Jacques Lacan’s mirror
stage is comparable to Freud’s fort/da-game insofar as both visually organized scenarios are central to their author’s theories of how subject constitution works. Taking
a look at Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s interpretation of the fort/da-game, might help
to understand what is going on between Lauren and the answering machine, which I
suggest to read as an aurally organized model of subject (re)constitution. Instead of
tackling Lacan’s own take straight away, however, I shall approach it, for reasons of
clarity, via a detour of two contemporary readings of Lacan: one by the Slovenian critic
and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek and the other by the American film scholar Kaja
Silverman.
For Freud the toy/reel represents the mother. Lacan, as we shall see, takes a different view. For him “[t]he reel is not the mother […] – it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained” (Lacan,
Tuché 62). Slavoj Žižek offers some assistance, when it comes to understanding
what Lacan means by this. He suggests an interpretation according to which the reel
is “that which Lacan called a ‘biceptor’; it is neither part of the child nor is it part of
the mother, it is between the two, the excluded intersection of the two conditions.”19
If we make use of this model to understand the DeLillo-scene, Lauren is the subject,
Mariella/Rey/Lauren’s mother are in the object position, and the answering machine
is the equivalent of the reel, and thus, a biceptor, which is neither entirely part of the
caller-subject nor of the called-object, but forms a kind of interface between them.
Having established this parallel, however, it needs to be modified as well, because
the answering machine is an 1) updated, 2) virtualized, 3) multiply inverted, and 4)
more complex kind of biceptor than Freud’s reel.
The scene described by Freud already tells the story of a mediated relation (the reel
is the medium between child and mother). DeLillo’s scene is technologically updated,
since Lauren and the answering machine are connected by a phone line, and not by a
string. It is made virtual because the person called by phone, even if she picks it up,
will never be physically present (in contrast to the mother in Freud’s scene). The scene
is also inverted in three ways. Firstly, there is an inversion of the relation between
silence and voice. In Freud’s scene, the subject makes a sound – the famous “o-o-o-o”
and the object, the reel, is silent. By contrast, in DeLillo’s scene Lauren, the subject,
is silent and the biceptor makes a sound: “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the /
tone.” The second instance of inversion concerns the quality of these sounds. Freud
describes a deficient signifier: o-o-o-o is a not-yet-perfectly-formed word. In contrast,
DeLillo’s scene offers a hyper-artificial sound, a computer generated voice characterized by gaps and discontinuities. The third inversion consists in the obliteration of the
game’s “fort”-element, which I shall look at in more detail later on. DeLillo’s model is
more complex, because the game he describes has two levels. When Lauren calls
Mariella’s number, she is trying to create a situation of presence-in-absence. This is
true for all phone-calls, of course. Generally, the person called is not in the same
room. Absence is therefore a condition. If the person called picks up, the call creates
a situation of (at least vocal and mental) presence-in-absence. So Lauren’s phone call
is the attempt to create a “da” within the situation of a fundamental “fort.” When she
puts down the receiver again, she re-establishes the fundamental “fort” or – perhaps
this is the better parallel – she makes herself disappear, much as Freud’s grandson
did by crouching underneath the mirror. The important difference between the two is
that the boy makes his image disappear while Lauren makes her voice disappear.
Having already taken care to remove her visual appearance from the world (by shutting
herself up in the remote house), the deletion of her voice, of her sonic presence, so to
speak, is, seems as the next step.
This is the first level of DeLillo’s fort/da. Within the virtual “da” of the answering
machine, however, there is a second level. Systems-theory provides us with a useful
term for describing precisely this phenomenon: it is a “re-entry.” Once the distinction
between “fort” and “da” has been established, the same distinction returns within
the distinguished elements. When an answering machine springs into action, its
automatic voice usually delivers two messages. First, a “fort”-message, as in: “you
have dialed the number of so-and-so who is currently unable to take your call.” This
“fort” is then followed by the second message, an offer for communication delayed
in time, a “da”-within-the-“fort”-message: “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the /
tone”. The question “fort or da?,” thus, re-enters within the “fort” option and adds a
second level, a fort/da-game within the first one.
DeLillo obliterates the first part of the double message we expect from an answering machine. There is no “you have dialed the number of Mariella Chapman, who is
currently unable to take your call.” In other words: although Mariella is not “da,” there
is no “fort” in the message. All that readers are presented with is a virtual “da”-message.
This obliteration of the game’s “fort”-half is DeLillo’s third inversion of Freud’s scene.
Freud’s account is very clear that he first observes how the child goes “o-o-o-o.” Only
later does he discover that the “da”-part makes the game complete. So while Freud
first reduces the game to its “fort”-part – the “first act, which was repeated untiringly
as a game in itself” – DeLillo seems to reduce the game to its “da”-part.
Having dealt with Slavoj Žižek–’s interpretation of the reel as a “biceptor,” it is
worth taking a look at a second critic who comments on Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s
scenario and focuses more on sound. Kaja Silverman stresses the fort/da-game’s
phonemic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Freud’s scenario. As a matter of fact,
Freud himself mentions this already, but leaves it to Lacan to point it out as
important:
Lacan emphasizes the phonemic opposition between the “o” and “a” in the words
uttered by the child. He sees that formal opposition as ushering in a conceptual one,
and in the process creating a self-enclosed signifying system. […] These signifying
alliances function to exclude altogether both the speaker’s lost complement, represented in the game by the toy, and the hostile and erotic drives which find expression
in the actions of throwing away and recovering that toy. (Silverman 170)
Although in DeLillo’s version it is not the subject who does the talking, but rather the
biceptor – in this case the answering machine – I would like to pick up two points made
by Silverman. Firstly, the notion of the “lost complement” – represented in the game
by the toy – explains why Lauren has no interest in talking to Mariella herself. When
Mariella actually does pick up the phone one day, Lauren “put down the phone, softly,
and stood completely still” (71). The lost complement is not Mariella – it is Rey, and
behind Rey, Lauren’s mother. Secondly, it is worth noting that, for Lacan, the Freudian
scene is about the child’s entry into the system of language. By opposing the signifier
“fort” with “da,” it forms the first of those oppositional pairs – like “o” vs. “a,” or
absence vs. presence or activity vs. passivity – that, for Lacan, govern language and
structure the subject’s psyche. It is important to remember that the phonetic, the
sonic dimension is not merely an appendix to the fort/da-game, but a core characteristic of the whole model. One of the major psychoanalytic models focusing on subject
formation, that is, may said to be fundamentally aurally structured. After Rey’s death
Lauren has to enter the symbolic order again to regain her subject status, and the
aural fort/da-game may be read as the signifier the text chooses for this process.
Answering machines are technological devices that deconstruct the binary opposition of presence vs. absence. This is what Mariella’s answering machine has in
common with the psychic construction Mr. Tuttle that allows Lauren to guarantee
Rey’s “presence-in-absence.” In order to illustrate this thesis, I would now like to take
a look at Lacan’s text proper. In the chapter “Tuché and Automaton,” which forms part
of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, he comments on Freud’s
fort/da-game. According to Lacan, Freud’s point, namely the fact that the child copes
with his mother’s absence by ascribing himself an active role within the game, is only
of secondary importance. Instead, Lacan suggests, the fort/da-game is actually
about the vanishing of the subject rather than about the mother’s absence:
For the game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the mother’s absence
has created on the frontier of his domain […], namely, a ditch […]. The reel is not the
mother […] – it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still
remaining his, still retained. […] It is with this object that the child leaps the frontiers
of his domain, transformed [from a ditch] into a well, and begins the incantation.
(Lacan, Tuché 62).
DeLillo sketches a scenario, where Rey’s death creates “ditches” around Lauren.
Signifiers of these ditches between the dead and the living may be found on the
phonemic level of the only message delivered by the answering machine, namely the
“brief but deep dimensions” that separate the syllables of “Please / leave / a mess /
age / after / the / tone.” The time after Rey’s death is truly a “mess-age” for Lauren,
but with Mr. Tuttle, her psychic biceptor, she manages to “leap the frontiers” of her
domain or the “ditch” that separates her from her dead husband, to “transform it into
a well” of productivity that results in her performance piece, and to “begin,” as Lacan
writes, “the incantation.” Here, my argument comes full circle. According to the thesis that it is Lauren herself who produces Mr. Tuttle’s different voices, “the incantation” she begins, not only mirrors his “chant,” but is actually identical with it.
For Lacan, the fort/da-game is about “the repetition of the mother’s departure as
a cause of a Spaltung [splitting] in the subject – overcome by the alternating game,
fort-da, which is a here or there, and whose aim, in its alternation, is simply that of
being the fort of a da, and the da of a fort.” (Lacan, Tuché 63) Mr. Tuttle not only
bridges the ditch, but is himself also a manifestation of the ditch. His phrase “nothing comes between me” gives away that he is not to be read as a subject, since for
Lacan it is precisely by the split that the subject is constituted (74). Instead, he is the
subject’s symptom, which is simultaneously a split-off part of the subject and the
splitting itself. By the loss of her love object (Rey), which then triggers the trauma
caused by the loss of the prime love object (the mother), Lauren has been thrown into
a state of lost subjectivity that finds its signifier in the sound of the “chant.”20 After
Rey’s death, she needs Mr. Tuttle in order to re-constitute herself as a subject. Just
as the technological biceptor guarantees a form of “da” within the fundamental
“fort” by its “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / tone,” the psychic biceptor
Mr. Tuttle guarantees Rey’s presence within the fundamental absence of death. At
the same time, however, Mr. Tuttle also makes possible the contact between the
grown-up Lauren and her traumatized nine-year-old self. A fundamental “fort,” caused
by death, has to be supplemented by a fantasmatic “da,” and Lauren’s speaking
through/in/as her own symptom in other voices is a strategy of fantasmatic selfempowerment in order to regain subjectivity.
Conclusion: Gender – De-Gendering – Empowerment
In the context of Lauren’s attempt to regain her subject status, gendering plays an
important part. At first glance, Mr. Tuttle’s masculinity may seem to be at odds with
an interpretation that proposes to read him as Lauren’s symptom. But, of course, projections of the psyche do not have to have the same gender as the body that houses
the psyche which produces them.
As Judith Butler points out, Freud somewhat revises the strict opposition he had
proposed between mourning and melancholia in the article bearing this very title in
1915, when he publishes “The Ego and The Id” in 1923: “Freud suggests that the
internalizing strategy of melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning, but may
be the only way in which the ego can survive the loss of its essential emotional ties to
others” (Butler 58). Based on the assumption that internalization is not only a characteristic of melancholia, but also of mourning, one could argue that since Lauren is
internalizing a male lost object, the fact that the symptom she produces is ‘male’ as
well makes perfect sense. Moreover, I would like to suggest that the gender difference
between the protagonist and her symptom does not only form an integral part of her
self-empowerment, but that gender itself, as I shall try to show, might be seen as a
fort/da-game. In other words, the fact that the female protagonist produces a male
symptom does not disturb my reading, but supports it.
One answer to the question why the novella presents such an un-masculine male
as a way out of Lauren’s helpless position is provided by Mr. Tuttle’s status. As I have
argued, the predominant purpose of this symptom is to provide present in absence.
Since the recently lost love object (Rey) is male, this may account for Mr. Tuttle’s masculine gender. But Mr. Tuttle does not only provide a connection with a lost object, but
also with a lost subject. The symptom’s second purpose, as I have shown, is to free
Lauren of her melancholy and start a process of mourning in order to regain her subject status. This subject status has been lost before, at Lauren’s mother’s traumatizing death, and then regained to make up Lauren’s grown-up self. Confronted with
Rey’s death, Lauren reacts by going back to the point from whence she once already
successfully constructed her subjectivity. As a biceptor Mr. Tuttle has to be read as a
“small part of” Lauren that “detaches itself from” her “while still remaining” (Lacan,
Tuché 62–63) hers. This may account for Mr. Tuttle’s childish appearance, since he
in part also represents this, Lauren’s younger self.
By claiming a male voice during her phase of transition, Lauren breaks free of her
old position in the symbolic order that is powerless because it is female. Following
this logic, one might expect that Lauren, in the interest of empowerment, might strive
for the very opposite of a female/powerless position, namely a male/powerful position like the one Rey occupies, for example, in short: a phallic one. But Rey, as we
know, is dead. Phallic as his position in the symbolic order might be, it has not
enabled him to survive. Having been through a first crisis after her mother’s death,
Lauren, by choosing Rey as her sexual partner, turns to the phallic position for stabilization. But Rey, in killing himself, not only proves that this position is no guarantee
for survival, he also plunges Lauren into the next crisis of subjectivity. From this, as I
have tried to show, Lauren manages to extract herself with the help of her symptom
Mr. Tuttle. It seems only logical that she should now choose a third option, an
ambiguous, precariously male, childlike, almost non-gendered position – both in Mr.
Tuttle and in the transformation of her own body for the performance, which has been
described as a product of “de-gendering.”
The de-gendered, childlike body, however, is probably the least remarkable of Mr.
Tuttle’s features. What makes him interesting for an analysis of sound, after all, is his
ability to speak in different voices. And it is precisely this, I would argue, which,
despite his unmanly appearance, puts him in possession of the phallus.21 Bearing in
mind Lacan’s emphasis on the strict distinction between the organ (penis) and the
signifier of power22 that structures the symbolic order (phallus), one could say that
the unmanly Mr. Tuttle’s position is much more phallic than that of the manly Rey.
After all, Mr. Tuttle’s voice overcomes that to which Rey’s ostentatious masculinity
submits: death. One could even say that the manly man’s death seems to be the condition for the unmanly character to unfold its power and demonstrate its possession
of the phallus. If, as suggested above, Mr. Tuttle’s voice is really produced by Lauren’s
voice box, then she who, due to her gender, has not been provided with a phallus by
the symbolic order, manages against all odds – namely via creating her phallic symptom – to gain access to it. It is predominantly in this sense that Mr. Tuttle forms part
of the female subject’s fantasmatic form of self-authorization via the appropriation,
the incorporation, and projection of voices.
Borrowing Freud’s terms once more, one could reformulate the role gender plays
in The Body Artist as yet another aspect of the fort/da-game. Since around 1800 the
system of gender-difference, which Thomas Laqueur calls the two-sex-model, is
designed as a dichotomy which marks everything that does not willingly fit into one
of its two opposing categories as scandalous: you are supposed to be either female
or male. It is not difficult to see the similarity to the underlying structure of the
fort/da-game Freud described at the end of the 19th century: the reel is either “fort”
or it is “da,” a third position does not form part of the system, tertium non datur.
Indeed, the parallel between Freud’s theory of gender-difference and the fort/dagame is striking: the little boy has a “narcissistic interest” in the “da” of his penis,
the little girl “has seen it and knows that she is without it [“fort”] and wants to have
it” (Freud, Psychical Consequences 250; 252). But, as Freud explains, the status of
“da” for the little boy is far from stable. Being confronted with what he reads as the
little girl’s fundamental lack, her genital “fort,” he becomes anxiously aware that his
own genital “da” cannot be taken for granted. Since there obviously are “mutilated”
creatures whose penis is “fort,” there is no guarantee, that his penis will remain
“da.” It is “not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon
him,” Freud writes, “that the observation becomes important” to the little boy (Freud,
Psychical Consequences 252). The “normal” male reaction to this supposed danger
of the irreversible transformation of a “da” into a fundamental “fort” is the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, which is “literally smashed to pieces by the shock of
threatened castration” (Freud, Psychical Consequences 257).
Given the organization of the symbolic order as described by Lacan, the access to
power, too, is determined by a fort/da-game, in this case the absence or presence of
the phallus. As far as gender is concerned, this access is an asymmetric one, since
the phallic position is coded as “male.” Admittedly, The Body Artist does not attempt
to design an alternative to this symbolic order. Lauren’s empowerment remains organized around the phallus. What the text does do, however, is to demonstrate again that
to remain within this asymmetric structure does not necessarily mean that all men are
in possession of the phallus or that no woman can be. Despite Rey’s undoubted masculinity (penis: “da”), he is shown as a character who fails and decides to end all
future decisions by killing himself (phallus: “fort”). Lauren, by contrast, despite her
femininity (penis: “fort”), finds a way to empowerment (phallus: “da”). She substitutes
her “fundamental lack” by a fantasmatic vocal phallus and thus manages to regain the
very subject status that Rey’s suicide endangered.
At the beginning of this article, I described the language Mr. Tuttle produces as a
sound-effect of displacement and condensation. These principles may also be seen
at work when it comes to the construction of the sonic symptom itself. Mr. Tuttle is a
mix of characters of different genders whose voices are reproduced in metonymically
gliding and semantically condensed language. As I have pointed out in the introduction, there are two ways to read the text: one that accepts Mr. Tuttle as a realistic
character, and another, which opts for reading Mr. Tuttle as a kind of ghost or psychic
symptom. I hope to have demonstrated how psychoanalytic theory unlocks the potential of the second reading, but it would, nevertheless, curtail the novella’s richness of
meaning, if one limited one’s interpretation to this dimension. Just as the almost
genderless, childlike Mr. Tuttle and Lauren’s own de-gendered body insist on hovering
in a sphere of gender ambiguity, the text should be allowed to remain in the realm of
the genuinely fantastic which, by definition, resists ultimate clarification and is characterized by irreducible oscillation between contradictory readings.
While the answering machine functions as a technological biceptor, and while Mr.
Tuttle functions as a psychological biceptor, DeLillo’s novella itself may be called a
kind of literary answering machine. As readers, we know that no one will “pick up”
when, in reading a text, we search for meaning. Having gone through poststructuralist
theory, we don’t even desire to be offered an answer from the other “end of the line.”
But in offering an interpretation, we may hopefully leave a “mess/age” after the tone.
Notes
1. The thoughts and theses I present in this
article form part of a book project on sound
and the fantastic, which currently bears the
working title More than Meets the Ear:
Semiotics of Sound in Fantastic Literature. All
quotations from DeLillo’s novella are given in
round brackets in the text and taken from the
following edition: DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist.
New York: Picador, 2001.
Pynchon und Don DeLillo. Berlin: Berliner
Beiträge zur Amerikanistik, 2001.
2. I am using the term “fantastic” in Todorov’s
and Lachmann’s sense. Building on Tzvetan
Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as that which
causes “a hesitation” (25) in the reader, an
inability to decide whether a witnessed event is
natural or supernatural, Lachmann speaks of the
fantastic text’s “Unschlüssigkeitsstruktur,” its
underlying “structure of undicidibility” (94).
First quote from: Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic:
A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Second quote from:
Lachmann, Renate. Erzählte Phantastik: Zu
Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik
phantastischer Texte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002.
8. “There is a story, a flow of consciousness
and possibility. The future comes into being.
But not for him […] Past and present and future
are not amenities of language. Time unfolds
into the seams of being. It passes through you,
making and shaping. But not if you are him.
This is a man who remembers the future. […]
He violates the limits of the human” (100).
3. One might describe “the noise” in the
breakfast scene as that particular type of
“parasite” that Michel Serres describes as the
equally inevitable and productive third between
any communicating two. Serres, Michel. The
Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
4. I am using the term in the sense of Stewart,
Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the
Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
5. As a footnote informs the reader, “à la
cantonade” means “to nobody in particular.”
Both quotes from: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar:
Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Allain Miller. New
York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998, 208.
6. There is a lucid description of “noises” in
some other DeLillo-novels which has been
inspired by information theory to be found in:
Picicci, Annibale. Noise Culture: Kultur und
Ästhetik des Rauschens in der
Informationsgesellschaft am Beispiel von Thomas
7. Sterne refers here to the French doctor
Matthieu-François-Régis Buisson, who
distinguishes three forms of voice: the “voice
strictly speaking” – meaning its physiological
function – the singing voice and the speaking
voice.
9. This act of naming is, perhaps, the best
example for the reader’s dependence on Lauren.
We never get to learn the third main character’s
“real” name, and although it is made clear, that
Mr. Tuttle is nothing but a nickname, the text
offers no alternative to calling him what Lauren
calls him. Moreover, by consistently referring to
him by that, the nickname becomes his name
and one tends to, but must not forget that this
is entirely due to Lauren.
10. “She was in town, driving down a hilly
street of frame houses, and saw a man sitting
on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and
shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced blondish
man, lounging. She felt that […] she saw him
complete. His life flew open to her in her
passing glance. A lazy and manipulative man, in
real estate, in Fairview condos by a mosquito
lake. She knew him. She saw into him. He was
there, divorced and drink-haunted, emotionally
distant from his kids, his sons, two sons, in
school blazers, in the barest blink. A voice
recited the news on the radio. When the car
moved past the house, in a pull of the full
second, she understood she was not looking at
a seated man, but at a paint can placed on a
board that was balanced between two chairs.
The white and yellow can was his face, the
board was his arms and the mind and heart of
the man were in the air somewhere, already
lost in the voice of the news reader on the
radio.” (70)
11. The de-gendering of voice is completed in
DeLillo’s text not on the plot-level, but on the
level of narration. Two passages, written in the
present tense and in the extremely rare secondperson narrative voice, address both Lauren
and the reader (of which ever gender), inviting
identification. The first of these forms part of
the breakfast scene (19), the second starts off
chapter six (89).
12. The discussion that I refer to is extensive
but, for those interested, two texts provide a
useful starting point: Mulvey, Laura. “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative,
apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader.
New York: Columbia UP, 1986 and Silverman,
Kaja. Threshold of the Visible World. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
13. David Copenhafer’s article in this volume
explores the role voice, in this case Louis
Armstrong’s, can play when invisibility is
produced by a racist environment.
14. Di Prete, 88–98. The quote within the
quote is taken from: Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes
on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s
Metapsychology.” The Shell and the Kernel:
Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas T. Rand.
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1994.
171–76, here: 171.
15. “I believe that Mr. Tuttle’s ventriloquism
objectifies a profound split in Lauren, a division
directly linked to the traumatic loss of her
husband” (Di Prete 91).
16. Tancred kills his beloved Clorinda when
she is disguised as an enemy knight and, after
her burial, wounds her again, by slashing a tree
that is imprisoning her soul with his sword.
17. “Like the voice of Clorinda reminding
Tancred of having killed her, that of Mr. Tuttle,
as it mimics a dead man’s words and gestures,
renews and compulsively repeats in Lauren’s
psyche the trauma of an inevitable loss” (Di
Prete 91).
18. “Thus, if for any reason there can be no
reaction to a psychical trauma, it retains its
original affect, and when someone cannot get
rid of the increase in stimulation by ‘abreacting’
it, we have the possibility of the event in
question remaining a psychical trauma. […] A
healthy man […] always succeeds in achieving
the result that the affect which was originally
strong in his memory eventually loses intensity
and that finally the recollection, having lost its
affect, falls a victim to forgetfulness and the
process of wearing-away. Now we have found
that in hysterical patients there are nothing but
impressions which have not lost their affect
and whose memory has remained vivid. It
follows, therefore, that these memories in
hysterical patients, which have become
pathogenic, occupy an exceptional position as
regards the wearing-away process; and
observation shows that, in the case of all the
events that have become determinants of
hysterical phenomena, we are dealing with
psychical traumas which have not been
completely abreacted, or completely dealt with.
Thus we may assert that hysterical patients
suffer from incompletely abreacted psychical
traumas.” Freud, Sigmund. “The Mechanism of
Hysterical Phenomena (1893).” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. III. Ed. James Strachey.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1962. 25–39,
here: 37–38.
19. This is my translation of the German
version of Žižek, Slavoj. “Jenseits des Fort-DaPrinzips”, in: 15 Feb 2006 ⬍http://
www.freitag.de/ 2002/22/02221101.php⬎.
The article was originally published in Freitag.
Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitschrift 22 (24 May
2002). Žižek refers here to the unpublished
manuscript of Lacan’s Seminar X: Anxiety
(1962–3) held on 14 Nov 1962 and translated
by Cormac Gallagher.
20. While mourning is described by Freud as
the renewed beginning of ego formation,
melancholia is characterized by the loss of
those features that mark off the subject
through incorporation of the love object. Freud,
Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia (1917
[1915]).” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIV.
Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1957. 237–58.
21. Coding the voice as phallic is no invention
of the early 21st century, and the idea to locate
the phallic voice in a body, whose deeply
ambiguous gender irritates the dichotomous
system of gender difference, is not new either.
One fin de siècle text that does both is Vernon
Lee’s “The Wicked Voice,” which portrays the
effects of a castrato singer’s phallic voice on
the imagination of a male protagonist, his
sense of identity and understanding of his own
masculinity. For an analysis that focuses on the
phallic voice and gender see: Mieszkowski,
Sylvia. “Male Coloratura – Klang des Bösen.”
Bilder und Begriffe des Bösen. Eds. Gisela
Engel and Malte C. Gruber. Berlin: Trafo, 2007.
141–60.
22. “In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a
phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary
effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-,
internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that
this term tends to accentuate the reality
pertaining in a relation. It is even less
the organ, penis or clitoris, that it
symbolizes.” Lacan, 281–91, here: 285.
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⬍http://www.freitag.de/2002/22/02221101.
php>.
Corporeal Voices, Sexual
Differentiations: New
Materialist Perspectives on
Music, Singing and Subjectivity
Milla Tiainen
ABSTRACT
Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on
Music, Singing and Subjectivity
Many of today’s cultural theorists have suggested that the analysis of sounds in general and music in particular would bring important new perspectives into the study of
subjectivity. Especially, they have stressed the relevance of “the sonic” for examining
two major aspects of subject formation: first, how our subjectivity is materially
embedded, and second, how it emerges through inextricable interconnections with
the surrounding reality. My article explores these possibilities by intersecting music
scholarship with so-called new materialist feminist insights. More precisely, I focus
on the questions of subjectivity, corporeal materiality and the multiplicity of sexual
differences, as they unfold in relation to singers’ live processes of sound production
in the context of opera. Theoretically, the article draws on the work of Rosi Braidotti,
Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze, as well as on current critical opera studies.
Introduction
The realm of the sonic, understood as a versatile field of phenomena, would seem to
attract ever-growing interest among today’s cultural analysts in many disciplinary
strands. To list some threads of this tendency, soundscape scholars explore, firstly,
sonic (micro-) worlds in relation to cultural belonging and memory: peoples’ sense of
place, themselves and the social dynamics of their surroundings (Järviluoma and
Wagstaff). Secondly, film theory of recent decades has witnessed the emergence of
Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations | 147
stances that challenge the previous dominance of the visual in studying cinema,
investigating the effectiveness of auditory elements and their interaction with visual
layers in cinematic narration and perception (Silverman; Chion; Kassabian; Joe and
Theresa; Pisters 175–215). Furthermore, musical and other aural presences in contemporary audiovisual culture on a broader scale, like in television, music videos and
computer games, receive increasing scholarly attention (Mundy; Vernallis).
Interestingly, new possibilities for thought that could be opened up by “the sonic”
are currently being probed also in the more philosophical quarters of cultural theory.
Of the array of topics discussed in such frameworks, the one concerning us here is
the ever so pressing question of subjectivity. More precisely, of relevance are the
debates that focus on the social, corporeal-material and sexed1 constitution of subjects. At least some theorists who work with these issues have seen great potential
in attempts to refigure subjectivity in relation to sonic phenomena. Above all, they
have stressed the novel perspectives such explorations would provide on certain central aspects of subject formation. Namely, how our subjectivity is always materially
embedded, and how its emergence occurs through inextricable interconnections with
the surrounding reality, thereby making that which is outside us and inside us constantly pass into each other. The latter aspect is emphasized by philosopher Christine
Battersby in her study The Phenomenal Woman. She states that “if we want to rethink
identity in ways that do not rest upon an oppositional relation between “self” and
“other,” then it is useful to think more about the way identity is established and maintained in the aural field” (Battersby 178). Specific traits informing this field include,
according to Battersby, spatiotemporal fluidity and processuality and accordingly,
leaky, oscillating borders between subjects and the so-called outside world.
Also, feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti has pondered upon the potentials offered by
the sonic for refiguring subjectivity. She, too, relates these potentials to ideas of the
subject as a dynamic and open entity: a palpably material but at the same time metamorphic configuration, which emerges in immanent connections with its environment
(Braidotti, Metamorphoses 153–57). For Braidotti, sounds or “the acoustic regime”
(155) are, to begin with, less codified by power than visual practices. This is because
different techniques of visualization, along with notions of sight, looking, and the
gaze have escorted the modern ideal of a unified, self- and world-regulating subject;
the very construction which theories of multifarious subjectivity seek to dismantle. Sonic
and acoustic registers, on the other hand, feature only marginally if at all in the historically long-term models of subject, power and knowledge. Therefore, they could help
generate new, possibly subversive ways of thinking. When writing about music, Braidotti
summarizes her insights on the forces and processes sounds can propel in subjectivity –
supposedly both in terms of production and of perception, although she is not explicit
on that point. Braidotti contends, “music can express affectivity, immanence and dissolution of boundaries. […] It makes audible the irreducibility of in-between spaces,
148 | Milla Tiainen
polyphonic hybridization, multiple sonic interferences.” (Metamorphoses 157). A moment
earlier, referring to the experimental art of Laurie Anderson and Stelarc, she stresses
the elemental relations between sounds and corporeality by pointing out, how “the
sheer materiality of the human body and its fleshy contents (lungs, nerves, brains,
intestines, etc.) are as many sound-making, acoustic chambers” (157).
Battersby’s and Braidotti’s suggestions for a “sonic turn” in cultural theoretical
accounts of subjectivity are appealing. I share their excitement about the ways
sounds would redirect such investigations. However, the formulations of these theorists remain rather sketchy as such. In order to be sharpened and developed they
would have to be brought into closer contact with actual sound events and concrete
analyses of sonic practices. Encounters would thus be needed between sounds, their
frameworks, the specific questions each sonic sphere provokes, and cultural theoretical redefinitions of subjectivity.
The present article aims at inducing some such encounters. These are carried out
in the context of Western operatic music. More precisely, my examination will focus
on singers’ live processes of sound production in the contemporary realm of opera.
The impulses behind this exploration are deeply trans-disciplinary, relating to the theoretical views quoted above. Firstly, my aim is to show how the study of music-making in the particular settings of opera can contribute to notions of materially
embedded, yet multiple and changing subjectivity. I interrogate how these notions
might be rendered more concrete, more usable, when related with live instances of
musical production. In disciplinary terms, the direction of this inquiry is from music
scholarship to cultural theory and analysis. I wish to demonstrate that even such a
supposedly traditional musical-cultural sphere as opera may offer new, possibly radical insights into current theories of subjectivity. Moreover, in that process opera may
come out as not so conservative a realm of culture after all.
Secondly, the direction of my investigation is also from cultural theory and analysis to musicology. By utilizing Braidotti’s ideas amongst others, I attempt to renew
musicological understandings of how subjectivity may arise in relation to music.
Thus, philosophical modes of thought intervene in their turn in the established agendas of music research, effecting possible transformations in them. Throughout the
article, the main concepts on which my argumentation rests are subjectivity, corporeality/the body and sexual difference. This is both because I believe these axes, or
their intersections, have a central place in singers’ music-making, and because of
the essential role of these concepts in today’s cultural theoretical discussions at
large. The concept of space adds a notable dimension to my inquiry. Basically, it will
be used in what follows in two ways: first, with reference to singing bodies as material aggregates of variables that are however not only spatial but also temporal; and
second, with reference to opera culture as a field, an open-ended space, for continuous production of sexual differences.
To clarify further the theoretical impulses of the article, they could be summarized
into the concept of “new materialism” (De Landa). The term embraces such currently
emerging forms of thought – evolving in the humanities mainly in cultural and feminist studies – which aim at offering alternatives to the now dominating paradigms of
cultural theory: social constructivism, the critique of representation, and psychoanalytic criticism. It is impossible to discuss the scope and background of these
attempts in any great detail here. Therefore only those new materialist ideas that are
most relevant to the present article are introduced.2
New Materialism, in this article, is about reconsidering the significance and ontological status of materiality in our analyses of culture, power and subjectivity. It is of
course undeniable that we can only refer to the material world, e.g. bodies, through
discourse and representation – an argument endlessly reiterated by social constructivists. Still, new materialist thinkers claim that, taken to its extreme, this stance
runs the risk of forcing a situation in which the material dimensions of life are
reduced to nothing more than an inert ground waiting for the active arrangements of
our representations. What new materialist thinkers want to insist is, that linguisticsemiotic operations are not everything there is; not even for humanistic analyses of
culture. Hence, it would be vital to see concepts and signs as one register of existence and to conceive, for example bodies, as another: as a positively different3
domain of processes, which encounters and merges with symbolic activities among
other things, but cannot be ontologically submitted to them. (Colebrook From Radical
Representations; Bray and Colebrook 55–58.) This realization is, I think, very fruitful
when the goal is to theorize live music and subjectivity as material and sexed.
A second, related notion this article commits to is, that it would be important to
approach all “worldly” phenomena as multiple and assembled. Such a perspective of
multiplicity would map for example bodies and differences between subjects as
mobile configurations. In these, body movements, corporeal intensity levels, concepts, exchanges with other subjects (both physical-affective and symbolic), and connections
to
broader
surroundings
intermingle,
creating
situation-bound
constellations that can be then called embodiments or sexes. Eventually, this would
mean an analysis of the varying micro layers of subjectivity, sex, and the body. My
article takes steps towards such an analysis.
Besides being rooted in cultural theory and musicology, this endeavor is also feminist. Thus, my article addresses music from a new materialist feminist perspective.
This implies that the category “sex” receives special attention throughout the article.
A critical attitude towards social constructivist stances, with too heavy a reliance on
theories of signification, informs new materialist feminist approaches as new materialism overall. It is to this that my use of the term “sex” instead of that of “gender”
relates. Namely, the choice of utilizing that concept designates my commitment to
theories of sexual difference. These theorizations take as their starting point that
150 | Milla Tiainen
differences between masculine and feminine subjects are formed, not only at discursive but simultaneously at material (and subconscious) levels.
Theories of sexual difference presume, then, a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between corporeal processes and other, e.g. conceptual practices. In other
words, bodies are not without their “own” corporeal traits and forces that make them
sexed. While these forces include physiological, even genetic variables, in the end
sexual difference theorists see corporeality as an inextricable mixture of physicality,
social constitution, and symbolic (re)definition. Such an emphasis differs decisively
from social constructivist approaches, represented for example by philosopher Judith
Butler, which stress, above all, the grip of discourse–power systems on bodies; their
ability to endow the bodies with gendered attributes.
Since theories of sexual difference conceive of bodies as multi-faceted in all their
materiality, they provide a path to studying the micro layers of sex and subjectivity.
Hence, from a feminist viewpoint, my ultimate aim is to argue that bodies, and sexed
potentials of being a subject, are far more varied and complex than the macro binary
of man–woman would lead us to believe. If the multiplicity of sexual differences were
embraced, then spaces could be created for the experience and recognition of microfemininities and micro-masculinities; such forms of difference that would question
the hierarchical and simplified man-woman dichotomy, preferring the (ideal) category
of “Man” (Grosz “A Thousand Tiny Sexes”).
The specific theoretical tools of this article stem from the work of two thinkers of
sexual difference: Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. In addition, I draw on the
insights of the feminist scholar Claire Colebrook and philosopher Gilles Deleuze (as
well as the latter’s writings with Félix Guattari). All these theorists can be characterized
as advocates of new materialism, and the first three are also new materialist feminists
who elaborate on Deleuze’s thought, each in their singular ways. These philosophers’
claims are linked to current musicological stances when possible, especially those
coming from opera studies. As for the methodological commitments and analytical data
of the article, they relate to a fieldwork process I carried out in the years 2003–05
among singing students at Sibelius-Academy, Finland.4 The field material contains
observations on and recordings of the students’ music-making processes, as well as
interviews with them and their teachers and directors. Although this material will only
be referred to rather than analyzed at length, it provides an indispensable point of
departure for the whole new materialist approach. Without observing singers’ musical
situations in the “field,” the exploration of subjectivity, corporeality and sexual difference as it is conducted here would have been impossible.
The paths of thought opened up by new materialism are exemplified by two modes
of conceptualization and their usability in connection with actual musical moments.
These are 1) sexed singing bodies/subjects as open materiality; and 2) sexed performing bodies/subjects as assemblages, leading to the notion of a thousand tiny
sexes. Both of the conceptualizations come principally from Grosz, who in her turn
elaborates on Deleuze and his part-time co-thinker Guattari. Also Braidotti and
Colebrook’s views are deployed with regard to both themes. Experimentation with
these concepts forms the main section of the article.
However, before testing the analytical force of the concepts, I seek to offer a critical commentary on how body, subjectivity, and gender/sex emerged as major topics
in music scholarship in the first place. I ask with what theoretical and methodological strategies have been tracked so far? In particular, my aim is to interrogate where
the limitations of these existent approaches lie – their obvious strengths notwithstanding – from the perspective of new materialism. The question immediately following from this is what novel and valuable ideas new materialist thinking might bring
to the study of corporeality, sex, and subjectivity in diverse musical-cultural settings?
The previous musicological takes on these issues are reviewed rather provisionally.
Nonetheless, I think this survey is necessary to provide a background and pave the
way for the new materialist approach. The question I wish to highlight above all is:
what are the epistemological and ontological stakes in either ignoring or taking into
account the live character of music in the analyses of its corporeal, sexed, and subject-related unfolding?
A Shift in Music Scholarship: From Self-referential Texts to Representational
Sounds
After the turn of the 1990s the field of musicology, which refers here mainly to the
study of Western art music, underwent a series of changes in terms of focus, methods and research politics. To put it bluntly, these changes have ensued from the
arrival of post-structuralist impulses into the discipline – a process that has challenged such previous tenets of musicology as structuralist models of study and positivistic historiography. These paradigm shifts have resulted in a number of voices
questioning the former traditions of music theory and analysis.5 The debates in question
have emerged eminently from within Anglo-American “new” and “critical” musicology
quarters, including such branches as feminist and cultural musicology (McClary;
Kramer Music as Cultural and Classical Music; Solie; Cook, and Tsou; Clayton et al).
It is these discussions I shall concentrate on in the following.6
What the critical voices of new musicology have suggested is that music analysis
shifts its focus from examining musical phenomena as self-referential structural entities
to studying them as productions of culture with rich linkages to other socio-cultural
realms. This demand has been aimed above all at such formalist paradigms as
Schenker analysis (viable from the early 20th century on) and set theory (from the
1950s on), which are today practiced primarily in the U.S., but also all over Europe.
Many new musicologists have claimed that the methods these research traditions provide, treat music more or less as sealed and autonomous “texts” (Cusick Feminist
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Theory; Gender).7 According to them, the formalist models of analysis are informed by
a belief that the structural-stylistic processes of music have their own exclusive logic
and hierarchies, such as surface-depth-organizations (Fink). These unfold and can be
investigated without any considerable links to other layers or broader frameworks of
culture. As a consequence of this emphasis, new musicologists argue, the notion of
musical meaning has been too limited in formalist music analytical traditions. If music
has been thought of as carrying meaning at all, its nature has been restricted to the
emphatically musical, that is, a signifying content rising from within the sonic structures themselves. Judged on the basis of these remarks, the music analytical
approaches under discussion have abstracted music from the socio-culturally signifying and material forces that necessarily inform its existence.
The advocates of new musicology have succeeded in questioning the previous
epistemological and ontological premises of musicology in general and formalist
music analysis in particular. While the debates are still under way, a large amount of
today’s researchers support a view, according to which (even) art music is about
much more than just innate codifications. Like other arts, music’s stylistic and
expressive conventions, too, are nowadays addressed from various angles as systems of cultural representation, sites of identity production, and results of sociopolitical power struggles. The actualization of music’s cultural potentials is theorized
as occurring in its encounters with the listeners, from which context-bound musical
“meanings” are claimed to emerge (Kramer Musical Meaning 7–8). Moreover, factors
that were formerly often deemed extra-musical, such as discourses around music,
are now believed to affect its constitution.
When aiming to analyze subjectivity, corporeality and gender/sexual difference
from a new materialist feminist perspective, it is useful to consider previous
approaches to music’s corporeal, sexual and subject-related dimensions with a threepart model which combines 1) textual and discursive approaches, 2) score-anchored
approaches, and 3) psychoanalytic approaches.
The model is my construction on the basis of the different emphases and methods that already inform music scholarship as regards the issues of the body, subject
and sex. Although inevitably a simplification, I nevertheless believe it to offer a way
of assessing the benefits and limits of these different research strategies. The first
category encompasses studies that focus on how music is rendered meaningful by
other than sonic – usually linguistic – means. I call their strategies accordingly textual
and discursive approaches. These include, for example, studies which examine, from
a critical feminist viewpoint, how female opera singers have been represented and
thus constructed in terms of gender, voice, embodiment and sexuality; ultimately,
subjectivity in different kinds of cultural texts. Both the ways novelists and biographers have described the singers, and the interpretations of these texts by reading
audiences have been of interest for such studies (Dunn and Jones; Leonardi, and
Pope 48–174). Also analyses on gendered narratives of music, for example, in opera
libretti, may be included into this category.8
The model’s second category is called score-anchored representational
approaches. These studies also profess the view that the so-called “politics of representation” informs practically all music. Thus, they engage in exploring and critiquing
the manners in which music constructs gender(s), subject and power positions, and
references to embodiment through practices of representation. Contrary to the textual-discursive ones, score-anchored approaches claim to concentrate on music’s
“own,” i.e. sonic representational techniques. They make use of established music
analytical methods9 to construct score-based interpretations and blend detailed findings in musical texture with post-structural theorizations of subjectivity.10 In light of
these studies, subjectivity, gender/sex and the body exist in music through the structural-stylistic conventions with which they are musically represented; symbolized and
signified with sound formulas (McClary; Välimäki, Smart “Ulterior Motives”; Abbate
“Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”; In Search of Opera).
Both the textual-discursive and score-anchored approaches have introduced
invaluable models of analysis into music scholarship. However, assessed from a new
materialist angle they are not entirely without problems. Actually, one may argue that
while committing themselves in principle to “embodied criticism” (Abbate Music 506)
that explores music’s worldly, socio-political materiality, these research strategies
end up partly sustaining the notions of music as a textual phenomenon. The studies
on music-related discourses do this along “classical” social constructivist lines, as
demonstrated e.g. in the work of the identity theorist Stuart Hall (Representation) or
feminist philosopher Judith Butler (Bodies that Matter). In other words, textualdiscursive approaches examine how music acquires cultural existence through linguistic operations that make it signify. This stance bypasses music’s equally powerful, material modalities of existence, such as its emergence with/as musicians’ body
movements in live situations of sound making. Score-anchored approaches identify
music with those of its features that can be (re)constructed on the basis of notational
symbols – another textual source. Just as textual-discursive approaches, score-anchored
analyses, too, largely ignore music’s infinitely varying, socially and materially embedded
modes of emergence.11
How to grasp the materiality of music, then, with its alleged ties to the body, sexual differences, and subjectivity? The third category of the currently used model
seems to give more attention than the two previous ones to music’s corporeality,
along with its links to the bodily nature of subject formation. Investigatory strategies
that fall into this category which I call psychoanalytic approaches. They have been
developed both by psychoanalytic music enthusiasts and psychoanalytically oriented
musicologists (Poizat; Schwarz; Välimäki). These studies mostly follow theoretical
premises set out by Lacan and Kristeva, although they refer to Freud and other major
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psychoanalysts as well. Analyses of this type posit a link between music’s bodily
aspects12 and the primeval, pre-symbolic phase of human subjectivity. The musical
reminiscences of this phase – which takes place before the subject’s language acquisition – are argued to include such qualities as noises from a singer’s throat or high
screams of female operatic voices. Indeed, opera and, lately, other vocal cultures
enjoy a privileged status in these studies. Music’s material “tremors” are claimed to
invoke flashes of the pre-symbolic stage in the (listening) subject. At this stage, the
subject was still dominated by corporeal impulses, instinctive desires, and a blissful
sense of union with the world, above all: the mother. Music’s materiality is thus
understood as a momentary bridge to a lost realm of subjectivity, which can never be
regained in full.
Psychoanalytical approaches to music clearly appreciate its material dimensions.
However, if one reassesses these studies from a new materialist perspective, they
seem to position the category of the body somewhat problematically, since they tend
to essentialize its materiality.13 Music’s bodily properties are thus rendered more or
less a-historical: “unpolluted” by cultural processes of subject formation. Psychoanalytic
notions of music also repeat certain conceptions of sexual difference that are familiar
from the history of Western thought. By claiming that female voices are considered
particularly powerful evokers of pre-symbolic flashbacks, women become equated
with the realm of the pre-symbolic, and thus with nature, instincts, and the body
more than men who are especially in Lacan’s scheme firmly tied to the laws of the
symbolic.14
New materialist feminist thought challenges both of these tendencies in psychoanalytic theorizations, a-historicity on the one hand and reinforcement of binary sexual differences on the other.15 But which genuinely new viewpoints could new
materialism offer so as to broaden the insights enabled by the three modes of
approach above? What would it mean to take the corporeal materiality of subjectivity
seriously, without either over-textualizing it or (re-) essentializing the body? How could
such a re-examination be carried out with regard to live musical situations? It is now
time to explore with some operatic examples, how new materialist thinking might be
able to answer these questions and theoretical challenges.
Differential Sonorous Subjects: Forces of Open Bodies
If one wanted to describe how new materialist (feminist) thought conceives of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference, in a single phrase, “positive difference”
would be a good one to pick. Basically, this expression implies that in examining cultural phenomena, or other events of reality, new materialist thought leans on an
ontology of processes instead of one of essences. Hence, in the (Deleuzian) new
materialist scheme, “difference” does not refer principally to differences between
entities that are supposedly preformed, such as men and women. It is not used in
the negative sense of “different from something/somebody,” but rather in the positive sense of “incessantly different in and of itself.” All phenomena16 are thought of
as mobile, transformative and open-ended: internally multiple and differentiating,
although always in interconnection with other forces of the world. (Deleuze Difference
137–45; Deleuze and Guattari 3–25, 232–309; Braidotti Metamorphoses 3–6,
11–64; De Landa; Colebrook Understanding Deleuze 15–18, 27–43.)
In feminist re-examinations of corporeality these movements of differentiation
have been conceptualized for example as open materiality, a term coined by Elizabeth
Grosz. In her book Volatile Bodies she introduces (191) the term by insisting that the
body is:
an open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities which
may be developed, yet whose development will necessarily hinder or induce other
developments and other trajectories. These are not individually chosen, nor are they
amenable to will or intentionality; they are more like bodily styles, habits, practices […].
Grosz’ definition foregrounds two aspects. Firstly, bodies are indeed constellations
of change and mutation; of the future. Different physical capacities – such as abilities
to produce vocal and bodily movements that are deemed appropriate in operatic
culture – are continuously under construction in unpredictable ways. They may, or may
not, evolve through new physical exercises and mental techniques, or in connection
to a new space (in music e.g. acoustics) and novel co-participants. Simultaneously,
these evolvements, which are always partly surprising, create styles and habits,
“specificities of the body” as Grosz also calls them, which orientate the future potentials of those same bodies (x–xi, 138–44, 155–59). Secondly, the stylistic trajectories of bodies, while open to experimentation, are not born from within individual
subjects conceived as neat physio-psychical entities. Rather, they arise pre- and
supra-individually; in cultural networks of action that are both concretely social (subjects merging and emerging with others) and collectively formed by their very nature.
Grosz’s visions of open materiality provide useful tools to analyze my findings
amongst singing students. Singing lessons, for example, are a complex practice of
bodily openness. They consist of constant experiments with or “tunings” of singers’
bodies so that they would utter certain vocal pitches, volumes, durations, and other
expressive qualities. The experiments vary endlessly, since the muscular impulses
and kinaesthetic energies bodies must produce are always singular. They depend, on
one hand, on the specific musical effects that are sought at each moment. On the
other hand, they depend, at least as importantly, on the bodily subjects who produce
those effects, with their divergent histories, layered habits and even instant-to-instant
inner differentiations.
This type of situation-bound and body-specific dynamism became evident for
example in the singing lessons of a female student with a high soprano voice. During
one lesson, she and her teacher launched continuously new conceptualizations and
156 | Milla Tiainen
physical “tricks” of voice production. The goal was to test and mould the student’s
bodily capacities, so that she would be able to utter very high tones in a relaxed, corporeally unhindered manner. The emerging conceptualizations stretched from “a
mother eagle that spreads its wings” to “an amazed, relaxed body earthed on the
ground”. (FN, Sl [MS]: 1 Dec 2004.) These speech figures may sound imaginative,
even ridiculous. However, their effects on the singer in that lesson demonstrated
both how concepts directly inform and animate bodies, not just defining them in a
limited linguistic sense, and how bodies can “talk back” to these forms of address.
Namely, sometimes the conceptualizations invented by the teacher, and the singer
herself, inspired an immediate change in her sound production. At other points,
numerous instructions had to be tried before the student’s body and voice agreed to
act and react along the desired stylistic lines. Hence, what the talking back of the
body refers to here is that the corporeal actions of a subject do not necessarily comply with the conceptual impulses aimed at them, at least not in the intended ways.
Rather, bodies have their “own,” ultimately non-controllable modes of connecting to
and elaborating on conceptual actions. In that sense, the encounters between language use and corporeality in the student’s lesson might be described as reciprocal.
These field observations seem to confirm Claire Colebrook’s remark on the material activeness of bodies, stating that “while the body may only be referred to through
discourse or representation, it possesses a force and being that marks the very character of representation” (“From Radical” 77). This conclusion relates to one of the
central claims of new materialist thinking in general. (Corporeal) materiality is not an
effect of discourse; it enters into mutual relations with discursive acts, being
affected by them and affecting them back, but there remains an essential “gap of
non-resemblance” (Massumi “Introduction” xix) between these registers of reality.
Bodies are thus “open” and through that openness, constantly changing in two complementary senses. First, their actions are not self-sufficient but instead, become
modified by e.g. conceptual forces. Second, however, bodies retain their distinctive
and ever-evolving “force and being” which cannot be determined by the discourses
with which they intermingle – their open nature is also openness in and of itself.
Singing is one of the activities that beautifully demonstrate the open materiality of
culturally embedded human bodies. With regard to sexual difference, the concept of
open materiality is fascinating and politically important in that it stresses the susceptibility to differentiation of the sexed features of bodies. If these features stem
from the bodies’ heterogeneous histories and mobile, supra-individual encounters
with words and other bodies, we cannot ever know in advance, what a “female” or
“male” body can perform and become (Gatens).
As for the question of subject formation, my field observations revealed that even
though bodies in opera culture result from minute disciplinary techniques à la
Foucault, they are also sites of rich sensations. Operatic bodies consist of multiple
sensorial and temporal processes, and being a singing subject requires a good dose
of experimental spirit: embodied open-mindedness from which new bodily capacities,
experiences, even pleasures may ensue. The same female student, for example,
stated in her lesson that now and then the uttering of a loud high note seemed to
send so intensive an adrenaline “shot” through her body that it felt almost difficult to
proceed to the following vocal lines (Gatens).
Any body that remains open in its abilities and sensations – materializations – can
be thought of as spatial. A singing body in particular is clearly a spatial configuration
from the start. As Braidotti observes in the citation quoted above, (human) corporeality as such consists of a bunch of sound-making and acoustic “chambers,” including
brains and intestines (Metamorphoses 157). In operatic practices many of these bodily chambers are put to work in highly elaborate ways: for instance lungs, cheekbones,
and the whole area around ribs are variably considered and activated as part of voice
production. Thus, it could be said that subjects who sing opera are among other
things corporeal aggregates of spaces that vibrate and lend themselves to subtle
modification. The considerable differences which exist and develop between these
spatial(ized) subjects are due to sexed voice types, as well as individual singularities
of bodies. The spatiality of operatic bodies is also, even primarily, open. Through the
stream of voice they create, these corporealities become audible and sensible to others. At the same time the bodies sense and merge with the space – both physicalacoustic and social – which surrounds them. To paraphrase Moira Gatens (63), singing
bodies are composed, de-composed and re-composed by their outsides. Interestingly
enough, one of the most repeated instructions in “classical” voice training, including
the lessons I observed, is the request to “open up” bodily during the acts of singing.
Singers are, in other words, encouraged to open up to the acoustic space they are in,
to the air that has to be sucked into the body in order to utter sounds, and so forth.
As open materiality the spatial character of vocal bodies is hence comprised of continuous foldings-in of physical and affective particles17 and simultaneously, unfoldingsout of sonic-bodily forces (Braidotti “How to endure” 182–84; Metamorphoses
145–46). Singing bodies are spatial formations that exist, emerge and change in time.
Operatic Assemblages of Sex
Closely related to the idea of open materiality is that of bodies, and sexes, as assemblages. This notion’s new materialist feminist potentials can be explored with Grosz.
In her article “A Thousand Tiny Sexes” she assesses some of Deleuze’s/Guattari’s
thoughts – such as re-theorizations of subjectivity – for feminist cultural analysis. In
her view, especially their conceptions of the body can be useful for feminists, since
Deleuze/Guattari make a serious effort to challenge models of Western thought
which persistently promote the binary polarizations of mind/body, nature/culture,
subject/object, and interior/exterior (1446).
158 | Milla Tiainen
By way of introduction Grosz lists, quite breathtakingly, how Deleuze and Guattari
discuss the body “as a discontinuous, non-totalized series of processes, organs,
flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities, and durations” (1446). She continues that, in their thinking, human bodies, or bodily subjects,
form linkages not only with other bodies, but also with non-human animate and inanimate surroundings, such as material tools or institutional spaces (1446–47).
Bodies intersect, then, with social and semiotic practices, technological environments, alimentary supplies, musical sounds and vibrations, and so forth. They form
machinic connections with a varying wealth of other components. Hence, they act
always already as parts of broader supra-individual, even supra-human assemblages
in addition to being themselves constantly assembled and reassembled.
When linked to singers’ practices, the idea of assemblages opens up fresh theoretical horizons. It helps to analyze the formation of sexually differentiated subjects
in music in a way that takes into account the multiple bodily and material factors
involved. In singers’ case organs refer to their various body parts and sites18 that
become disciplined, highlighted and transformed in the acts of singing. The diverse
corporeal components of a singing body do not form a stable organization determined
for good. Rather, they are always on the move in terms of co-ordination, intensification and relaxation. It could even be argued that at their extreme vocal bodies
approach the state of “the Body without Organs” (BwO), an idea also provided by
Deleuze and Guattari. This concept refers to bodies as thresholds of multiple, proliferating sensations and powers. “Bodies without Organs” do not, of course, lack
organs per se, but what they eschew is a stable, hierarchical organization of the body.
Thus, the term BwO designates a tendency of bodies to become radically open-ended
configurations. The transformations in capacity of such bodies are in excess of any
totalizing form or definitive social categorization (Grosz “A Thousand Tiny Sexes”
1453–54).
The changing constellations – assemblages – of the organs of singing bodies
relate to musical repertoires, which are in their turn sexually differentiated according
to voice types.19 In the end, however, the sexual characteristics of singing bodies
vary according to, as well as within each corporeality, socio-musical moment and
material location. To proceed with the Deleuzian framework, flows, energies, intensities, and durations are interconnected means of describing processes of differentiation which bodies are endlessly in (Braidotti Transpositions 144–203). With respect
to singers, these take place simultaneously through sound production and other
performative aspects, such as bodily expressions and investments connected to a
stage role. Corporeal substances refer to the sheer materiality of singers’ bodies with
their concrete traits and open-ended habits. Finally, incorporeal events are non-material
forces – for instance, ways of conceptualizing and thus partly evoking features of
bodies – which transform corporeal-material reality in their varying ways. In the case
of singers, one incorporeal event might be said to occur when the voice of a singing
student is declared to represent a certain voice type. In that moment, a voice, which
has its singular, bodily embedded timbre and many open-ended capacities, becomes
attached to a conceptual category that carries a heavy cultural load with it: associations with already formed aesthetic ideals, previous singers and performances, and
sexual characteristics. Moreover, the consequences of this event are highly material.
The fact of being named a representative of a voice type affects the ways the singer
is taught and trained, and what repertoires s/he will sing. Incorporeal forces should
not be interpreted, however, merely or even largely as instances of containment and
control. In the framework of Deleuze’s thought, incorporeality refers in the end to bodies’ potential to vary: to their capacities of acquiring traits and performing deeds
which are not, yet, materially present here and now (Massumi Parables for 5).
It is of course impossible to account for each and every above-listed variable even
in certain specific assemblages of music, the body, and subjectivity. Nonetheless,
the fieldwork made it clear that if the goal is to rethink how subjects and sexes are
constituted in live music, then the notion of assemblage proves to be not only fruitful,
but almost a necessity. It is a great tool with which to grasp the multi-layered nature
of the sonic in general and operatic music-making in particular.
The concept of assemblage helps, furthermore, to complicate ideas about sexual
difference. Since the focus is on singers, we can take vocal qualities as a case in
point, without forgetting their linkages with other social, material and discursive components involved in singing. It could be argued that every voice, be it operatic or
inhabiting some other musical-cultural domain, is an assemblage to begin with. This
became clear in both of the stage productions I observed. Not a single role or character in them was univocal.
In W.A. Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the first of the productions I attended, there is the
role of Fiordiligi, a young woman. In vocal terms the role is usually defined as a part
for high coloratura soprano, and the role demands indeed a very high voice capable of
producing rapid figurative or “coloratura” passages. These vocal-musical features
have been, interestingly enough, interpreted as simulations of female hysteria in various studies on opera, which renders them sexually differentiated in a stereotypical
and moreover pejorative manner (Abbate In Search of Opera 86; 91–92). However, listened to more carefully, the part of Fiordiligi stretches beyond mere coloratura work
and high frequencies. The singer of the role must also have a strong lower register in
her voice with noticeably darker tones, as well as a capacity to shift quickly from the
highest to the lowest register. Hence, we are talking about a voice/body that has both
agility and steadiness, both readiness for light slides and remarkable muscular force
to control the voice’s manifold movements, its “flows, energies, intensities, and durations” to quote Grosz again. It is the aspect of power and control on the one hand, and
the multiplicity of the singer’s voice on the other that questions negative associations
160 | Milla Tiainen
of this type of high voice to hysteria: to uncontrollability and vocally, piercing “feminine
noise.”20
At least in the production I observed, Fiordiligi was rendered multiple also at the
level of stage action. For one, the singer’s performance contained elements of irony
and parody. These were used with the conscious aim to over-exaggerate conventional
markers of “female hysteria” (this was agreed on in the rehearsals of the opera). The
ironic and parodist expressions included theatrical bodily trembles and waving of
hair, as well as a high moan in the middle of Fiordiligi’s major solo number. Apart from
that, there were moments when the authority exercised by the singer (through her
vocal and bodily virtuosity) over the other performers/characters was stressed in a
more serious manner. The singer’s registers of action included moreover bursts of
violence (like kicking one of the male characters, Fiordiligi’s fiancé Guglielmo), and
tender bodily contacts with another female character/player, Fiordiligi’s sister
Dorabella (FN Cft: 4 Nov 2003; MD Cft: 5 Dec 2003).
What the scope of these expressions can be taken to demonstrate is that singers
of contemporary operatic culture never, or at least rarely, actualize some uniform set
of sexual difference. Rather, their performances create mobile assemblages of musical, cultural and sexed styles. Besides producing vocal tones with associations to
varying modes of sexual difference in- and outside of opera, their gestures, movements and interactions with others can point to numerous cultural directions. These
may range from opera and theatre to cinema, television, dance, current social discussions; even feminist theories of subjectivity. Furthermore, when forming and reforming into assemblages, the variables differentiate, so that they potentially
engender new (micro-) existences of corporeality, sex, and subjectivity. Among other
things, this depends on the perception of listeners-viewers. In feminist and queer
studies of music, opera already features as a field where complex and sometimes
surprisingly unconventional sexual differences – such as homoeroticism between
female performers – are negotiated, (Blackmer and Smith). The notion of assemblage
transports the question of opera’s sexual complexity into a new theoretical terrain,
while, at the same time, reformulating it.
As far as spatiality is concerned, opera – as a dynamic field of sexual differences –
could be considered with Deleuze/Guattari as a “striated space” as well as a
“smooth space.” Applied in a somewhat loose fashion, the first concept refers to
domains and practices – cultural, socio-political, intellectual, etc. – that have become
conventionalized, are more or less closed and often have a strict, centralized organization (Deleuze and Guattari 474–75). In everyday imagination, opera is perhaps
likely to be equated with this kind of striated space: it seems to be dwelling in its own
cultural sphere, repeating centuries-old narratives, sounds, and sexual arrangements. If, however, observed at the grass roots level, opera, as I tried to show above,
reveals itself as at least partly and potentially open to other artistic and social
spaces. Due to this, it is also open to the spectrum of sexual styles of being. Through
these tendencies, opera culture possesses features of a smooth space alongside a
striated one. It does not have an all-encompassing (transcendental) set of codes that
regulates all its manifestations, but is in principle varied, unlimited and renewing in
its current and future expressions (Deleuze and Guattari 474–500).
The diversity of sexed potentials informing singers’ actions – their simultaneous
restrictions notwithstanding – can be further explored with Grosz’s notion of “a thousand tiny sexes” (“A Thousand Tiny Sexes” 1456–57). Inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari, the concept expresses a belief in the inescapable multiplicity of sexual differences, be they bodily, emotive, erotic, intellectual, or some other. Whatever domain
we are talking about, the point is that this multiplicity blurs rigid dualisms of sex, no
matter how strenuously the dualistic models are deployed in order to tame and control the abundance of sexual differences. At an analytical level, the acknowledgement
of multiplicity calls for, in Claire Colebrook’s apt words, “a bottom-up theory”
(Understanding 43). Instead of concentrating on how the big difference of “masculine” vs. “feminine” is articulated and partly unsuccessfully sustained in various cultural realms, we might begin at the other end: starting with the ways in which bodily
subjects are different corporeally, expressively, sonically, through discursive attributions, in their encounters with others, and in connection to non-human factors. Or, to
stress the aspect of materiality once again, we might ask, how are different modalities of sexual differentiation due to the specificity of different bodies? (Colebrook,
“From Radical Representation” 90)
The perspective of “a thousand tiny sexes” does not equate with obliviousness to
power relations that prevail both between and within sexed, social groups. What it
can mean is a theoretical and methodological opportunity to enrich our ideas about
subject formation, the body and sex. This applies both to musical practices and to
other fields. In this way, the perspective of “a thousand tiny sexes” may expose and
then replace the insufficiency of dualistic accounts of sexual difference with their
simplifying, controlling, and strongly hierarchical tendencies.
New Materialism, Music and Cultural Theory
To conclude, I would like to assemble the thematic threads of this article once more,
this time, however, focusing on the concept of subjectivity, since it has received less
explicit attention so far than the other two main concepts – body/corporeality and
sexual difference. What is the relevance of the above observations on singing for current cultural theoretical and feminist discussions of subjectivity? What is subjectivity
when mapped through singers’ live music-making? On what levels does it figure and
whom it may concern?
The answer to these questions appears twofold to me. On the one hand, it may be
argued that issues discussed in this article – bodies’ openness to change and their
162 | Milla Tiainen
surroundings, the varying modalities of sexual difference in vocal, corporeal and
social registers, and the resulting expressive and thinking formations i.e. subjects –
are characteristic of musical situations, especially sung ones. Thus, materially
embedded and multiple subjectivities emerge when sounds are uttered, when bodies
are situated in acoustic and performative spaces, and when social encounters are
experienced on stage or as exchanges between different power positions, discursive
acts and bodily arrangements (like teachers and singers in singing lessons). On the
other hand, it could be argued that while these issues may appear in particularly
interesting ways in music, they exist in other socio-cultural realms too, acquiring just
positively different modes of differentiation there. The concepts of open materiality
and assemblages can then be connected, not only to music but eventually to many coexistent slices of reality as well. Likewise, they can be elaborated in many disciplinary
contexts besides musicology. This, however, does not diminish the fact that exploring
music can bring about new cultural theoretical, philosophical, and feminist ideas of
subjectivity that are of relevance across disciplinary borders. In regard to musicology,
the new materialist approach challenges scholars working in this field to rethink their
methods of studying the emergence, character and “worldly” effects of sounds.
Recalling the location of this article at the crossroads of cultural studies,
musicology and feminism, the following citation by Braidotti sums up, what kinds of
re-articulations of subjectivity have been at stake in my mappings of singers’ musicmaking. In her article “Becoming Woman: or Sexual Difference Revisited” she states
that the subject she is advocating in her own theoretical project is “an intensive, multiple subject, functioning in a net of interconnections. I would add that it is rhizomatic
(that is to say non-unitary, non-linear, web-like), embodied and therefore perfectly artificial; as an artifact it is machinic, complex, endowed with multiple capacities of interconnectedness” (44). A little later, referring clearly to debates that concern the
interrelations of discourses, bodies and subjects she adds that subjectivity “is to be
understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point
of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions”
(44). It is precisely along these lines that I have argued for the materiality of bodies,
sexes and subjects in music. As Braidotti’s expressions “artificial” and “artifact”
make clear, re-theorizing subjectivity in a new materialist framework does not mean
that its materiality be posited as an essential ground to our existence. Rather, this
materiality is to be approached as a wealth of ongoing processes that become
embroiled in other processes of the world, material as well as non-material.
Interestingly for future studies on sonic phenomena and subjectivity, bodies that
make vocal music form part of these processes. Opera culture is one fascinating
framework in which such bodies, through their production of operatic voice, take on
various forms, become sexed, relate to other components of reality, and endlessly
differentiate.
Notes
1. As a general rule, the terms “sex/sexed”
and “sexual difference(s)” are used in this
article instead of that of “gender.” The
motivations behind this choice are explained
properly on page 150–51. Suffice it to say here
that the concept of “sex” informs my affinities
to theories of sexual difference, which depart in
certain significant aspects from the social
constructivist accounts of gender with their
stronger linguistic emphasis. However, I also
utilize the term “gender” when discussing such
studies on music that explicitly use that concept
and, more often than not, lean theoretically
towards social constructivist approaches.
2. For more extensive accounts of new
materialist thinking in relation to cultural theory,
feminism and philosophy, De Landa; Grosz, Time
& The Nick of; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.
3. The expression “positively different”
crystallizes one of the aims of new materialism:
to conceive of differences between things and
phenomena beyond the more or less dualistic
representational scheme of “analogous to”
(sameness, resemblance) and “different from”
(opposition). In place of this framework, new
materialism proposes a view of differences as
inexhaustible micro-differentiations, which occur
both within and between phenomena. For a
more detailed account of this, see page 55–56.
4. The Sibelius-Academy is the leading Music
University of Finland. Relating supposedly to a
previous lack of interest in live musical situations,
the use of fieldwork methods has remained rare
in art music studies. Largely these methodological
concerns have been left to the hands of
ethnomusicologists and, to a lesser degree,
popular music scholars. However, there exist
already some well-known ethnographic analyses
of art music culture. See Kingsbury; Nettl; Born.
5. The terms “music theory” and “music
analysis” are partly interchangeable, but their
implications also vary when moving from
Europe to the U.S. In US-American musicology
departments, “music theory” often refers to
different traditions of analyzing musical
structures, forms, and stylistic conventions.
164 | Milla Tiainen
These include newer critical approaches, such
as developments within feminist music theory.
In Europe, on the other hand, “music theory”
often carries a narrower meaning, referring
more to the conservatory-type study of the
traditional formal features of Western art music
(from the composers” point of view) rather than
to academic research. The term reserved for
academic approaches dealing with the
organization and meanings of musical textures
is “music analysis.” From now on, I will use the
latter term while acknowledging the
terminological ambiguities.
6. I do not wish to argue that the challenge to
the establishments of music analytical
scholarship has originated solely in the AngloAmerican academia. Certain movements of
more continental-based musical semiotics
have, for instance, also redefined the goals and
frames of music analysis (Välimäki 111–28).
However, for reasons of brevity I limit my
attention here to the new musicological
impulses behind this paradigm shift.
7. For example, music analyst and popular music
scholar Nicholas Cook (204) notes with a critical
tone the long historical roots of treating (art)
music as written texts. He places the point of
departure of this mode of thought in
“musicology’s origins as a nineteenth-century
discipline modeled on philology.” In place of a
textual view of music, Cook envisions
performance-centered approaches, and
consequent reconsiderations of music’s ontology.
8. An early and influential example is
Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of
Women (1989), which concentrates on
bourgeois gender hierarchies in 19th century
opera plots. In the study, Clément comments
on the broader social and political implications
of these plots, i.e., their relations with the wider
gender–power-systems of the surrounding
society. Textual-discursive approaches such as
Clément’s come close to narrative and later,
discourse analytical approaches prevalent in
today”s cultural and literary studies. Many
researchers in this field have in fact received
their education originally in literature.
9. Study models of harmony, form, thematic
processes, etc.
pleasures, affects). See Välimäki 138–42,
301–27.
10. Including feminist, queer and cultural
studies perspectives.
15. Evidently, not all musicological studies on
embodiment, sex, and subjectivity fit into the
model presented above. Thus, the model should
be seen more as a heuristic device of
classification than as an attempt to offer a
definitive account of musicological takes on
these issues. To mention some exceptions to
the model, Potter explores the cultural formation
of voices, operatic and partly popular musical,
with references to historically developed singing
techniques and their bodily implications.
Hutcheon and Hutcheon set out to examine the
operatic body – both singers’ and listeners’ –
through an interdisciplinary analysis of opera as
live art. See also Abel; Koestenbaum.
11. That is, actual instances of sound
production and perception.
12. This includes the presence of musicians’
bodies in sounds as well as the corporeal
effects of music on listeners.
13. Corporeal materiality in music is made to
mark that which is original in us but at the same
time irretrievably in the past. In other words,
music’s bodily aspects are seen as highlighting
the major distinction between “before the
Symbolic” and “after the Symbolic” which
according to both Lacan and Kristeva lies at the
core of the subject. Moreover, it is this transition
from the pre-symbolic domain to the regulated
sphere of language and culture that allegedly
creates a crack or a crisis in human (psychic)
existence. It is in this way that psychoanalytic
approaches, linking music as they do to the
longed for, pre-symbolic origins of subjectivity, may
be claimed to give its materiality at least a touch
of essentiality. However, differences between
Lacan and Kristeva’s views should be also taken
into account. For Kristeva, the rift between
symbolic and pre-symbolic forces is not as clear
or fundamental as it is for Lacan. For example, in
her theory of signification, all signifying events
consist of two components: the semiotic (presymbolic, drive-anchored) and the symbolic
(referring to language as sign, nomination and
syntax) (Kristeva 19–106; Välimäki 138–39).
Thus, utilization of Kristeva’s insights enables
such analyses of music, in which the (corporeal)
materiality of sounds does not designate so
powerfully an essentialized primary stage of
subjectivity, but is interpreted more as an actual
part of the subject’s life throughout.
14. This type of sexually differentiated scheme
of subjectivity has also been used, après
Kristeva, for feminist purposes: for affirming
every subject’s “female” (mother-related)
origins, which express themselves through
corporeal registers of existence (desires,
16. They could be geological or other natural
processes, as well as human physico-cultural
capacities and social organizations.
17. Such as air, sensorial data (aural, visual,
tactile), and affective forces of audience
response.
18. These include vocal cords, back and
abdomen muscles, cavities of the head, lungs,
and the whole circulation of air into, within and
out of the body.
19. Such as high dramatic soprano,
lyrical/dramatic mezzo soprano, bass baritone,
etc. All the voice types have, moreover, many
further sub-categories.
20. Women as central, even authoritative
agents in opera, and bodily virtuosic
sovereignty as a path to their empowerment
are themes that have already been touched
upon in several musicological studies.
Abbate (Opera) insists that the noisy and
indispensable presence of female singers on
the operatic stage subverts at least in part the
misogynist tendencies of many opera plots
(see also Wheelock; Leonardi, and Pope).
Taking another route, Hannah Bosma
discusses the qualitative varieties in a single
female artist’s, Madonna’s, voice, and their
differing gendered potentials in a way that
could be applied to operatic singing too.
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Performing Subjectivity:
Literature, Race and Mourning
David Copenhafer
ABSTRACT
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man “race” is not simply seen but heard as well. This article
addresses the complex interaction of the audible and the visible in the novel and seeks
to grasp the dynamics of race in terms of both music and figural language. Music, it is
claimed, acts like a figure of speech; it can provide a measure of racial identity but also
tends to destabilize any and all identity effects. The essay closes with a meditation on
Jeff Wall’s photograph, “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface.”
Introduction
In music what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is
language, it is, like notation in music history, a language sedimented from gestures. It
is not possible to ask music what it conveys as its meaning; rather, music has as its
theme the question, How can gestures be made eternal? (Adorno 139)
Everyone knows that Invisible Man is a classic, but if that designation is to be anything other than a death sentence, then we must admit that we have yet to comprehend the novel, yet to understand completely what it has to say, in particular,
regarding the interaction of the audible, the visible, and the racial. All three dimensions are invoked on its very first page:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my
Invisible Music (Ellison) | 171
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and
anything except me […] Nor is that invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. (3)
The narrator insists that his invisibility is not natural, nor even accidental, but the
product of a “refusal” on the part of others to see him. “Blackness,” the unnamed
“biochemical accident” to which he refers, would appear to provoke this refusal. But
insofar as the narrator is able to speak, to write, to figure his condition, his invisibility would appear not to be absolute. Indeed, the very figure of the “bodiless head” by
which he means to mark his invisibility confers some minimal visibility on the narrator, and it suggests that the refusal of a black body is perhaps never complete. A
mouth, a face, may tend stubbornly to persist. Beyond this particular figure, however,
the simple fact of the narrative voice, what we might call an irreducible acoustic
remainder in the text, tends to bring the blackness of the narrator into visibility.
Someone is speaking. And it is difficult not to confer a “raced” body to a voice
despite the massive epistemological uncertainties of such a conferral. Oddly, voice
translates a measure of vision.
“Race” is constituted, in part, through looking, but that looking would appear
already to be formed and inflected by notions of race, some of which belong to the
order of the audible. This circuitous logic represents more than an epistemological
quandary. It is the arena in which our constant failure to recognize one another
occurs – the condition of our anxiety, our jealousy, our suspicion, and even of our
love. There is very likely no exit from this circuit, only a renewed effort to, in Ellison’s
words, “change the joke and slip the yoke,” that is, to grasp what this logic enables
and disables and to modify the terms by which we are held. What, then, is the relationship in Invisible Man between speaking (or singing), race and in/visibility? A first
attempt at answering this question takes us to a reading of – and a listening to – the
novel’s prologue.1
Prologue: Music’s (Black and Blue) Face
The prologue to Invisible Man is like a hypertext with the Fats Waller-Andy Razaf song
“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” functioning as its soundtrack. This is not
to say there is a one to one correspondence between music and text, but the song is
clearly a phantom presence throughout the prologue: the writing is a response, an
engagement both with its lyrics and its musical form. What both the song and the prologue advocate is a “logic” of the cut or sudden jump into a new key or register.2
Comparing the song to the prologue will enable us to elucidate this logic as well as
to understand how both engage with the circuit of race and in/visibility.
Armstrong recorded three versions of the tune in his lifetime. Two were recorded
after the publication of Invisible Man, so it must be the version from 1929 to which
172 | David Copenhafer
the narrator listens on his phonograph. The bluesy composition in A minor is written
in the 32 bar, AABA form (three stanzas interrupted by a bridge) characteristic of
many songs from the early jazz era.
“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?”
Section/Key Lyric
A (A minor) Old empty bed
Springs hard as lead
Feel like old Ned
Wish I was dead
All my life through
I’ve been so black and blue.
A’ (A minor) Even a mouse
Ran from my house
They laugh at you
And scorned you too
What did I do
to be so black and blue?
B (A-flat major / C major) I’m white inside
But that don’t help my case
Cause I can’t hide
What is in my fa …
A’’ (A minor) How will it end?
Ain’t got a friend
My only sin
is in my skin
What did I do
to be so black and blue?
The band runs through the song twice, first as an instrumental, a second time
with vocals. During the instrumental first half, the melody rises towards C, what could
be called the pivotal note of the entire composition. When Armstrong begins to sing,
he does away with the rising contour of the melody, emphasizing only its peak.
The lack of melodic movement in the vocal A sections is complemented by the images
of destitution in the lyrics (“old empty bed/ springs hard as lead”) and by the simple
rhyme scheme (couplets, rhymed aaaa in the first section). The song seems stuck on
C, and a certain poverty in the form perfectly conveys the poverty to which the lyrics
allude. Interestingly, the harmony moves to the relative major (C) in order to pose the
highly rhetorical yet serious question “What did I do to be so black and blue?”3
The relative fixity of the A section makes the jump to the B section or bridge
quite dramatic. Suddenly the song seems to be in A-flat major, a remote key from its
A minor “home.” This harmonic distance complements the strangeness of the first
line of the bridge – “I’m white inside” – and establishes something of a parallelism
between white and black, major and minor (although, as we indicated, the major
mode occurs at the end of each A section). The vaguely triumphant sound of the
leap to A-flat major is quickly undermined however. The harmony oscillates between
A-flat major and C major and does not affix what could be called the “ideal” of whiteness to either. Once again, C is the highest note of the main melody, but instead
of rising toward or remaining stuck on it as in the A sections, the melody of the
bridge falls away from C, as if to signal a falling away from the ideal of whiteness to
which the lyrics allude or, alternately, to signify a falling away from blackness as an
ideal.
The bridge recontextualizes those elements of the A section – the note C and
even the key of C – that signify blackness (or the condition of being black and blue).
In the bridge, C is associated with a strange kind of “interior” whiteness, something
not entirely of the order of the visible. Though it is tempting to think of the bridge
as the simple interior of the song; it would be more accurate to say that it opens a
gap or way out of the song’s conventions. The bridge itself is a convention, but one
that doesn’t quite reinforce the conventional logic of what it interrupts. The bridge
demonstrates the utter reversibility of musical tropes and suggests that a portion of
music used to designate a particular race may quickly be turned to gesture towards
another.
We will return to the even more radical way in which Armstrong’s singing complicates the notions of blackness and of whiteness upon which the song finds an
always uncertain basis. Now, however, I want to turn to the prologue of Invisible Man
to demonstrate how it obeys a similar logic of the bridge.
The narrator states:
I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa.
And so I play the invisible music of my isolation. The last statement doesn’t seem
just right, does it? But it is; you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black
and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility? (13–14)
“Play” here seems to refer to the fact that the narrator plays records on his phonograph but also to his activity as a writer, one who puts things down “in black and
white.” One should imagine him engaged in a ritual of listening to songs like “(What
Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” over and over, picking up the needle and dropping
it, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes elsewhere, playing (with) the music but
also transforming it, transcribing it onto another medium, the page on which he writes.
Like the Waller-Razaf song, his narrative is both traditionally structured but given to
sudden departure, changing the subject from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence. In order to demonstrate how the narrative logic corresponds to the
logic of the song, allow me to quote one exemplary passage in full. Notice how “once”
marks key changes in the narration; the word functions like the very temporal nodes
of which the passage speaks:
Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream
and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the
vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.
Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think
it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility
aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave
me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was
a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time,
you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind.
Instead of the swift imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those
points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks
and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music … Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one
violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel
held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale
of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as
a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The
yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time. So under the spell of
the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. (my emphasis; 8–9)
Ice cream becomes vapor becomes light and then music; then music becomes boxing
and then music again. These rapid changes reinforce the narrator’s reflections on
two methods of marking time that are represented by the two styles of fighting – one
regular, or “scientific,” the other unexpected and violent. Style, whether in a narrative
or a song (or a fight), is the tension between the propulsive force of the form – its
tendency to move from a to b to c, from beginning to middle to end – and the force of
interruption, one that threatens to take the form to a place from which it cannot
return, or to induce a complete breakdown.
The narrative departures, like the B section of “Black and Blue,” break with what
comes before but also lead back to a renewed statement of the previous material.
The brief narrative of the “yokel,” for example, is a bridge that cuts into the previous
narrative of listening to Armstrong and ties the two parts of that story together.
Similarly, the bridge of “Black and Blue” is where the song communicates with itself.
Neither fully outside nor totally contained by the rest, it is an exterior interiority or vice
versa. The bridge is a rhythmic disturbance or hesitation, a stylized shudder that troubles the dominant narrative pattern of both song and writing.
The narrator describes Armstrong’s stylistic innovation primarily in rhythmic terms,
and he relates rhythm to visibility: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.” My question, then, is does
style, whether as a cut or as playing with the beat, help to bring a performer into visibility? Armstrong worries the melodic line, stylizes the predictable, rushing some
phrases, such as the initial “old empty bed,” and extending others, particularly those
in the bridge (“iinside”), past what might be considered their usual term. Such idiosyncratic phrasing helps to stamp the performance as his own and constitutes what
might be termed his aural signature. But does it allow us to “see” Louis Armstrong?
The narrator writes: “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry
out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible.”
Armstrong, though he is invisible, apparently sings in such a way as not to register an
awareness of that fact. If we follow the narrator’s lead in trying to understand
Armstrong’s singing, is it not necessary to see-him-not-seeing that he is invisible? Is
it not necessary, in other words, to see blackness, and to see the invisibility of blackness, in order to comprehend the performance?
The narrator listens to Armstrong in a room “full of light” about which he says:
Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light,
love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives
birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay
in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room
becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it
is with me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware
of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not
become alive until I discovered my invisibility. (6–7)
In this paradoxical passage, the narrator asserts that light, an excess of light, confirms the reality that he is invisible. How can this be unless blackness itself were the
true source of invisibility? Yet, as the narrator points out, blackness is not enough to
guarantee invisibility: one must refuse it as well. In order to see invisibility one must
see another who is either invisible to a third person or invisible to herself, perhaps
both. At the limit, it might be possible both to refuse the blackness of another and to
witness that refusal, to be the “first person” who sees as well as the “third person”
who does not. In that case, one might be able to say of oneself: “I see myself not
seeing another person.” This is one way to translate the narrator’s statement,
“Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible.
I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible.” The narrator insists on
the refusal to see Armstrong (his invisibility), participates in that refusal himself, and
experiences the pathos of Armstrong’s own supposed lack of awareness of his invisibility. The tragicomic pathos of Armstrong’s performance would lie in the stark contrast between the tremendous vocal skill he brings to it and the failure of that
performance to bring him social recognition, irrespective of his fame and fortune.4
For the narrator, Armstrong remains, like him, an “invisible man,” one who is subject
to the same forms of racism, both institutional and non-institutional, intrinsic to midcentury American life.
Must we accept the narrator’s hypothesis concerning both Armstrong’s invisibility
and his lack of awareness of that condition? Armstrong would appear to be the most
uncanny of figures, one whose invisibility may be seen; in which case, invisibility would
appear to break down as soon as one tries to designate it. This tension between the
visible and the invisible is most apparent in the narrator’s peculiar use of the word
“form.” Apparently, there is a “form” of invisibility, a manner in which visibility and invisibility may co-exist. What is “form” for the narrator? Certainly it is linked to appearance. But, like the circus head in comparison to which the narrator first describes his
invisibility, to have a form is crucially linked to having a face. The unnamed “beautiful
girl” mentioned in the passage above is another figure for an invisibility that retains,
just barely, a face. I can’t help but think she is also a figure for Armstrong, one produced by the narrator’s “new analytic way of listening.” For Armstrong fashions a memorable “face” in “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” by distending and
distorting the very word into something scarcely recognizable.
In fact, he never completes the word, never completes the rhyme with “case” that
might bring some kind of closure to the bridge.5 Instead “face” becomes the point of
departure of his scat. Armstrong steps, or perhaps falls, outside of the boundaries of
language and of the song’s steady tempo in order to announce another, always interrupted time, the time of the cut and of a cutting into the cut that represents a subtilization of the bridge. The bridge bridges. Each phoneme or sonic fragment
constitutes a miniature drama of departure from and return to this face or figure that
is not one.
I am tempted to speak of Armstrong’s profound awareness of the face, of “his”
face, precisely as a figure – a figure, in this case, for disfiguration. How else to
explain the strange, no doubt improvised, grammar of the line: “ ‘Cause I/can’t hide/
what is in my face”? “In my face”? The original lyric had been “on my face.” And by
means of that minor change, a single letter, a single sound, Armstrong turns the
entire rhetoric of color and of race in the bridge on its head. He says, in effect, that
race is not to be seen on his face, is not exactly “a biochemical accident to [his] epidermis,” but is to be found elsewhere “in” what the face signifies (as well as “in” the
sound of his horn which is often literally in his face). In this way, “whiteness” and
“blackness” are both drawn “inside” some ideal space of language, into the figures
that produce our notions of color, our perceptions of racialized faces. All perception
of color is a disfiguration insofar as our truly primitive, dichotomous vocabulary of
“black” and “white” misleads us into believing that these adjectives possess some
stable referential value.
The form that allows the narrator to see the invisibility of blackness is the disfigured face Armstrong produces in “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” It is the
figure of prosopopeia which de Man in “Autobiography as De-facement” describes as:
[T]he fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which
posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice
assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the
trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is
the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name […] is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. (76)
Armstrong’s generosity, on the recording, is to offer his disfigured face as a form of
address to an absent other, the listener. As de Man points out such an offering “posits
the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.” In other
words, at the same time that Armstrong both provides and deprives himself of a face,
he posits the listening, perhaps singing or speaking face of another. There is a fundamental echolalia to all forms of address (and what language fails to address?): the
apostrophe calls out to one who is recognized as capable of responding, of becoming
alternately ear or mouth in a sequence that need admit no final term.
One should not paint too rosy a picture of Armstrong’s address, however, for, as I
have already indicated, his figuration is also a dis-figuration. The scat that emerges
to interrupt his pronunciation of the word “face” points towards a history and a pain
that cannot be uttered by means of conventional language. Nor, however, can it be
uttered by “unconventional” language, but it may be more insistently indexed by the
breakdown of language than by its untroubled operation. Scat both responds and
alludes to the history of slavery and of racial violence but it can also produce a singer
who, at least momentarily, is on the way towards losing his or her connection to other
speakers. This potential loss of community is signified by the way the rhythm section
drops out at the moment Armstrong sings “face.” Armstrong’s scat (dis)figuration
exposes the tension between two temporalities at work in the song – the time of the
soloist and the time of the ensemble. The price of freedom, of a soloist’s time, the
time to index a pain that is at once personal and historical, is the loss of the common time of the community or ensemble.
The narrator’s fear of the complete loss of form, expressed in the dream of the beautiful girl whose face expands beyond recognition, is related to the potential loss of both
identity and community; and it is what drives his ambivalent response to Armstrong’s
address. Although he clearly admires Armstrong’s virtuosity and rhythmic subtlety, he
also posits the singer’s ignorance, a lack of awareness of his invisibility, as a way to differentiate himself and to grasp his own relative awareness of invisibility. By stating
“I am an invisible man” the narrator fabricates an identity that both excludes and
includes Armstrong: they are both invisible in his conception but only he is aware of that
fact. As we have seen, however, the entire prologue represents a sustained attempt to
recuperate the very work on invisibility that Armstrong’s music performs, its logic of
the break and of the breakdown – the failure of language to capture either history or
experience.
The narrator translates part of his listening experience by saying:
I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath
the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it
and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz
as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the
color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slave
owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more
rapid tempo and I heard someone shout:
“Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the ‘Blackness of Blackness’ ”
And a congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black, brother, most
black…”
“In the beginning […]”
“At the very start,” they cried.
“[…] there was blackness […]” (9)
Insofar as the narrator records this vision, which is also a listening, he posits an historical community with which he clearly identifies. However, he also stands apart
from it and does not join the “congregation of voices” that respond to the preacher.
This is perhaps the narrator’s most characteristic gesture, to repeat and recast
scenes of subjection, scenes in which invisibility becomes intelligible. If we recall the
narrator’s question – “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and
white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” – we see that he understands
his own activity as a writer as analogous to Armstrong’s (dis)figuration of invisibility.
Both Armstrong and the narrator give a face to the subject of racial violence at the
same time that they are incapable of bringing that subject into full view. The narrator
expresses an ambivalent identification with figures of blackness/invisibility such as
Armstrong, the “beautiful girl,” or the others who emerge during his listening to
“Black and Blue.” By turning away from such figures, the narrator produces what he
takes to be his unique identity, that of the “invisible man” who is capable of stating
that he is invisible. But the narrator’s turning away is never complete. He repeatedly
conjures the figures or faces of those from whom he would seek to distance himself.
The tendency to refuse to see blackness is one of the unspeakable conditions of
the intelligibility of the subject. Though the narrator identifies this disposition as part
of the social world that denies him recognition, insofar as he is part of that world he
cannot help but repeat elements of its logic. The uninhabitable logic of social recognition – the web of social and linguistic forces that enables “one” to say “I” – would
appear to demand that the narrator himself fail to recognize another on the basis of
race, another whom he might wish to admire or to love. In other words, the narrator’s
self-assertion – his capacity to say “I” – seems predicated on a certain destruction
of community. The narrator’s resistance to this eventuality results in the melancholy
repetition of figures of blackness/invisibility, figures that disavow the loss they also
help to instantiate.
Imitation of Life
The narrator’s ambivalent reaction to Armstrong, which is really a refusal to grant him
the status of a self-conscious artist, repeats aspects of the critical reception of the
famous musician whom some, including members of the Be Bop generation,
described as a racial opportunist or “Uncle Tom.” Armstrong incurred this charge in
part because of the way he would contort his face while singing and playing. Ellison
himself defends Armstrong from such criticism in his essay “On Bird, Bird-Watching
and Jazz”:
The thrust toward respectability exhibited by the Negro jazzmen of [Charlie] Parker’s
generation drew much of its immediate fire from their understandable rejection of the traditional entertainer’s role – a heritage from the minstrel tradition – exemplified by such an
outstanding creative musician as Louis Armstrong. But when they fastened the epithet
“Uncle Tom” upon Armstrong’s music they confused artistic quality with questions of personal conduct, a confusion which would ultimately reduce their own music to the mere
matter of race. By rejecting Armstrong they thought to rid themselves of the entertainer’s
role. And by way of getting rid of the role, they demanded, in the name of their racial identity, a purity of status which by definition is impossible for the performing artist. (259)
One senses, even in this defense, a certain unease with Armstrong whose “personal
conduct” apparently needs to be held apart from his art in order for the latter to be
judged properly. Ellison goes on to say that Armstrong’s way of performing is “basically a make-believe role of clown – which the irreverent poetry and triumphant sound
of his trumpet makes even the squarest of squares aware of” (261). Again, we notice
a slight, but unmistakable hesitation about Armstrong in that “basically.” I would
argue that Ellison’s ambivalence about the need for a black performer to evoke
aspects of the minstrel tradition is what produces this hesitation, even here in the
context of his otherwise vigorous defense of Armstrong’s mode of performing. It is
worth noting that it is the sound of Armstrong’s trumpet which apparently needs no
defense and alerts even the “squarest of squares” of Armstrong’s real stance vis-àvis what must then be primarily a visible form of self-mockery.
Can the stereotype of the black entertainer always be successfully turned in the
manner Ellison implies Armstrong was able to turn it? And what might be the consequences of its unsuccessful turning? Is it enough to assert an artist exercises some
conscious control over his or her role to escape a melancholy and ambivalent reaction to the appearance of that role? In what follows I want to take up these questions
in relationship to another scene of subjection, one that occurs much later in the
novel (though it takes place at a moment that is chronologically prior to the time of
the prologue).
The incident occurs while the narrator is working for “the Brotherhood” – what is,
essentially, the novel’s name for the Communist Party. He stumbles upon a strange
object and a mysterious scene unfolding on a crowded street in New York City:
It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd’s fascinated eyes and down again,
seeing it clearly this time. I’d seen nothing like it before. A grinning doll of orange-andblack tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which
some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed,
shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached
from the black, mask-like face. It’s no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll
throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in
public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions. (431)
At first the narrator cannot seem to decide on an appropriate reaction to the tiny figure,
and says he was “held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and
struggled between the desire to join in the laughter and to leap upon it with both feet”
(432). His description of the scene registers a distaste for the racial caricature but also
a trace of amusement with its bouncy demeanor. He also suspects that something else
lies behind the performance, possibly a “fierce defiance,” or a “perverse pleasure.” The
narrator’s confusion seems partly to derive from his inability to identify the source of the
doll’s motion. He imagines “some mysterious mechanism” to animate it, and he seems
vexed by the contrast between the inanimate “mask-like face” and its lively movements.
In “The Echo of the Subject,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes about a related
scene in which an inability to identify the motive behind a visible, rhythmic gesture
renders an event uncanny and incoherent. In the program notes to Mahler’s second
symphony, the composer imagines someone coming across figures dancing at such
a distance that no music is audible:
The unceasingly moving, never understandable bustle of life becomes as ghastly as
the moving of dancing figures in an illuminated dance hall into which you look from the
dark night, from so far away that you cannot hear the music. The turning and moving of
the couples appears then to be senseless, as the rhythm clue is missing. (193)
For Lacoue-Labarthe, what renders the sight of the dancers unintelligible to the distant observer is the lack of an audible rhythm:
Without rhythm, the dance (it is a waltz) becomes disorganized and disfigured. In other
words, rhythm, of a specifically musical (acoustic) essence here, is prior to the figure or
the visible schema whose appearance, as such – it conditions […] What is missing is
quite simply a “participation” (categorization, schematization): in this case the repetition
or temporal (not topological or spatial) constraint that acts as a means of diversification
by which the real might be recognized, established, and disposed […] Missing is the repetition from which the division might be made between the mimetic and the non-mimetic:
a division between the recognizable and the non-recognizable, the familiar and the
strange, the real and the fantastic, the sensible and the mad – life and fiction. (194)
If Lacoue-Labarthe is correct, then we are accustomed to seeing movement as what
follows or imitates music – rhythmic gesture as a repetition of a rhythm that may be
heard. Dance without music tends to discomfit.
Unlike the figures of Mahler’s program the “Sambo” doll does not move in silence.
Somewhat in the style of a vaudeville performer or carnival huckster, the narrator’s
friend, Clifton, bounces in sympathetic motion with the dolls and produces a playful
rap – the narrator calls it a “spiel” – meant to divest his audience of a tiny portion of
their hard-earned money:
Shake it up! Shake it up!
He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen.
Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down,
– He’ll do the rest. Yes!
[…]
For he’s Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing,
Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll.
And all for twenty-five cents, the quarter part of a dollar
Ladies and gentlemen, he’ll bring you joy
[…]
What makes him happy, what makes him dance,
This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping joy boy?
He’s more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he’s Sambo, the dancing doll,
the twentieth-century miracle.
Look at that rumba, that suzy-q, he’s Sambo-Boogie,
Sambo-Woogie, you don’t have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed, he’ll kill
your depression
And your dispossession, he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile
And only twenty-five cents, the brotherly two bits of a dollar because he
wants me to eat.
It gives him pleasure to see me eat.
You simply take him and shake him … and he does the rest.
Thank you, lady. (431–32)
All of Clifton’s address appears in italics in the original, no doubt to denote the unreality of the scene for the narrator but also to indicate its quality as something other
than everyday speech, something much closer to music or to poetry. One can imagine
Clifton stressing individual words, somewhat in the manner of Armstrong, modifying
either their duration or their dynamic. But despite Clifton’s musicality, the narrator is
not comforted by the rhythmic correspondence between his rap and the doll’s movement. On the contrary, he is enraged by their association and identifies them so
strongly with one another that his rhetoric tends to lose a distinction between the two:
What had happened to Clifton? … It was as though he had chosen – how had he
put it the night he fought with Ras? – to fall outside of history. I stopped in the middle
of the walk with the thought. “To plunge,” he had said. But he knew that only in the
Brotherhood could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo
dolls. Such an obscene flouncing of everything human! (434–35)
It is not clear whether the narrator’s judgment – “Such an obscene flouncing of everything human” – refers to the doll or to Clifton, for “flouncing” would appear to apply
equally well to the spring-like motion of the doll but also to Clifton’s speech and its
repetitive breaks and frequent internal rhyme. The narrator seems to view both performances as instances of the same pernicious stereotype, but would he be so quick
to do so if the scene were played out in silence? What would have been the narrator’s
reaction to a solemn-faced Clifton offering the dolls without commentary? It may be
that the narrator is simply appalled by the fact that he is selling the dolls, trafficking
in such images. But it appears that the “flouncing” rhythm of the rap is what enables
him to make such a strong identification between Clifton and the doll. Whereas in
Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the Mahler program, rhythm is what enables a division
between “life and fiction” to be made, here rhythm produces a confusion between the
two, a confusion between a living being and a made thing that is also a confusion
between life and death.6
The narrator seems to believe that an identification with Sambo marks a kind of
symbolic death, a “plunge” outside of history. “Only in the Brotherhood,” he thinks,
“could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls.” The implication is that only the form of life offered to black people within “The Brotherhood”
has a chance of surviving, of making history. By saying “we,” the narrator places himself momentarily within reach of the stereotype. But he does this only as a prelude
to a more intense statement of his disagreement with Clifton and of his own loyalty
to the Brotherhood:
My God! And I had been worrying about being left out of a meeting! I’d overlook it a
thousand times; no matter why I wasn’t called. I’d forget it and hold on desperately to
Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge … To plunge!
(435)7
Previously, we noted the narrator’s anxiety over the loss of form. In this instance, we
witness something similar – a fear for the loss of a form of life that is viable. Crucially,
however, this fear is linked to something like the opposite of the fear of formlessness: a fear of an identification with a stereotype which would be too rigid, deadly for
being too “formed.” “Stereotype” derives from the Greek stereos (solid) ⫹ typos
(type). All stereotypes are rigid, but the narrator’s rhetoric produces an extremely
solid or tight identification between Clifton and the doll. In refusing to identify with
Clifton, the narrator refuses to allow any significant difference between the performance of his friend and that of the doll. It does seem possible, however, to read
Clifton’s performance against the grain as one that mocks the stereotypical image of
Sambo as well as an audience’s delight in the eternally grinning figure.
Despite the narrator’s identification of Clifton with the doll, he literally does not see the
connection between them. Only after Clifton is killed – shot by a policeman shortly after
his performance (pushed one too many times by a cop, the defiance his sales pitch had
only partly disguised emerges when he pushes back) – and the narrator examines one
of the dolls closely, does he discover the secret of its insidious movement:
What had made it seem to dance? Its cardboard hands were doubled into fists, the
fingers outlined in orange paint, and I noticed that it had two faces, one on either side
of the disk of cardboard, and both grinning. Clifton’s voice came to me as he spieled
his directions for making it dance, and I held it by the feet and stretched its neck, seeing it crumple and slide forward. I tried again, turning its other face around. It gave a
tired flounce, shook itself and fell in a heap … It had still grinned when I played the
fool and spat upon it, and it was still grinning when Clifton ignored me. Then I saw a
fine black thread and pulled it from the frilled paper. There was a loop tied in the end.
I slipped it over my finger and stood stretching it taut. And this time it danced. Clifton
had been making it dance all the time and the black thread had been invisible. (my
emphases; 446)
Clifton’s link to the doll is more than a matter of a similar, “flouncing” rhythm; nor is
it the pure product of the audience’s gaze or willingness to credit a resemblance
between the two. It is material at the same time that it is nearly undetectable, a magician’s sleight-of-hand.8 Once we are aware of the invisible string, it becomes possible
to read the text of his performance retroactively and to see that it contains numerous
double-entendres and outright lies. The entire first stanza – the instructions for the
doll’s use which the narrator recalls privately – insists that having shaken the doll one
may stand apart from it and watch it dance. “He’ll do the rest. Yes!” Clifton exclaims.
But the existence of the string suggests that, on the contrary, there is an intimate
connection between doll and performer, and that whatever foolish gestures one
wishes to see it make, one must also, in a sense, perform. One could say that the
“mysterious mechanism” of the doll exposes, at every step, the investment of the
one who derives pleasure from the dance in producing it.
Clifton’s rap plays openly with the origin of the doll’s movements, as he asks
“what makes him dance?” This sly rhetorical question points, of course, towards the
interest or investment on the part of his audience in seeing the doll move about.
What makes the image of an eternally smiling, bouncing, black male performer
appealing? Clifton’s comment “he’s more than a toy” suggests that in his rap we are
dealing with a text that thematizes its own status as a stereotypical representation
that sells. The figure of Sambo is indeed more than a toy: it is a powerful image
whose commodification has had both psychic and economic effects (induced both
“depression” and “dispossession”). The persistence of “Sambo” as a cultural commodity (and it is by no means clear that he has exited the “stage” of popular culture)
points to the historical willingness of Americans to accept black entertainers, if not
always black intellectual, black political, or black economic leaders. And this would
seem to have to do with a willingness to accept images of black pleasure linked to
subordination and a “refusal” to confront images of black pain.
Clifton’s rap is a confidence trick: an effort to dupe others into buying a product
that either will not work for them or that they will have to manipulate actively rather
than enjoy from a distance. As a con it also tends to displace the meaning of the
image, to expose the stereotype of the smiling performer as one that may contain a
half-hidden form of resistance to the power that wishes to maintain it. The narrator’s
suspicion that a “perverse pleasure” underlies the performance proves correct. But
his discovery of the invisible string comes too late for him to realize the full import of
Clifton’s words, too late for him to recognize his friend’s “fierce defiance.”
The narrator’s statement that Clifton “ignored” him is untrue. The references to the
“brotherly two bits of a dollar” as well as to “dispossession” (a word the narrator had
stressed in a speech which Clifton attended) are clearly jabs at him, forms of address
meant to draw the narrator into the joke. But they go unheeded. The “flouncing” rhythm
of Clifton’s rap enables the narrator to refuse to recognize him. And the failure of the two
men to acknowledge each other leads to a terrible outcome: Clifton dies, and the narrator suffers enormous guilt over not having confronted his friend. This failed identification,
a missed opportunity, points to the great risk a performer takes when trying to turn a
stereotype away from its conventional use, away from the image meant to justify domination: he or she may not be understood in their effort to produce such a turn and may
be mistaken for one who simply believes in the stereotype or, worse, has become it.
Melancholy, Listening
In “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” Ellison describes Louis Armstrong as a trickster and magician:
Armstrong’s clownish license and intoxicating powers are almost Elizabethan; he
takes liberties with kings, queens and presidents; he emphasizes the physicality of his
music with sweat, spittle and facial contortions; he performs the magical feat of making romantic melody issue from a throat of gravel. (106)
Here, the slight hesitation about Armstrong’s joking which we noted in the essay on
Charlie Parker is absent (although it would appear that Shakespeare’s clowns surpass even Armstrong in their prowess); and Ellison seems to credit Armstrong with a
precise awareness of how his clownish physicality enables him to transcend his
social status, to take “liberties with kings, queens, and presidents.” This is perhaps
the understanding of Armstrong towards which the narrator of Invisible Man moves in
the prologue, although, as we have indicated, he does not credit Armstrong with a full
awareness of his invisibility. The narrator turns away from a complete identification
with Armstrong in order to realize his own “form” of invisibility. But this turning away
is also a turning towards: he is only able to understand his own invisibility by listening to Armstrong.
The narrator listens to him in a room that he has wired to accommodate 1,369
lights. But an excess of light is apparently not enough to reassure him of his
form/face: he would have an excess of music as well:
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. (8)
In “ ‘I Am I Be’: The Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity” Alexander Weheliye writes persuasively about the narrator’s canny use of technology to invent new forms of subjectivity:
If the multiplicity of the lights reflects the protagonist’s craving to understand his
social invisibility, then the corporeal viscerality of the protagonist’s ideal listening scenario manifests an intense longing to experience his body in sound in ways that he cannot do visually. Wanting to embody and be embodied by sound, the protagonist
imagines his flesh as an eardrum, transforming his corporeal schema into a channel
for his sonic interpellation. Thus, the sonic and the scopic, far from being diametrically
opposed, provide occasion for one another; visual subjection begets sonic subjectivation. (109)
I agree with Weheliye that the narrator’s technology of self-understanding tends to
reconfigure subjectivity along sonic rather than scopic lines, but I am afraid that the
price of such self-understanding, of providing oneself with a face through listening to
an absent other, appears to be the loss of a social world. Moreover, that the loss of
that social world may bring about a debilitating compulsion to repeat a moment that
figures the visible loss of the other. Is not the narrator’s “longing to experience his
body in sound” precisely the index of his loss of contact with others? When the narrator describes listening to his phonograph, he may have been isolated in his underground dwelling for as many as twenty years, playing and replaying records, revisiting
the most traumatic and compelling scenes of his life through a practice of listening
and writing. And while he listens to Armstrong, the trickster who managed both to live
and to succeed, it seems unavoidable that he would also mourn his friend, Clifton,
the joking performer who “plunged” and died. It is unclear to me if this melancholy
mode of “living with music” is viable.
The turn towards Armstrong is somehow meant to compensate for the turn away
from his friend. Yet Armstrong, too, is but a phantom, a voice emanating from a
loudspeaker. Despite its power, this marvelous voice cannot, of course, bring the
dead back to life. The joy of recorded music is linked to a unique form of sorrow: the
feeling that it might be possible, just as one might return the tonearm on a record
player to its original position, to return to an exact moment when the other was alive,
and the recognition that this is impossible.
Coda: “The Pre-face”
In a beautiful photograph, “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Preface,” Jeff Wall
imagines the narrator listening to music in his underground dwelling (see Figure 1).9
Though it would appear impossible to count all of the light-bulbs in the picture, I don’t
doubt that there may be exactly 1,369. But the interest of the photograph does not,
of course, lie in its faithfulness to Ellison’s text but in its going beyond verisimilitude
to become a work of art in its own right. In fact, the very title is a misreading of sorts.
Ellison did not write a “preface” but a “prologue.” That “error” seems telling however.
The photograph is very much a “pre-face,” a work that posits the coming into visibility of a face as an event yet to be completed.10 Moreover, our angle of vision is such
that we feel always on the verge of being able to recognize the face of the narrator.
Wall’s photograph evokes the tremendous melancholy of the moment in the prologue
Jeff Wall
“After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface”, 1999–2000
Transparency in lightbox [174 ⫻ 250.5 cm]
when the narrator tries to grasp through listening the fugitive faces of so many dead
or missing who have preceded him.
How do I know that the figure in the photograph is listening? It is not just his posture, the fact that he is seated, bent forward, directly in front of his phonograph (interestingly, another phonograph sits off to the side, as if the narrator were on his way
towards realizing his dream of the five phonographs). Nor that the red liquid in the glass
next to the phonograph seems a deliberate reference to his favorite drink (“sloe gin”)
to have while listening. Look at what he is holding. It is some kind of cookware, either
a bowl or a pot, and he also holds a rag with which to dry it in one of his hands. The
sink on the left is full of dishes. The narrator has stopped washing dishes in order to
sit in front of his phonograph while drying one of them (one can’t face a windowless wall
for too long while doing dishes). It seems remarkable that, of the two chairs placed next
to the phonograph, he sits in the one that appears less comfortable, not the armchair,
but the folding chair. Perhaps this is because he knows he will have to return to his
task. But it may also be that he does not wish to get too comfortable. The narrator
rests, like a fighter in his corner, waiting to do battle. And the evidence of that battle sits
precariously on top of his armchair – the pages of his novel or autobiography, a few of
which may be seen on the chair’s seat, a few others on top of the little table in front of
the phonograph. It is possible, in fact, that the narrator is reading something like his
own interpretation of the music at the same time that he is listening to it, for a few
pages seem directly in his line of sight. Possibly, the soft armchair is for writing while
the more severe folding chair is for listening, the two seats productive of two temporalities, the disciplined time of listening and the more open time of composition.
“After Invisible Man” has the aspect ratio of a cinematic film still, and much about it
seems intended to evoke the experience of cinema, not least the absent or “implied”
music. It succeeds, however, where so many film stills fail, in preserving the “continuous” tense of cinema, the sense that something is happening, that an action or event
is incomplete. It is rare for actors to turn away from the camera for an extended period
of time. The visibility of the face is of paramount importance to most films. Thus, “After
Invisible Man” manages to appear like a transitional cinematic instant, a moment in
between two others when the subject’s face would be legible. This “interstitial” quality
reinforces its evocation of a moment of intense listening, for listening always occurs in
the interval between an event and its cognition. Listening is transitory, incomplete.
The narrator has not finished mourning either Armstrong or Clifton. This work cannot, in fact, be completed. It will have required hours of listening and writing; and it
will have taken the form of the novel Invisible Man at the close of which he writes:
“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving.
He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try
to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is
this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for
you? (581)
An entire alternate reading of Invisible Man could begin here with a reflection on how
the narrator – who elsewhere in the novel shows himself to be something of a
“square,” incapable of understanding rhymed speech – has, finally, himself learned
to rhyme (“true,” “do,” “through,” “you”). Here he produces an elementary blues
whose questions “what else could I do?”, “what else but try to tell you?” echo the
muted question (muted, like a trumpet, because it is delivered as a parenthesis) of
“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.” The narrator recognizes that, like
Armstrong, like Clifton, he has become a “disembodied voice,” but a voice nevertheless, one that echoes in the body of a listener. And his final question (which has
always baffled me) asks a listener to pursue the sound of his voice not in the customary register of speech but on those lower, bass frequencies one might feel while
listening to five recordings play simultaneously. I still seek it there.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Katherine Bergeron for
her fine reading of an earlier version of this
article. I also wish to thank Armando Manalo
for his excellent editorial assistance. A version
of this paper was published in Qui Parle 2004.
2. On the significance of the “cut,” see James
Snead’s “Repetition as a Figure of Black
Culture” in Black Literature and Literary Theory,
Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Methuen,
1984. 59–80. See also Fred Moten’s In The
Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
2003, especially chapter one which deals with
the prologue to Invisible Man.
3. Does the “and” of the title separate two
independent meanings – “blackness” and
“sadness” – or does it conjoin the terms so that
the title means “bruised” or “damaged”?
Though grammatically distinct, the two
meanings are, of course, not logically
incompatible.
4. The inability of even highly skilled AfricanAmericans to gain social recognition is a
consistent preoccupation of the novel. See, for
example, the episode in chapter three involving
the veterans at the Golden Day, many of whom
are highly educated but have nevertheless
lost their social status and become
institutionalized.
5. On more than one occasion Armstrong
claimed to have invented scat. For some
excellent reflections on the significance of
Armstrong’s “scat-ology,” see Brent Hayes
Edwards’ “The Syntax of Scat” in Critical
Inquiry, 28.3 (Spring 2002), 618–49.
6. The narrator’s confusion over Clifton’s
appearance on the street contrasts with the
great admiration for his face which he
expresses on first meeting him:
I saw that he was very black and very handsome, and as he advanced mid-distance into the
room, that he possessed the chiseled, blackmarble features sometimes found on statues in
northern museums and alive in southern towns in
which the white offspring of house children and
the black offspring of yard children bear names,
features and character traits as identical as the
rifling of bullets fired from a common barrel. And
now close up […] I saw […] a small X-shaped
patch of adhesive upon the subtly blended, velvetover-stone, granite-over-bone, Afro-Anglo-Saxon
contour of his cheek. (362)
The narrator’s disgust over Clifton’s
“identification” with Sambo thus expresses a
profound fear of de-facement, of the ruin of
Clifton’s “statuesque” features.
7. The narrator’s effort to reject Clifton and to
assert that his subjection to the stereotype lies
in the past is contradicted in a violent manner
by the gesture of a man who also watches the
doll’s performance. The narrator says that after
he spits on the doll: “The crowd turned on me
indignantly … I saw a short pot-bellied man
look down, then up at me with amazement and
explode with laughter, pointing from me to the
doll, rocking.” (433). This laughter and this
pointing posit a resemblance between the
narrator and the doll, but one wonders if the
man isn’t missing a chance to assert his own
smiling, rocking resemblance to the tiny figure
(now turned somewhat white by spittle).
8. In a novel whose central concern is the
invisibility of blackness, it is no accident that
the string that ties Clifton to the doll is black.
That the narrator does not see it speaks to his
unwillingness to identify with blackness at this
point in the story.
9. See Jeff Wall: Photographs. Göttingen:
Steidl. 2002. I would like to thank John Muse
for pointing me to this photograph: “After
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface”;
1999–2000; Transparency in lightbox;
174 ⫻ 250.5 cm.
10. The title of Wall’s photograph (“After
Invisible Man”) captures the temporal distortion
of the prologue. In terms of the story, the
prologue comes “after” the rest of the novel.
But as writing, or discourse, it is placed before
that remainder. The grammatical tense of Wall’s
photograph would be something like the future
perfect in that it anticipates a prior event.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. “On the Contemporary
Relationship of Philosophy and Music.” Essays
on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2003. 135–61.
Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong: Satch Plays
Fats (sound recording). Sony, 2000.
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.”
The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York:
Columbia UP, 1983. 67–82.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage
International, 1990.
—. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” The
Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The
Modern Library, 2003. 100–12.
—. “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz.” The
Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The
Modern Library, 2003. 256–65.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “The Echo of the
Subject.” Typography. Stanford: Stanford UP,
1998. 139–207.
Weheliye, Alexander. “ ‘I Am I Be:’ The Subject
of Sonic Afro-Modernity.” Boundary 2 30.2
(2002). 97–114.
Historicizing the Ghostly Sound
of a Ghastly Sight: James
Baldwin’s Blues for Mister
Charlie
Soyica Diggs
ABSTRACT
Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight:
James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie
In African American literature, often authors use music as a model of historical recuperation. Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and W.E.B.
Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) implicitly argue that spirituals, or sorrow songs, can
communicate affective, personal, and social histories. Similarly utilizing a phonic dynamic,
James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), communicates lynching victims’ pain
and its causes by transforming the sound of moaning associated with lynching, which signifies grief and suffering, into the articulate speech of the protagonist, Richard Henry.
James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), begins with Lyle Britten, a white
man, disposing of the dead body of Richard Henry, a black man and the protagonist of
the play, whom Lyle lynches. Directly following the disposal of Richard’s body the “sound
of mourning begins.”1 The opening sequence of Baldwin’s play references the thick
acoustic history associated with lynching. The “sound of mourning,” coming from
Richard’s father’s church, complicates the dangerous struggle between white and black
men the play details by foregrounding the ghostly protagonist’s unfinished business.
Blues for Mister Charlie depicts Richard, a disillusioned recovering drug addict, returning to his hometown after migrating to the North to escape the social restrictions of the
South, and to pursue a music career. Once he returns, he begins to challenge his town’s
most sensitive social conventions. For example, he carries around pictures of white
women in his wallet, he brags to his friends about the relationships he has had with
Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight | 193
these women, and he has a public verbal altercation with Lyle, a storeowner. Richard’s
actions qualify him as dangerous because his racial difference has already registered
him as a threat. In an American context, black masculinity has repeatedly been associated with danger, violence, and sexual excess. Therefore, all of Richard’s actions have
an uncanny quality, since Lyle interprets them based on predominate understandings of
black masculinity and not a personal knowledge of Richard. To quote Freud, “the
uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and
long familiar;” in this case what is “old and long familiar” is a stereotypical understanding of black masculinity.2 Interpretations of his actions, therefore, must contend
with the preexisting history of racial strife in the South. When Richard returns, he
upsets his friends and family because he undermines all of the social mechanisms
arranged to keep black men “in their place” and to alleviate the threat black men pose
to the psychic economy of the townspeople. Since Richard threatens what Lyle knows
and finds familiar, he feels no remorse when he kills Richard. Lyle’s action does not,
however, end Richard’s role in the play. Seeming to haunt the other characters for the
remainder of Blues for Mister Charlie, Richard appears through flashbacks that often
focus on what and how he would respond to a given situation. As the “sound[s] of
mourning” coming from the church, perhaps singing, crying, and moaning, suggest,
even though Richard is dead, he continues to affect the living. Blues for Mister Charlie
intervenes in a highly visual tradition greatly influenced by the systematic silencing of
the victim of the lynch mob by giving voice to Richard after his death.
The way we find the protagonist of Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie, in the opening scene, lying “face down in the weeds,” recalls perhaps the only lynching victim
Americans know by name and sight – Emmett Till (2). Emmett Till’s body haunts James
Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie much like Toni Morrison’s “ghost in the machine.”3 In
1955 the fourteen-year-old, black boy was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for
allegedly whistling at a white woman. Although, Richard Henry, the play’s protagonist,
does not represent Emmett Till, his tragic death and the staging of his funeral, nonetheless, echo throughout the play. Similarly to Till, Richard has a larger effect on his community in death than in life. His haunting speech shows how the acoustic legacies left by
the victims of lynching inform the shape of historical narratives. Richard’s voice marks a
threat similar to the danger expressed by the moans and cries for help enunciated by victims of lynching. At the same time that his voice recalls the pain experienced by lynching
victims and their communities, it signals the trauma that lingers after the fact. Based on
that temporal incongruity, the sound of his voice evokes visceral responses from the
other characters because it brings to mind histories of pain. Richard’s voice disrupts and
jars the other characters as it structures the play.
Blues for Mister Charlie utilizes a legacy of acoustic resistance modeled in African
American literature to present the competing historical narratives that necessitated
Till’s death and the deaths of thousands of other lynching victims. Frederick Douglass
194 | Soyica Diggs
(1818–1895), a formerly enslaved African American who gained international prominence as an abolitionist, and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a forefather of African
American studies and one of the most influential American scholars of the 20th century, strategically represent the sound of spirituals to structure the narrative progress
of their most often cited works, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
and Souls of Black Folk (1903) respectively.4 In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, the author’s first autobiography, the juxtaposition of Douglass hearing his
Aunt Hester screaming, and hearing the singing of spirituals by his fellow enslaved
Africans, creates the conditions that necessitate the development of his concept of
self. The sounds that Douglass hears remain an absent presence that the reader
gains partial access to through the historical results that emerge throughout the narrative. In Douglass’s autobiography, the reader never hears the sound of Aunt Hester
screaming or the enslaved Africans singing, but the narrative demonstrates how those
sounds inform who Douglass becomes. Similarly, in The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays, Du Bois frames each chapter with epigrams of musical notation. The
musical notation or “the sonic signs” that frame The Souls of Black Folk, as Alexander
G. Weheliye explains, “cannot form a mimetic merger with spirituals.”5 The musical
notation points towards sounds, but does not create them. Therefore, the epigrams
serve a double purpose. First, they represent but do not replicate a cultural history
marked by the spirituals, which the individual must hear and feel to realize fully.
Second, they create a structure to read the narrative histories presented in The Souls
of Black Folk. Douglass and Du Bois offer strategies to engage the operation of the
repressed, the ghostly, and the sound of loss in all narrative, by organizing their texts
through sounds that are an absent presence. In these cases, the sound of loss supplements the representation of a fullness that does not exist.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk model
strategies of narration and demand certain modes of reading. Following in that legacy,
Blues for Mister Charlie deciphers the social structures that allowed lynching to take
place by utilizing the sound of Richard Henry’s voice to structure the play. One notable
difference between Baldwin’s and Douglass’s and Du Bois’s pieces is that Blues for
Mister Charlie is a play, and, therefore, through theatrical production, it creates the
sound of Richard’s voice. As with the representations of sound in The Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk, I am primarily concerned with
categorizing the sound of Richard’s voice by the affective and psychic dynamics it produces. In Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, Karla F.C. Holloway explicates
a relationship between artistic representations of historical events, both phonic and
visual, and the affect generated by the actual events. Using the sorrow songs as an
example, she argues,
African American cultural practices – music, literature, and visual arts – all used the
facts of black death and dying as their subject. There was an overlap of fiction and fact,
artistic subject and streetscape, lyric and conversation. The spirituals, those ‘sorrow
songs,’ also of course, captured black melancholy.6
Building on Holloway’s astute analysis in, this article’s formulation, the sounds of lynching, refers to the affective and psychic dynamics produced in response to and as a result
of black death in both historical and artistic representations. Historically, the sound of
lynching, to borrow from Fred Moten, could be best categorized as mo’nin’, a sound that
registers and communicates mourning and pain. Cries of “have mercy,” the dead silence
of shock and the gesticulations and heaving thrust of sounds that often accompany weeping, all qualify. In art, Billie Holiday’s weathered and sophisticated voice, a voice that
sounds like it has “been through something,” heard in her rendition of Lewis Allen’s lyrics
“Strange Fruit,” is the sound most readily associated with lynching.7 In this article, I
explain how Blues for Mister Charlie extends the literary history of representations of
mo’nin’ by creating a voice that explains those losses in order to move from ghostly memory to the introjection of history, from the incorporation of loss to the “work of mourning.”8
The play represents some of the social, psychic, and historical legacies that could produce
such ghastly sights and did produce such ghostly sounds and comments on the relationship between those sounds and the process of historical narration.
One of the final scenes of the play establishes the haunting quality of Richard’s voice
and presents the social and cultural paradigms that his bold performance of black masculinity challenges. The play explains not only why Richard must die, but also why his
death “marks panic.” Not the emergence of panic, especially since “panic had already
led to the death of so many,” but a genuine sense of frantic urgency nonetheless.9 Lyle
describes this confrontation after his acquittal. Even after Lyle has killed Richard, even
in death, he must continually remember Richard questioning him:
RICHARD. Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me? Why are you always trying to cut off my cock? You worried about it? Why? (Lyle shoots again.) Okay. Okay. Okay.
Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like it.
You might get to like it, too. Wow! (Richard falls). (120)
Richard’s final spoken lines, in the play and in the chronology of his life, illuminate the
investments Lyle has made to secure his ego. While Richard can physically die only
once, he asks the question, “Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me?” The
ongoing process he identifies signals the perpetual threat he represents as black masculinity embodied. He continues: “Why are you always trying to cut off my cock?” His
second question points to the threat of castration and highlights the way psychic and
physical forms of castration collapse at the intersection of a particular black, male body
to guard against the bold performance of black masculinity that Richard enacts and the
subversive histories he echoes. Even though a distinction exists between the bodily
penis and the symbolic phallus, “access to the phallus is still predicated upon possession of the penis.”10 Moreover, the emphasis marked by italicizing “my” personalizes this memory and points to a specific voice that Lyle calls forth as he remembers
196 | Soyica Diggs
his final encounter with Richard. Therefore, when Richard states “Okay. Okay. Okay.
Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like
it. You might get to like it, too”, he reveals to the audience the process of fetishization
and the secret desire on the part of Lyle to possess blackness, a symbolic value that
exceeds Richard’s physical body and becomes transcribed onto his voice. When Lyle
kills Richard, he does so to secure his position in the social order of the town. Richard,
however, continues to haunt Lyle through his final spoken words, which draw attention
to Lyle’s inability to kill what really troubles him. Richard’s haunting voice, produced in
Lyle’s memory, also serves as a metaphor for the relationship between unconscious
histories and national narratives.
The characters in the play hear Richard’s voice, which serves as a catalyst for them
to refine their own voices. Lyle fears that Richard will expose the ubiquitous lack he,
like all male subjects unable to realize an unobtainable ideal, fiercely tries to hide.
Unfortunately, Lyle does not realize that the subject he becomes is predicated on the
perpetual incursion of Richard’s voice. Exposure would free Lyle to tell a different
story, allowing him to give up the ghost and become a fuller subject.
By structuring the play through Richard’s speech, Blues for Mister Charlie complicates the genealogy of the lynching narrative. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the reiteration of lynching across the southern landscape reflected and
normalized it as a mode of discipline.11 Depictions of lynching scenes also pervade
early 20th century American literature. Consequently, even though lynching was an
uncommon practice in 1955, and certainly in 1964, the “meaning, made an excess in
time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order,”12 to borrow a phrase from
Hortense Spillers, continued to inform the national landscape. Even though black
communities created strategies to resist the morbid display of mutilated black bodies,
the repetition of those images over time informs our historical understanding of lynching. As Ashraf Rushdy suggests in his analysis of the brutal lynching of James Byrd
(1998), “African American men have long been portrayed as comic buffoons or dangerous criminals, and a large segment of this nation [the United States] remains incapable of imagining black suffering.”13 Once again, the body, covered by the history of
racial construction, serves as a shibboleth of black performance, authorizing certain
actions (the black man acting as violent criminal) and making others undecipherable
(the black male experiencing pain). In order to move past this binary, Baldwin’s play
focuses on the ways discursive performances produce blackness.
The lynching narrative not only qualifies as a significant national narrative, but it
also occupies a specific space in American drama. In the introduction to Black Female
Playwrights: an Anthology of Plays Before 1950, Kathy Perkins describes the proliferation of lynching in America up until the 1930s:
An estimated 3,589 blacks, including 76 women, were lynched between 1882 and
1927. According to historian John Hope Franklin, “In the very first year of the new century
more than 100 Negroes were lynched, and before the outbreak of World War I the number
for the century had soared to more than 1,100.14
Perkins notes Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), Safe
(1929) and Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930) as well as Regina Andrew’s Climbing Jacob’s
Ladder (1931) as distinguished plays by black women about lynching. Meanwhile, black
male playwrights were also interested in this peculiar form of American discipline.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia (1913) and Langston Hughes’s Mulatto (1931)
also qualify as lynching narratives. In both of these texts, the lynching scene establishes the power of the white community while it simultaneously instantiates the human
sacrifice of black people as central to the development of communities.
Besides endowing the victim of lynching with a voice, the play further transforms
the lynching narrative by utilizing the blues as an idiom that situates the function of
Richard’s voice. Houston Baker explains in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature: A Vernacular Theory:
The materiality of any blues manifestation, such as a guitar’s walking bass or a
French harp’s “whoop” of motion seen, is, one might say, enciphered in ways that enable
the material to escape into a named code, blues signification. The material, thus, slips
into irreversible difference.15
Designating the play as a blues for Mister Charlie situates it within a formal and thematic tradition whose material “slips into irreversible difference.” The opacity to which
Baker refers, as enciphered by the blues, explains why Blues for Mister Charlie draws
on this particular music as a formal model. Through its structure, the play references
the sounds of lynching and the cadence of the blues tradition in a manner that reveals
the sounds of lynching in all its mutations as acoustic regimes constituting and constituted by America.
Prior to Baldwin’s depiction of Richard’s haunting voice, Jean Toomer described a different kind of phonic excess enacted at the site of a lynching. “Blood Burning Moon,”
one of the short stories in the first section of Toomer’s Cane, depicts a black man, Tom
Burwell, who is lynched for fighting and killing a white man, Bob Stone, in a fight over a
black woman, Louisa. As in Blues for Mister Charlie, in this story, too, societal constraints
challenge the black characters’ ability to act. Thus, as expressed through the changes in
the form of the story, from prose to poetry, the characters must invent modes of expression, practices that exceed the constraints of the societal narrative.
Through the spilling of Tom’s blood and the depiction of the sound of lynching, the
story instantiates the physical contribution black people have made to America’s history and landscape. After fighting with Bob and eventually cutting his throat, Tom is
apprehended, bound and dragged to a factory:
The big man shoved him (Tom) through the door. The mob pressed in from the sides.
Taunt humming. No words. A stake was sunk into the ground. Rotting floor boards piled
around it. Kerosene poured on the rotting floor boards. Tom bound to the stake.16
198 | Soyica Diggs
Tom is portrayed as quiet, “his eyes were set and stony. Except for irregular breathing, one
would have thought him already dead.”17 In African American literature the lynching victim
is often depicted as quiet, if not silent, in the face of demise. Writers portray black people
performing with dignity in death to counter the dehumanizing stereotypes ascribed to
African Americans, and used to justify lynching. Similarly, in Cane the lynching victim is
silent and it is the white mob that is undignified in their screams. Once “a great flare muffled in black smoke shot upward,” the only sound heard is the mob yelling:
Its yell echoed against the skeleton stone walls and sounded like a hundred yells.
Like a hundred mobs yelling. Its yell thudded against the thick front wall and fell back.
Ghost of a yell slipped through the flames and out the great door of the factory. It fluttered like a dying thing down the single street of factory town.18
In this case, although the “Ghost of a yell” comes from the lynch mob, it reveals
part of the acoustic legacy echoed through Richard’s haunting voice, which is also
filled with Till’s legendary whistle. The “ghost of a yell” draws attention to the lack of
the victim’s voice as it presents a sound associated with lynching as a disembodied
echo. Similarly, many accounts of Emmet Till’s lynching story focus on the legendary
whistle that purportedly incited his killers. Both references point to the way sound
lingers after its production has ended, making it a fitting method of symbolic representation for the effects of lynching Baldwin delineates in his play.
Fred Moten extends the theorization of the acoustic history of lynching saying, “you
need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost, the
agency of the fixed but multiply apparent shade, an improvisation of spectrality, another
development of the negative.”19 Moten implies that ghosts always have a sound that
must be attended to, a sound that can be read back alongside the visual to enrich and
explain it. However, that sound is complex and dissonant because it calls on historical
narratives some Americans would rather forget. As a result, those sounds manifest
themselves as the “polyphonic affectivity of the ghost;” sounds that signal the return
of repressed, the history of mo’nin’. Recalling the famous photograph of Emmett Till’s
corpse displayed on the cover of Jet magazine, Moten argues that the photo had a
phonic materiality because the photograph “restage[d] death and rehearse[d]
mo[ur]nin[g].”20 Aware of the social impact Jet created by printing Till’s photograph on
its cover, Moten describes an accompanying phonic dynamic. Moten’s language, calling
the photography a re-staging of death, indicates viewers had seen this kind of death
before. Furthermore, his contention that the photograph “rehearse[d] mo[ur]nin[g],”
implies that once Till’s image became fixed for the world to see, African Americans, and
Americans in general, were then able to begin to mourn his loss. The haunting, “polyphonic activity” of the photograph echoed “the logos that voice implies” and as Moten
goes on to explain,
has been complicated by the echo of a trangressive whistle, abortive seduction, stuttered leave-taking, and by reconstructive overtones of mo’nin’. Something is remembered
and repeated in such complications. Transferred. To move or work through that something,
to improvise, requires thinking about mourning and how mourning sounds, how moaning
sounds. What’s made and destroyed.21
Moten works carefully to explain how the transgressive whistle complicates “the logos
that voice implies.” He suggests that the trangressive whistle lingers, repeats, modifies, and becomes incorporated in the voice’s implied logos. In the moaning evoked by
mourning, Emmett Till transforms the polyphonic activity produced by the lynch mob.
Yet, the two do not function in isolation. A more productive formulation would emerge
by considering how the sound of the lynch mob, the transgressive whistle, mourning
sound, and moaning sounds collectively inform the sounds of lynching.
In Blues for Mister Charlie, also structured through phonic interruption, the interruption of Richard’s voice extends the representation of the sounds of lynching by calling on another acoustic history: the blues. And, as the play’s title infers, the blues
idiom inflects Richard’s voice, which allows it to recall the horror of lynching, while critiquing the contemporary social structures that encourage the practice. The blues,
originating at the crossroads of African and American music, incorporates the inherent
dichotomy between African Americans and the concept of nation. In “African
Slaves/American Slaves: Their Music” Amiri Baraka writes, blues is “the product of
the black man in this country; or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think
about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”22 Baraka limits his analysis to a specific gendered identity. Nevertheless,
Baraka distinguishes the initiating societal pressures that ushered in the blues by noting that the trans-Atlantic slave trade resulted in the blues. He also makes clear the
consistent restrictions experienced by black Americans as both African and American
captives. The blues as songs of the American captives demand a certain performance
of Richard’s voice. While his voice evokes the grief and pain produced by lynching,
it also inspires insurgent behavior. In the third and final act, Richard’s father’s
intractable testimony is inflected by the conversations he had with his son. Because
Richard falls in the gulf between Whitetown and Blacktown, he questions the social
mores.
By invoking the blues, the play also demonstrates how the personal informs the
social. Lynching signifies terror and panic. To comment on the process of creating terror, Baldwin’s play attempts to disarm the public display. The blues, as Cheryl Wall
argues in Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition,
“offers a way of contextualizing the ‘private story.’ ” She goes on to write, quoting Amiri
Baraka:
In African American culture, the blues had been the vehicle for discussing and analyzing people’s most private concerns. In the musical tradition, the persona of the individual performer dominates the song which centers on the singer’s own feelings,
experiences, fears, dreams, acquaintances, and idiosyncrasies. As Amiri Baraka (then
200 | Soyica Diggs
Leroi Jones) argued in Blues People, “[E]ven though its birth and growth seems connected finally to the general movement of the mass of black Americans into the central
culture of the country [during and after Reconstruction], blues still went back for its
impetus and emotional meaning to the individual, to his completely personal life and
death.”23
Richard haunts deeply personal scenes in the play, and, as Baraka indicates, the
scenes derive their “emotional meaning” from the individual. The inflection of the blues
comes through the environments that house the tenor of Richard’s voice. The scenes
focus on how Richard’s haunting informs the individual’s self-perception. The acoustic
is not inherently more private than the visual, but the specific idiom – the blues – that
the play deploys, lends itself to the personal. Blues for Mister Charlie does not turn to
the acoustic, but echoes an acoustic legacy, the cry of many thousands gone, the
“ghost of a yell” emanating from the mob, and the whistle of Emmett Till, through a
personal (African) American form.
The blues song, in Blues for Mister Charlie, also mourns the inability of Parnell
James, a white lawyer whose class privilege allows him to serve as the mediator
between the white and black communities, to acknowledge his social privilege. In the
trial of Lyle Britten for the murder of Richard Henry, Parnell is called to testify for the
prosecution. Parnell has information that could confirm Lyle’s guilt, but he decides to
withhold that information from the court. As a result, Richard’s story never becomes
part of the public record. Nonetheless, through a flashback that interrupts his testimony, Parnell realizes how Richard’s death secures his performance of American masculinity. Even though Lyle denies killing Richard, he offers a justification for Richard’s
death; while on the stand, Lyle claims that Richard assaulted his wife. When the state
questions Parnell about the same encounter he recalls:
PARNELL. I – I knew of a fight. It was understood that the boy had gone to Mr. Britten’s
store looking for a fight. I – I cannot explain that, either.
THE STATE. Who told you of the fight?
PARNELL. Why – Mr. Britten.
THE STATE. And he did not tell you that Richard Henry had attempted to assault his
wife? Come, Mr. James!
PARNELL. We were all very much upset. Perhaps he was not as coherent as he might
have been – perhaps I failed to listen closely. It was my assumption that Mrs. Britten had
misconstrued the boy’s actions – he had been in the North a long time, his manner was
very free and bold. (113)
Parnell presents the discrepancy between his testimony and Lyle’s as a lapse in memory. The structure of the play, however, uncovers what causes Parnell to “fail to listen
closely.” Immediately before Parnell takes the stand, the play flashes back to Parnell
in his bedroom, contemplating his sexual desires for black women. In order for Parnell
to negotiate his anxiety over Richard’s death he has to regress to a personal, sexualized space. He thinks:
PARNELL. Richard would say that you’ve got – black fever! Yeah, and he’d be wrong –
that long, loud, black mother. I wonder if she’s asleep yet – or just lying there, looking at
the walls. Poor girl! All your life you’ve been made sick, stunned dizzy, oh Lord! Driven half
mad by blackness. Blackness in front of your eyes. Boys and girls, men and women –
you’ve bowed down in front of them all! And then you hated yourself. Hated yourself for
debasing yourself? Out with it Parnell! The nigger-lover! … Jesus! I’ve always been afraid.
Afraid of what I saw in their eyes? They don’t love me, certainly. You don’t love them,
either! Sick with a disease only white men catch. Blackness, What is it like to be black? To
look out on the world from that place? I give nothing! How dare she say that! My girl, if
you knew what I’ve given! Ah. Come off it, Parnell. To whom have you given? What name
did I call? What name did I Call? (106)
Parnell’s disjointed flashback, marked by the incursion of echoes of Richard’s voice,
exposes the motivations for his testimony. One could imagine Parnell performing his
prediction that Richard would deem him infected with “black fever” in a mocking semblance of Richard’s voice. Even if the actor did not issue the line in that way, the text
calls attention not only to what Richard would say but also to the way he would say it
through the emphasis added by the dash that precedes and the exclamation point that
ends it. Parnell signals the impact of Richard’s imagined judgment by defending
against it by invoking a racial slur. Parnell fears what admitting Richard’s innocence
reveals about him. If Richard were innocent, Parnell would have to confront the ways
he – like all other subjects – constantly avoids facing their limitations and insufficiencies. Parnell’s anger with Richard, “that long, loud, black mother,” is a manifestation
of the challenge Richard poses to the way Parnell sees himself. He lies to protect himself, to halt the revelation produced by Richard’s probing voice. Each time Parnell
utters the word “blackness,” he draws attention to the threat Richard poses which is
symbolized in the play by the incursion of the sound of Richard’s voice.
Parnell’s repeated iteration of “blackness,” in a memory that takes place in his bedroom, also foregrounds what Richard’s sexuality has to do with his identification as a
black man. Richard’s hyper-virility mirrors the excess attributed to blackness and the
excessive materiality of the voice, the other that the child cannot incorporate, and
therefore, in defense, eventually repudiates. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice
in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman contends
the male subject later hears the maternal voice through himself – that it comes to
resonate for him with all that he transcends through language […] the male subject subsequently “refines” his “own” voice by projecting onto the mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.24
202 | Soyica Diggs
Blues for Mister Charlie depicts the loss of Richard as incomplete by flashing back to
him throughout the play. Parnell attempts to refine his own voice by projecting onto
Richard all that is unassimilable to his position. It is fitting that Parnell literally
attempts to take his words and put them in Richard’s mouth, since the play represents
the excess stereotypically ascribed to blackness as akin to the quality of the sound of
the voice. Consequently, Richard’s voice and the words he says remain a haunting
trace that interrupts the narrative structure of the play.
The play establishes a stunning addendum to Freud’s representation of sexual difference, a visual difference, as the primary difference.25 Freud depicts the castration
crisis as the moment when the male child first learns to manage the difference of the
female child and not, strikingly, his own difference from her. As portrayed by Freud, the
male, racially non-marked and hence implicitly white child initially experiences the castration crisis when he sees that the female child does not have a penis. Freud
describes:
when a little boy first catches sight of a girl’s genital region, he begins by showing
irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen, he softens it down or looks about for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations.
It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that
the observation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses
a terrible storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat
which he has hitherto laughed at.26
The little girl poses a psychic threat to the male child because her body establishes
the possibility of physical castration. In Freudian terms the female body initiates the
primary psychic cut which continues to haunt the male throughout his life. Kaja
Silverman revolutionizes Freud’s paradigm, by arguing that difference is first registered
through hearing not through sight. Theorizing what she calls an “acoustic mirror,”
Silverman contends that before the child sees himself as different from others he
notices the difference between his voice and the voice of his mother. By situating the
loss of the mother’s voice, as a linguistic, primary loss, Silverman upsets the gender
hierarchy implicit in Freud’s model. Silverman’s challenge to Freud also enables analysis of the racial dynamics contained in his depiction of the castration crisis.
Reorienting Freud and pressing at the implications of Silverman’s analysis, I contend
that Blues for Mister Charlie establishes the phenotypic difference in features associated with race as a necessary part of the force that perpetuates psychic division, the
force that recalls a prior loss. Silverman argues that the little boy’s visual recognition
of physical difference is a by-product of a preexisting psychic process: he associates
the threat of losing the penis with another loss, the loss of the mother’s voice. Blues
for Mister Charlie explains the visual threat posed by the black male body, by recouping another overlooked phonic history of loss – the sounds of lynching. In the same
way that the little boy represses the loss of his mother’s voice, Blues for Mister Charlie
suggests American narrative has repressed the suffering of African American’s and
the sound of their mo’nin.’
The choices made in staging the Broadway premier of Blues for Mister Charlie
heighten the impact of Parnell’s confessional soliloquy. The production of the play
staged in April 1964 by the American National Theater and Academy Theater (ANTA)
utilized no scenery.27 The production depended on the effect caused by lighting, intonation, and spacing to communicate the shifts in time and space. Both white and
black characters occupy the stage at the same time, however when the black characters present their stories they move downstage while white characters move upstage,
similarly the white characters move to the front during their scenes.28 Placing individuals from one community in the shadows and the others illuminated but occupying the
stage at the same time, the production of the play created a spatial dynamic that complements the psychic history it presents. Furthermore, by not having scenery the ANTA
production emphasizes how sound and body language can work together to create narrative.
Keeping in mind the lack of scenery further emphasizes how Blues for Mister
Charlie derives its narrative coherence from Richard Henry’s voice, which shifts the
focus of lynching from the event, what happened, to the causes for the event, why did
this happen? The stage directions say:
For the murder scene, the aisle functions as a gulf. The stage should be built out, so
that the audience reacts to the enormity of this gulf and so that RICHARD, when he falls,
falls out of sight of the audience, like a stone, into the pit. (2)
Consequently, the play opens with: “In the darkness we hear a shot. Lights up slowly on
LYLE, staring down at the ground. He looks around him, bends slowly and picks up
RICHARD’s body as though it were a sack. He carries him upstage drops him.” (2) At the
end when the death scene is reenacted, Richard again falls out of sight. While his falling
body represents the loss experienced in each lynching, his haunting return throughout the
play models how to transform the affect associated with loss into insurgence.
The flashbacks staged in Blues for Mister Charlie elaborate on the cutting that Freud
describes. Freud depicts the male subject deploying strategies he developed to counter
the threat of castration in moments when he feels threatened. In Blues for Mister Charlie
characters register a threat in the moments before the flashbacks. As a part of the play’s
structural apparatus, the flashbacks expose why the character feels threatened and what
the character thinks he or she might be losing. The flashbacks as interruptions or cuts
draw attention to the cultural histories that exemplify the process of castration.
Kaja Silverman qualifies the acoustic realm as a suitable space to historicize the
anatomical loss described by Freud as the castration crisis. She depicts the auditory
as one of the spheres, if not the most important one, in which the child, both male and
female, learns to distinguish between self and other – between his or her own vocal
self and the mother’s voice. In the moment of distinction the mother’s voice becomes
204 | Soyica Diggs
excess. The child’s realization that the voice is not a part of the self, the realization
that the child cannot contain the voice, is both traumatic and necessary.
Nevertheless, the child creates strategies to manage the loss of the mother’s voice.
Freud attempts to present the castration crisis as an initial splitting, as the male
child’s first introduction to the potential of loss. Silverman counters Freud arguing, that
“there is a castration which precedes the recognition of anatomical difference – a castration to which all cultural subjects must submit, since it coincides with separation
from the world of objects, and the entry into language.”29 Silverman locates the threat
of castration, the threat of losing part of the self, as not gender specific, but as a common bill that all individuals must pay to enter into language. She explains that
“[a]ccording to the terms of Freud’s own argument, if the spectacle of female castration strikes the male viewer as ‘uncanny,’ he himself must already have experienced
castration […] he too inhabits the frame of the unpleasurable image.”30 When the
male child realizes his anatomical difference, he is already in pursuit of the phallus,
which is “a signifier for symbolic knowledge, power and privilege.”31 Parnell’s and
Lyle’s power depends not only on their sex but also their gender, within the social political landscape of the U.S. Therefore, every mechanism they formulate to defend
against the threat of castration that is directed toward the object, in this case Richard,
will always fall short, since “what seems to confront [them] from without, in the guise
of the [black male] body, actually threatens him from within, in the form of [their] own
history.”32 Parnell and Lyle are unable to banish the threat symbolized by Richard’s
voice because they participate in producing it.
Baldwin’s play emphasizes the collective phonic nature of lynching, a practice primarily associated with the visual, to uncover its perpetrators motivations. Lynching is
a social mechanism par excellence of disciplining communities. In Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault theorizes the interdependence of public violence and community consolidation. He asserts that “[t]he public execution did
not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.”33 Moreover, he contends that public displays of violence served a reciprocal purpose; they established the role of the discipliner as those displays subordinated the disciplined. Emmet’s mother, Maime Till
Bradley, attempted to shift the power dynamics implicit in the visual dominance of
lynching by presenting her son’s mutilated corpse in a casket instead of hanging from
a tree.34 By altering the setting of the “scene of subjection,” to borrow a phrase from
Saidiya Hartman, Bradley usurped some of the power of the lynch mob.35 Till’s mother,
however, was not the first family member of a lynching victim to challenge the authority of the mob. Therefore, her actions must be read within the historical context that
precedes them. In “Exquisite Corpse,” Ashraf Rushdy describes some of the actions
of Bradley’s precursors. He explains:
In 1889, after a mob broke into a Barnwell, South Carolina, jail and lynched eight
African American men, the local black community displayed its solidarity at the funeral.
More than five hundred people lined the street, and several women implored the Lord to
“burn Barnwell to the ground.” The community refused to bury six of the men, claiming
that the whites who killed them should bear that responsibility. In Virginia, Joseph
McCoy’s aunt refused to bury the body of her nephew, who was lynched in 1897. “As the
people killed him, they will have to bury him,” she explained. The body, whether buried or
left to the elements, had become a symbol of the injustice and barbarism of the white
community, the failure of the nation’s founding principles: Let the dead bury their
dead.35 Family and community members decided to respond to the brutality of lynching
by transferring the symbolic weight of the death from the victims to the “whites who
killed them.”
Instead of utilizing the dense visual history formed by historical responses to lynchings, Blues for Mister Charlie takes a different tactic; it obscures lynching from view
and does not emphasize its physical results. The play calls attention to the aural history that may have been overlooked by focusing on the visual evidence. The reorientation in Blues for Mister Charlie from the visual to the acoustic marks a consideration
of what Toni Morrison posits as the “racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of
race.’ ”37 In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison considers how race or racial unconsciousness informs the narrative choices of American
writers. She goes on to question how the racial unconsciousness of the writer contributes to the formation of “literary whiteness” and “literary blackness.” Using the
logic implicit in Morrison’s inquiries, Baldwin’s act of narration not only comments on
the creation of American literature but also on the shape of all American narrative and
its reception. The phonic history produced by the theatrical production of the play
points to how racial unconsciousness interrupts, informs, and reroutes historical narration. In that way, Blues for Mister Charlie stages an aural intervention, which mimics
the historical interruption caused by Till’s death. Baldwin’s play and the emphasis it
puts on sounding Richard’s voice, calls into question the primacy afforded the visual
signifiers of race.
206 | Soyica Diggs
Notes
1. Baldwin 2. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically.
women writers, including Gloria Naylor and Toni
Morrison consider the impact of violence on
black women and the black family (46–47).
2. Freud “The ‘UnCanny’ ” 220.
12. Spillers 203.
3. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature,”
Toni Morrison calls the African American
presence in American literature “the ghost in
the machine” (11). The phrase was coined by
Gilbert Ryle.
4. Cheryl Wall explains in Worrying the Line
Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary
Tradition, that “ ‘The Sorrow Songs’ is the
penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk.
Its importance derives from its rightful
estimation of the centrality of spirituals to
American culture. Not simply the ‘sole American
music, but […] the most beautiful expression of
human experience born this side of the seas,’
the spirituals were the slaves’ message to the
world. Extending the insight of Douglass in his
1845 Narrative, Du Bois defines the ‘hearttouching witness of these songs’ as an
indictment of the ‘inhumanity of slavery’.” (36)
13. Rushdy 77.
14. Perkins 9–10.
15. Baker 6.
16. Toomer 34.
17. Toomer 34.
18. Toomer 34–35.
19. Moten 196.
20. Moten 196.
21. Moten 201.
22. Baraka 17.
23. Wall 118.
5. Weheliye 320.
24. Silverman 81.
6. Holloway 61.
7. In Gayl Jones’ novel, Corregidora, Cat, a
secondary character, categorizes the voice of
the main character Ursa, as a voice that sounds
like “you been through something” (44).
8. Abraham and Torok 16.
9. Moten 196.
10. Silverman 26.
11. Farah Jasmine Griffin claims in “Who Set
You Flowin’?”: “Through both the media and the
cultural production of these African-American
visual, literary and musical artists, lynching
became a dominant symbol of the South” (15).
She goes on to explain that although the
frequency of representations of lynching in
fiction decreased significantly after 1968, black
25. Freud “Some Psychic Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,”
252.
26. Ibidem.
27. The ANTA Theater became the Virginia
Theater in 1981 and the August Wilson Theatre
in 2006.
28. Gansberg, “James Baldwin Turns to
Broadway.”
29. Silverman 1.
30. Silverman 17.
31. Silverman 26.
32. Silverman 17.
33. Foucault 49.
34. For more on Bradley’s decision to display
her son’s corpse see: Maime Till-Mobley and
Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The
Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America.
New York: Random House, 2003. “The Untold
Story of Emmett Louis Till.” Till Freedom Come.
Keith Beauchamp, writer, producer and director;
Ceola J. Beauchamp, Edgar Beauchamp, Ali
Bey, Steven Laitmon, executive producers;
Yolande Geralds, producer. 2002.
35. Saidiya V. Hartman. Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
36. Rushdy 72.
37. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xii.
Bibliography
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and
the Kernel volume I. Chicago: The U of Chicago P,
1994.
Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and AfroAmerican Literature: A Vernacular Theory.
Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie. New
York: Dial P, 1964.
Baraka, Amiri. Blue People: Negro Music in White
America. New York: William Morrow, 1963.
—. “The ‘UnCanny.’ ” The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
Ed. James Strachey. Vol XVII. London: Hogarth,
1955. 218–56.
—. “The Unconscious.” The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol XIV. London:
Hogarth, 1955. 159–209.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”:
The African American Migration Narrative. New
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by
Himself. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s P,
1993.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection:
Terror Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford UP,
1997.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New
York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. [originally published 1903].
Holloway, Karla F.C. Passed On: African American
Mourning Stories. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity
in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon P,
1975.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XXI.
London: Hogarth, 1961. 149–57.
—. “Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol.
XIX. London: Hogarth, 1955. 241–60.
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Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis.
The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1973.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage
Books. 1992.
—. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The AfroAmerican Presence in American Literature.”
Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1989): 1–34.
Minnesota P, 2003.
White and In Color: Essays on American
Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2003. 203–29.
Perkins, Kathy. “Introduction.” Black Female
Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 1–17.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1975.
[originally published 1923].
Rushdy, Ashraf. “Exquisite Corpse.” Transition
9.3 (2000): 70–77.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female
Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s
Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black
Wall, Cheryl. Worrying the Line: Black Women
Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.
Weheliye, Alexander. “The Grooves of
Temporality.” Public Culture 17.2 (2005):
319–38.
Between Orality and Literature:
The Alida Folktale in Ellen
Ombre’s Short Fiction
“Fragments”
Joy Smith
ABSTRACT
Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Folktale in
Ellen Ombre’s Short Fiction “Fragments”
This essay explores sound and subject formation through orality in the case of a
Surinamese folktale. It examines through different historical periods, from pre-independent
Surinam to post independence, and various mediums, such as radio, theater, and print,
how communal and national affiliations are achieved. Questions of identifications through
sound, in terms of the cross-cultural and the transnational, are raised as a result of how
the folktale travels from Surinam to the Netherlands. The meaning and importance of the
folktale, its strategic deployment at home and abroad, are explored here. The latter half
of the essay concentrates on the ways sound is captured in literature with an analysis of
a short story, written by a Surinamese migrant writer, Ellen Ombre, in which the tale
appears in print. The story was part of a collection that was published in the Netherlands
during the postcolonial era.
The Alida Folktale
There is a story about a beautiful, mulatta, slave girl, told for generations, passed down,
from slave to slave in Surinam, and to their current-day descendants. A Creole house
slave’s beauty, particularly her lovely figure, catches the eye of the plantation owner who
then takes her for his own sexual gratification. Later, when the master is away, the mistress expresses her rage at her husband’s sexual infidelity by venting her wrath on the
defenseless slave girl by brutally mutilating her: she hacks off one of her breasts.
Despite the severity of the attack and having been disfigured, the slave girl survives.
Between Orality and Literaure | 211
This story, now known as the Alida folktale, is a Surinamese oral form, part of a
much larger array of black, expressive culture called vernacular. In his influential book
Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Houston A. Baker Jr. is concerned with
explicating the way sound permeates African American literature. To that end, he
focuses on the term vernacular, a word he defines in expressive terms as “arts
native or peculiar to a particular country or locale” (2). But in alluding to black vernacular forms in the U.S., and by his own definition, all of the Americas, he asserts,
[t]he ‘vernacular’ in relation to human beings signals “a slave born on his master’s
estate” (2). He is alluding to, and making central, the material conditions of slavery,
what he calls an “ancestral matrix” that has produced a particular kind of creativity
for black people in the Americas. When he defines the “blues” he does not restrict it
simply to a musical form, or a particular geographical area, the U.S., for he refers to
black slaves as “Africans in the New World”:
The blues are a synthesis […] Combining work songs, group seculars, field hollers,
sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald
humor, elegiac lament, and much more, they constitute an amalgam that seems always
to have been in motion in America – always becoming, shaping, transforming, displacing the peculiar experiences of Africans in the New World. (5)
Black vernacular forms have their basis in a history of certain conditions in the “New
World,” and they are a kind of response to these conditions that include, but are not
limited to verbal practices. Literary critic Carolyn Cooper concurs with this broader
definition of oral forms in her book on Caribbean literature, Noises in the Blood. In it
she writes, “[t]he oral tradition in Jamaica is conceived as a broad repertoire of
themes and cultural practices, as well as a more narrow taxonomy of verbal techniques” (2). The vernacular forms to which Baker and Cooper refer include diverse
forms such as music, dance, drumming, rituals, cultural beliefs and practices such
as obeah, story telling rituals, and proverbs. This expressive culture encompasses
performance, dramaturgy, the body, and importantly sound.
Much has been written about the enforced illiteracy, and the “embattled terrain” of
writing for black people during slavery in the Americas.1 Well-known scholar of orality,
Walter J. Ong notes, “[i]ntertextual analysis has commonly paid relatively little attention
to the interaction between texts and their circumambient orality” (Ong 164). This article
attempts to do just that by first exploring the particular social relations that have produced, and reproduced the Alida folktale, and then examining its continual occurrence in
various media, in order to ascertain its importance for Surinamers of African descent. The
history of slavery in the New World, captured, ravished, and pained bodies, as well as a
lack of access to alphabetic script provide the backdrop for these performances. Both
Fred Moten and Paul Gilroy emphasize expressive culture, particularly music, as well
as “hollerin,” and “moanin,” as important cultural and individual acts, modes of communication, and fleeting experiences of performed identity that “raises aspects of
212 | Joy Smith
embodied subjectivity that are not reducible to the cognitive and the ethical” (Gilroy
76). Gilroy is speaking of structures of affect expressed and communicated in ways
other than writing, or even language. They evoke a painful history, the sounds of slavery. The Alida folktale is part of this history, what could be described as an acoustic
legacy of slavery that encompasses much of black vernacular expression.2
While Gilroy and Moten choose music as their main subject, as Baker and Cooper
have asserted, musical performance, song and dance are not separate and distinct
from verbal, oral forms of black vernacular cultural expression. They often interact, or
collide, influencing each other and acting as models for various expressions. For
example the dance Juba came out of the prohibition against slaves drumming in the
New World. Instead they used their bodies, slapping thighs, hands and feet, in order
to recreate the sounds of the drums, a powerful form of expression and communication in Africa. The drum, its tonal quality, has influenced orality as well. Literary theorist Robert Elliot Fox has termed this influence “drumtalk” and asserts its major role
in black rhetorics, rhythms, writings and literatures (3–16).3
Orality in literature has been explored with regard to its intertextual relations with
oral forms, indigenous resources of a particular culture (Arndt; Quayson), the oral performative approach, where “speakerly texts” are examined that emphasize sound in
terms of voice, patois, Creole, as well as style, rhythm, alliterations, call and response
(Cooper; Gates; Glaser and Pausch; Hoving 122–83), and/or black musics, jazz and
blues, as models for literature (Baker; Mackey). Much as Fox’s assertion of the tonal
quality of the drum operating underneath, or infiltrating various aspects of black language and writing, I would like to locate the importance of the Alida folktale, as not necessarily on the level of narrative, but on the symbolic, that of sentiment, as an
invocation of a painful history of terror, that addresses particular readers in acts of cultural memory and communal bonding, i.e. aural communities. This calls for thinking
about narrative, in this case, as something less linear and referential, and reorienting it
to the oral as excess, noise, and an absent presence.
To that end, I provide an analysis, Ellen Ombre’s short story “Fragments” that will
take into consideration this opacity (Glissant 111–20, 189–94), when attempting to
identify an oral poetics. While the oral connotes speaking, the aural turns on listening and hearing, and this is key to Ombre’s work and how sound operates within the
text. I will also investigate how Ombre constructs a model of subjectivity in relation
to sound in her fiction, and I assert that this is mirrored in reader response; that
Ombre is able to summon an aural community with particular readers.4
Repetition, Revision, and the “Cut”
The “material conditions” of slavery to which Baker, Gilroy, and Moten refer, is part of
the “ancestral matrix” of slavery in the New World that precedes and produces the
Alida folktale. It is based on an actual historical event involving two now famous
women: a notoriously cruel slave mistress, Susanna du Plessis, and an unknown
slave girl, posthumously named Alida. In the historical experience from which the
folktale grew, the unknown mulatta slave girl was stabbed repeatedly in the chest,
ran out of the slave owners house, and then died in the streets of Paramaribo. Du
Plessis who was of Dutch descent, despite the French name, has come to signify the
cruelty of the Dutch slave-owning, colonial enterprise in Surinam.5
The importance of the figure of Alida for Surinamers of African descent is apparent in the yearly commemoration day held for her in Surinam, and she has been
memorialized in a monument whose image captures the silent scream of a onebreasted slave girl (Accord 65; Neus-van der Putten 15, 130–37). Beginning in the
sixties, the folktale began appearing in print in Surinam as part of a play about
Susanna du Plessis. In the late eighties and early nineties, it was written into fiction
and published in the Netherlands. In 2003, the Alida tale was recounted in two nonfiction works that were also published in Holland. The changing nature of folktales,
and the fact that they are anonymously and communally authored, makes it difficult
to account for transformations in the narrative unless they appear in print. Over the
past fifty-sixty years, however, since this oral folktale has been incorporated into written works, changes and shifts in details have been documented.6
In the book titled, With My Own Eyes: A Current Day Look at Surinamese Slavery,7 written by Clark Accord and Nina Jurna, the authors have compiled fiction, memoir, oral
forms and nonfiction pieces in order to assert links between the colonial past of
Surinam and current day Dutch society in the Netherlands. In a chapter titled “Slavin
Alida, symbol van onverzettelijkheid” [The Female Slave Alida, Symbol of Indomitability],
the folktale is described as one of the most important out of the history of slavery in
Surinam, that would make two women, Alida and Susanna du Plessis, two of the bestknown figures from the colonial period in Surinam (Accord 65–70).8 Given the name of
the chapter, Accord and Jurna stress that the importance of the tale is in the slave’s
imagined survival despite inhumane conditions; a testimony of strength and endurance
for Surinamers of African descent.
Hilda Neus-van der Putten, in her book Susanna du Plessis: Portrait of a Slave
Mistress,9 identifies 1963 as the year when the unnamed victim of the folktale becomes
“Alida.” The shift from merely surviving the stabbing, to the cutting off of one breast, also
occurs in a play about Susanna du Plessis performed in 1963.10 This performance
occurred during a centennial celebration marking the one-hundredth year of the abolition
of slavery in Surinam. Neus-van der Putten implies that this may be the reason for Alida’s
new found status as survivor (130–31). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that a play about
the cruel plantation mistress and the transformation from death, to a story of survival for
the slave girl, would occur in the decade just preceding decolonization.
Neus-van der Putten asserts a connection between a rise in national consciousness that becomes apparent in Surinamese writers’ works during the 1950’s when
214 | Joy Smith
they began to stress their own culture and appreciation of creolized languages over
the supposed superior European languages (128–32). Cultural anthropologist
Regina Bendix would seem to concur with Neus-van der Putten on the use of folktales
in nation formation. In her book, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore
Studies, she discusses how folklorists have historically been concerned with how
folktales have been used for nationalism, the psycho-social importance of these
works and their communal significance. In line with the changing nature of the
Alida tale, Bendix emphasizes the dynamic, performative aspect of folktales, and
the importance of cultural context, as she discusses their usage in the politics of
culture. She describes how folklorists’ paradigms shifted from attempts at recuperation of static, authentic oral “texts” to process and performance-oriented studies; an
understanding of the created and invented nature of folktales grew as well as an
appreciation of the “conscious and strategic deployment of expressive culture”
(188–218).
While Bendix focuses on folktales with regard to European nationalism, and
makes an argument for how they may function in those societies, the way in which
groups employ these works for social and political purposes is applicable to the
Surinamese case in its pre-independence years. In the Caribbean context, the role of
sound and its importance in terms of nation formation, and movements for decolonization in particular, has been demonstrated. In her article “Rude Bwoys, Ridim,
Rub-A-Dub and Rastas,” Loretta Collins, drawing on Baker asserts:
Each emerging nation has its genesis not only in material cultural practice but in
sound: ‘Just as infants babble through a welter of phones to achieve the phonemics of
a native language, so conglomerates of human beings seeking national identity engage
myriad sounds in order to achieve a vocabulary of national possibilities’ […] In the
process of nation formation, a repertoire of sounds emerges. (Collins 169)
Collin’s article is concerned with the soundscape at a particular historical moment in
which attempts were made at decolonization in Jamaica. Her arguments about the role
of sound in nation formation give credence to Neus-van der Putten’s assertions about
the folktale’s role in nationalism and the social uses of the Alida folktale. According to
Collins, sound may be involved in “articulating a desire for self-determination” for
Caribbean countries on their journey to decolonization (“Rude Bwoys” 170). And it is
during this time, the years just before Surinam’s independence, the folktale changes
from the death of a slave to that of stubborn survival.
In this case, the Alida folktale crossed and occupied several media simultaneously. It was performed repeatedly in theaters as part of a play about du Plessis in
Surinam, in the sixties and early seventies. Another production of the play was broadcast over the radio three years after Surinam achieved independence in 1978. During
the twentieth century, the folktale entered not only into the printed medium, but also
sound technology and reproduction, what Ong has termed “secondary” orality. The
radio makes for a voice/body-split that allows, as Marshall McLuhan observes, “words
[to] suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures” (quoted in Collins
“Crossroads” 2). Similar to embodied oral storytelling, the “intimate but disembodied”
radio transmission may grab hold of the listener, a sort of possession or resonance
within, that “enters and speaks through the engaged listener” (“Crossroads” 1). Radio
acts as a conduit that through electromagnetic waves transmits disembodied voices,
which in the case of the Alida folktale, passes on ancestral stories and collective
memories.
Given the play’s performance in post independence years, the folktale’s importance
then would seem to go beyond nationalistic pursuits, just as it had been told for
centuries before that possibility, to a kind of testimony that “writes into history the
trauma of the Caribbean, […] foregrounding the strength of a culture that sustained
itself through subversive sounds” (Collins, “Rude Bwoys” 185).11 The Alida tale
became a function and reflection of longings for independence and growing nationalist fervor, as well as a call for the recognition of a painful past. These repetitions and
varying reiterations place the Alida folktale at the center of Surinamese political culture as well as black communal identifications.
Alida represents the victimization and atrocities that occurred during the colonial
period of slavery in Surinam and all its implications. It is a primary text, whose import
and meaning is dependant upon its present context. In the sixties, it was part of acts
of subversion, sounds of protest, and calls for independence, where writers were concerned with telling/performing history from the vantage point of the colonized. In the
21st century, in Accord’s book for example, Alida is recounted within the context of
forty years of Surinamese immigration to the Netherlands that spanned the period
just before Surinam’s independence, and during the neocolonial period.
Given the book jacket not only references the abolishment of slavery in Surinam
140 years before its publication, but also the debate over the slavery monument in
the Netherlands during the nineties, communal identifications in the Netherlands, as
well as, or rather than national ones, would seem to be operating here. 12 The Alida
folktale, and its cross cultural movement, begs the question of sound and communal
identifications, as well as sound and transatlantic flows for those who study and theorize sound and aural culture.
For a country on its way to independence, a tale of communal mourning symbolized by a nameless, faceless victim is transformed into Alida, a survivor, a kind of
communal and then national symbol and heroine. How do sonic practices come into
play in terms of national and communal identifications? How then may we think about
repetition and revision, in the recounting of the folktale? How does a story about victimization come to stand for self-conscious empowerment, agency, and nationalistic
endeavors? For Susanna du Plessis is one of many cruel slave mistresses, and Alida,
one of countless many slaves who died at the hands of their masters.
216 | Joy Smith
For an analysis of the reiteration of the tale, I will turn to the influential article
“Repetition as a Figure in Black Culture” and its insistence on the notion of the
“cut.”13 James Snead regards repetition and revision as fundamental to modern
black culture. “Circulation” and “flow” are key terms, where accidents and changes
are allowed for, built into the dance, song, or sermon, etc. This is in distinction to progression, a destination or end goal. The “cut” is part of this tendency to repeat.
As Snead explains, it is analogous to a break in music where the tune strays from
the beat and then returns, but in a different register. The “cut” connotes continual
return, a cutting back to the start, but with a “renewed statement of the previous
material.”14
When discussing the folktale’s changes in narrative, as well as its emergence into
print and radio, I do not mean to present a teleological construct; a progression from
the oral to the written, from death to heroic survival. The nod to an historical event
goes hand and hand with recreation and imagination. It implies a deferral of any originary event. Thus to see the folktale as a performance followed by variations, that differ from an original narrative, the metaphor of original and copy, are insufficient in
capturing its ongoing reinvention and collective importance. Rather than focusing on
an authentic tale and its divergences, one should, according to literary critic
Alexander Weheliye, focus on the cultural conditions and the medium in which the
object appears. In other words, as Weheliye, in referencing Snead, argues, where repetition and black culture are concerned, expect difference, “repetition with difference”(Weheliye, Phonographies 32).
The Alida folktale(s) circulate and flow and yet they can be viewed “as events in
their own right” (Weheliye 33). The rather pronounced break in the narrative, from
dead victim to survivor, as a result of nationalist longings and practices is one reading. Saidiya Hartman’s elaboration on the “cut,” however, that deals with memory,
slavery, pained bodies, and forms of redress, is just as relevant. Despite the fight for
independence that was eventually won in Surinam, there is a continual return to a
narrative about slavery and its focus on terror, pain and loss, a constant state for
those who were enslaved in the New World, what Saidiya Hartman describes as a
“history of hurt” (51).
Hartman insists on the “centrality of practices” in the enslaved lives. While
“agency” would be an exaggeration, resistance was to be found in the “mnemic
traces” of everyday practices; the quotidian. In dancing juba, secret gatherings,
drumming, or storytelling, slaves often witnessed what they had not seen, testified to
what they had not experienced. Whether they danced a dance that was a remnant of
Africa, or told stories about the homeland they had never seen, or reflected on the
horrors of slave life they had not personally experienced, they not only expressed the
violence of dislocation and the everyday violence of slavery, but they were also
reflecting on their conditions.
In this way slaves could reappropriate dominant social space, transforming a
“space of captivity” into a “sacralized and ancestral landscape,” or in the case of the
Alida folktale, soundscape. As Hartman argues, everyday historicity of these practices were the way in which,
the quotidian articulates the wounds of history and the enormity of the breach instituted by the transatlantic crossing of black captives and the consequent processes of
enslavement: violent domination, dishonor, natal alienation, and chattel status. (72)
The enormous “subterranean history of death and discontinuity” is a history that cannot be fully undone. And it is this rupture, and inevitable inability to address it fully,
that ignites the continual return to these practices, the “cut” to certain stories, memories, or African retrievals. It is this “inevitable loss or breach that stands at the origin and engenders the black ‘New World’ subject […] As well, the ‘cut’ returns to
denied and unmet needs” (75). It is a collective, ravenous need that drives attempts
at redress that is always already denied.
Thus redress cannot solve the dilemma or put an end to a history whose effects
are still felt in terms of continued racism and inequality. It would seem that memory
is not enough, and yet central in terms of demands for recognition and articulating a
brutal history. For Hartman, the body, the slave’s pained body, becomes the central
site for memory in the service of redress.
The event of captivity and enslavement engenders the necessity of redress, the inevitability of its failure, and the constancy of repetition yielded by this failure. […] In this regard, the
body is both the ‘eroding witness’ to this history of terror and the object of redress. (77)
The Alida story in its narrative and in the continual return is an example of the centrality of the pained body as witness and means for attempts at redress. Since total
redress is an impossibility, Alida has stayed alive, not only in the retelling of the tale,
but in the narrative, she lives, but experiences and embodies the “cut,” the cutting of
flesh, is cut into continually, as part of a story that is cut back to always.
The folktale, which centers around the cutting of flesh – containing an image of
violence, amputation, and loss – can be read as a physical rendering of the psychic
fragmentation of subjectivity that had to occur in order for Africans to be successfully
interpellated into slave society.15 The collective return during the sixties, to a folktale
that describes the cutting off of flesh, the breast in particular, from a mulatta slave
girl as punishment for having been the (unwilling) object of desire of a slave owner,
puts the ravished (sexually and physically), hybrid, female body at the site of cultural
conflict and domination in Surinam. Clearly agency, in terms of redress, was at work
in the tales’ reiteration and performance in theaters during pre-independence years,
in the “strategic deployment” of the folktale by individual writers.
Although grounded in fact, this story changes and grows, passes from oral expressive culture into the written language and back again, moves from the Caribbean to
the Netherlands, and twists and turns with the consciousness of a people.
218 | Joy Smith
“Sonic Afro-Modernity”: Between Orality and Literature
The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that
it makes is part of its meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of
as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning. When it is written, you lose the
sound or noise and therefore you lose part of the meaning. (Brathwaite 17)
In the postcolonial or neocolonial period, the Alida folktale has been re-imagined and
reiterated in two recent works of fiction published in the Netherlands: How Expensive
was the Sugar?, by Cynthia McLeod published in 1987, and a short story collection
entitled Vortex, published in 1993 and written by Ellen Ombre.16 The folktale’s
appearance in written texts is just one of a myriad of examples of the obsessive ways
in which African Americans “sounded modernity” in literature. The infusion of oral
forms in written texts is a twentieth century phenomenon for black literature in the
Americas, part of a larger characteristic of this period that confirms the “crucial place
of sound in modern black culture” (Weheliye 99–105).
In the quote above, taken from Brathwaite’s well-known History of the Voice, he considers what is lost when orature is written down, how the aspects of cultural tradition
and performance are no longer readily discernable. The missing, tonal quality of the
voice, sounds that carry emotion and connote immediacy and presence, interpersonal and communal connection, and most certainly cultural context, is all implied in
Brathwaite’s lament. When dealing with orality, one does need to consider what is missing in the translation. Orality is better understood as a gesture, an embodied mode
of social behavior, it is interpersonal, and while we tend to view it as words written on
a page when it appears in literature, there is an entire cultural tradition that comes
into play in its evocation. What we are left with in written form is an incomplete, if not
poor, rendering of an oral form as well as a transformation of an oral utterance.
Yet one also needs to consider what is gained when orature is not only written
down but becomes part of an interaction with literature. This loss or absence can be
generative of other meanings and produce communal affiliations. The readers’ ability to respond to and experience communal identifications is not obliterated in the
writing, but remains.17 A separation does occur between author and text, so in a
sense it becomes autonomous, but as Ong asserts, “removing an utterance from its
author is not removing it from discourse. Written utterances then can only interrupt
discourse, perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years, but it does not “fix” it. “In
this way, in their need to be uttered, all texts are part of discourse”(Ong in Foley 149).
The ghostly sound remnants of vernacular performances may be captured in print,
discernible to those who can hear and listen between the lines conveying “a new
sense of sound, and noise, emerging from the present-day Caribbean” (Baker in
Reckin 5; Cooper).
Weheliye asserts these “possibilities” in his article “I Am I Be: The Subject of
Sonic Afro-modernity.” He discusses sound recordings and reproductions and their
importance to twentieth century black culture. Weheliye identifies music and orality
as two of the most important modes of cultural transfer, and these aural forms figure
prominently in African American written works in the last century (102).18 His project
is mainly concerned with the ways music and sound technologies offer different
modes, other than the linguistic, for theorizing subjectivity. These technologies allow
a space-time split where performance is separated from the contexts of reception. In
other words, “orality and musicality were no longer reliant on the immediate presence
of human subjects” (99).
While many critics, like Brathwaite, have interpreted this condition as one of lack
(of authenticity or immediacy), Weheliye contends that they neglect the possibilities
occasioned by this disjuncture. This complex “interfacing” of black culture with
sound technologies in the twentieth century, and all the varied cultural practices that
are produced, are what Weheliye calls “sonic Afro-modernity.” This aural sphere is not
only limited to music, included in Weheliye’s list of technologies is writing, and he discusses black writers’ obsession with attempting to “capture sound in literature.”
These writers have dealt with black musical forms as well as orality in their works.19
Weheliye understands these texts as “sounds recordings” of another kind. He adds,
“These texts suggest a different way of merging the phono and graph than the technology of the phonograph, underscoring how sound and writing meet and inform each
other in the written annals of twentieth-century African American literature”
(Weheliye, “I Am” 103).
Like many theorists when dealing with orality and literature, Weheliye limits his concern to the “oral performative dimensions of written language,” the way black writers
endow certain texts with the allusion of speech (103). The fact that folktales and oral
traditions are generally acknowledged as a major part of how sound suffuses black literature, the vernacular theories of Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., which emphasize
musical influences or the speaking voice, have gained widespread influence. Gates’
notion of the “speakerly text,” for example, has informed many analyses of black literature.20 With the “speakerly text,” Gates elaborates on the many ways in which black
writers endow the written text with the allusion of something approaching the oral.21
The emphasis has been on how this literature approximates spontaneous, conversational speech, how the writer’s use of rhythm and diction breathe life into the
text creating a kind of immediacy. The use of dialect and Creole also dominate these
analyses because they help to create a strong voice that involves the reader in a
more active, listening posture, much in a similar way to oral storytelling.
While in Ellen Ombre’s story “Fragments” the protagonist’s voice narrates the
story providing an intimate tone, Ombre does not include a Creole language or
dialect, and thus diverges from the notion of the “speakerly text.” Yet orality still plays
220 | Joy Smith
an important role in her reiteration of the Alida folktale. For as literary critic Ato
Quayson asserts, when theorizing the interaction of oral forms to written texts, orality “does not reside solely in the mimesis of verbal speech and in the forms of oralization as is arguably the case in poetry. It also lies at the level of the reproduction
of cultural codes and signifiers” (14). Quayson would seem to mean the interaction
of a wide breadth of oral forms to written literature, the way works of literature are
informed by as well as recount various kinds of black orature.22
I will now elaborate on sound in terms of subjectivity in Ellen Ombre’s story
“Fragments” in the hope that it can tell us something about the nature and formation
of black subjectivity. I will also explore the dialogical interaction of the Alida tale
within the short story, which manages to enlarge Ombre’s written story while also acting to subvert its own subjection, or capture, within the literary text. “Fragments” confirms a literary aesthetic based on tensions between orality and literature, producing
a text that requires a “hearing and reading through” by listener/readers (Reckin 2).
What interests me here is what occurs in the interaction between oral expressive culture with that of literature; this play of absence and presence and what is produced.
The Alida tale is not only retold but structures the story thematically, providing a
hidden polemic within the text that addresses potential readers in various ways. I
want to also consider the way “Fragments,” and its inclusion of the folktale, interpellates Surinamese readers into communal subjects with its performance of cultural
codes that act as interpretive guides for particular communities. The notion of an
“oral poetics,” rather than that of a “speakerly text” would better describe Ombre’s
ways oral forms are embraced within the story and provide a meta-expressive function within the text. “Fragments” would seem to challenge many existing assumptions about the importance of dialect with regard to orality in black literature and may
theorize important ways in which the spoken word and literature come together.
Fragments: Sound and Subject Formation
In her 1992 short story collection Maalstroom [Vortex], author Ellen Ombre deals with
subjects in motion. The movement of immigrants, travelers, and exiles are explored
through geographical space as well as temporal shifts between the past and the
present. These journeys span different time periods, and involve themes of exile and
alienation, not only from one’s homeland, but from one’s own self. The transnational,
migratory themes that abound in the collection, foreground destabilized identities.
This cross-cultural meditation on fragmented subjectivity is echoed in the story
“Fragments.” The longest story by far in Ombre’s collection, “Fragments” is set in the
city of Paramaribo in colonial Surinam, in the year 1939, seventy-six years after the
abolition of slavery.
In an intimate tone that approximates a confession, a young Creole girl recounts
her passage from the Surinamese interior to Paramaribo and life with the Miskins, a
Christian couple who become her guardians. Ombre’s story is focalized by the protagonist, who is estimated to be four years old. The narrative however moves back
and forth between that of the older, perhaps adult woman and the impressions of the
young girl. The girl’s story is told as a long monologue, a testimony of sorts, bearing
witness to her own journey from the Spite and Remorse plantation in the countryside
to the home of the Miskins in the waterfront, capital city of Paramaribo.
Her past recollections are no longer of importance to her current life, as she
makes clear, “What took place in my life before I left my relatives, continued in an
underworld of spirits and shadows” (78).23 Given her young age, she has very little
memory of her past, is in a sense tabula rasa. The Miskins immediately give her the
name Hannah, and in the naming there is a revision or undoing of what was. The significance in the naming, the Western, Christian name she is given, would seem to
somehow mark this break with the past, and identify her new, or burgeoning nature,
“I am named with their name and speak as they speak” (79). It signals an abrupt end
to the past.
Now nameless, but renamed, with memories fading fast, the past has been
forcibly ruptured perhaps prompting her claim that she did not exist until she was
written into the Paramaribo town records. There is no written record of her existence
on the plantation from which she comes. She confides, “history is silent on that” and
adds, “my existence begins in the house of Mr. and Mrs. Miskin in Paramaribo”
(79).24 Unlike in her former life, it is made official by the act of writing her name into
the city’s registry:
At the town registry office, my parents entered me in as: ‘Hannah, foster child
belonging to the family of Eugenio Miskin and Esmeralda Miskin, nee Schattevoo. At
the time of delivery, the 22nd of February, 1939, estimated age four years.25
It is only as her name is recorded, a sign of her entrance into the world of Western
writing and history, that she is delivered from her past. She is literally written into
existence.
On the night of her arrival, sleepy and disoriented, the girl is stripped naked and
given a cold shower by the mistress who would become her caretaker. As Mrs. Miskin
later recalls “that first cold shower” given to the protagonist, she proudly remarks on
her self-defined role in the acculturation process as one meant to break the girl:
You had a strong will, girl, typical character of a mixed blood. If an Indian and a bush
Negro come together you get a kind of… She cleared her throat, gave me a serious look
and frowned. As tough and impenetrable as a mangrove swamp. It took me a lot of
effort to break that will. But listen up, where there’s a will, there’s a way. (80)26
It is a symbolic baptism of sorts, one that marks her entry into dominant, colonial discourse, just as the naming in the written registry confirms it.
Naming is essentially what happens when subjects are interpellated. The word at
the root of interpellation is the same as the root for the word “appellation,” meaning
222 | Joy Smith
to name.27 According to Althusser, ideology “hails” or calls concrete individuals. They
then become “concrete subjects” (1504). Ideology represents subjects’ ideas in
relation to the world. It is material in that it involves rituals and practices, and
requires concrete individuals to act on them. Individuals are enlisted into belief
systems by ideology. In “Fragments,” the colonial state and its hierarchical situation
regarding Western values – expressed through the ideologies of the ISAs (Ideological
State Apparatuses), most notably in the form of family, church, and school – are operating by and through Mrs. Miskin.
While it is the Creole girl who guides us through the narrative, her mistress’s voice,
is recounted frequently and is prominent. Mrs. Miskin is the agent who interpellates
the young girl into Dutch colonial life. From the very beginning, Mrs. Miskin’s words not
only create, or remake the girl, but they begin a process of dismemberment, a psychological and emotional undoing, that takes the form of incessant derogatory comments:
“a mixed blood […] as tough and impenetrable as a mangrove swamp.” It is (at times)
more subtle, but a constant assault, nonetheless, from which the girl will never recover.
The title “Fragments” would seem to be descriptive of the effects of loss, rupture,
and forced acculturation the young girl experiences in the Miskin household.
As part of this “civilizing mission,”28 the Creole girl is sent to a Catholic school,
taken to church every week, taught to say her prayers nightly, and is groomed for
household chores such as clearing the table, cleaning fish, and later, giving Mr. Miskin
daily manicures. She must eat separately from the Miskins, secluded in a room off
from the kitchen.
While the promise of a better life may have been the impetus for the Creole girl’s
removal, the reality is a different story. She is not embraced as a member of the
family, but instead becomes a kind of house servant and improvement project. The
“privilege” of obtaining a Dutch education and gaining literacy comes at a high and
terrible price.
The largest part of this acculturation process is done at home. With a missionary’s zeal, Mrs. Miskin takes on the role of educating and refining her ward.
Recitation plays an important role in the Creole girl’s indoctrination into Dutch culture, language, and literacy in the form of Mrs. Miskin’s voice, her pedagogical recitations
which
monologues.
29
include
storytelling, history
lessons, poetry
recitations, and
When the girl is taught to recite lines of poetry from Mrs. Miskin’s
favorite Dutch writer, she is plainly confronted with her place in society:
‘What is important is the art of declamation, giving the correct emphasis,’ she
spoke, ‘but that is preceded by committing the text to memory, word for word.’ And
emphasizing every syllable she recited: ‘Negritude is like flowering vanilla, high in the
jungle trees. Still far away, the odor greets us, while carried with the breeze.’ That verse
is carved into my brain. As self-evident as the fact that the knife, as Mrs. Miskin taught
me, is laid to the right of the plate when setting the table.30
While mastering Dutch and living under the guidance and influence of her mistress,
the destination, the end goal, is that the Creole girl become better than those who
are like her, but who have not learned the colonizer’s language or ways. In the acculturation process, all that has to do with her past and where she comes from is devalued, or inspires terror.
Oh, won’t they get the shock of their lives if they ever see you again at Spite and
Remorse. When a lady comes to visit them. We, Mr. Miskin and I, may not have brought
you to this world but, by cultivating you, with a great deal of refinement, I shall succeed
in making you into a copy of ourselves. No one, no one will recognize you there when
you stand, clean and well cared for, in front of the primitives. They will ask themselves
who the lady is. And what will you answer?
‘I am Hannah Miskin,’ I answered.
I tried to imagine returning to Spite and Remorse. The only things I had to hold on
to were Mrs. Miskin’s descriptions. Primitiveness, poverty, idolatry, rattlesnakes, and
other terrifying things, such a story about the history of the place name Spite and
Remorse, which she told me with great enthusiasm. (89)31
It is clear that in learning Dutch the language becomes the ideological structure or
system that will speak the girl, provide the blue print for identifications, for that which
is valued and that which is not.
The title “Fragments” would also seem to refer to Mrs. Miskin’s sense of self and her
Dutch colonial identifications. She wears only plain dresses, never flowers and stripes.
“ ‘To loud,’ she found them, ‘too negro-like.’ ”32 When she teaches the girl poetry, it is from
Dutch writers, whom she refers to as “our” old masters, and she calls the Netherlands,
the colonial power of Surinam, the “mother country.” In taking the girl from “primitive” to
cultured and middle-class, the girl becomes a kind of affirmation of what Mrs. Miskin
aspires to be, the ideal, the Subject in Althusser’s terms; the white, Dutch colonial.
With this aspiration, the girl provides Mrs. Miskin with a purpose, in various ways, in
an empty life filled with disappointments. In her task to remake the girl, Mrs. Miskin finds
refuge from her distant marriage, where husband and wife seldom talk, and even less frequently touch. She is grateful to have the girl in the house, needs her in fact, and not only
because of the servicing chores she makes her do in the household. Mrs. Miskin turns
away from the disturbing state of her marriage, when she concentrates on the regime for
the girl. She denies her feelings of anger about being infertile, about feeling abandoned
or cursed by God, after all her years of piety, good service, and devotion.
Mrs. Miskin’s form of dismemberment, a kind of soul-killing marriage and life,
comes to the surface in occasional bouts of madness: she lives in a liminal state
between sanity and insanity. Only when the moon is full, do the suppressed emotions
come forth. During her periods of “illness,” Mrs. Miskin is overcome by “strange
moods.” These spells are characterized outwardly in rumblings of dissatisfaction,
mumbling, followed by an eruption of an uncontrollable urge to remove the “filth”
224 | Joy Smith
from the house. Everything must go, must be cleaned. She rages, curses God, and
the “kweekje,” her ward, until she must take to her bed in exhaustion.
In her escape from her marriage, her life, and the silence, she is obsessed with
the sound of her own voice, and spews a continual flood of words. Her husband is
not interested in interacting or communicating with her.
He had no time for her rhymes and what he called her verbal flood. […] If in her
attempts at conversation she spoke too long, he would cut her off with “Words, words, I
can’t bear all this racket” (89).33 So instead she turns to her ward, who describes Mrs.
Miskin as her “radio,” “on all day, […] she was my background music. I was her only audience. We were in tune with each other. (88)34
In the constant flow of language, the girl becomes advanced in Dutch in a very short
time and learns her place within Dutch society as well. The Creole girl’s interpellation
into Hannah Miskins is one of sonic interpellation.
While Althusser’s theory of interpellation does not expressly deal with sound, the
example he gives of subject interpellation, is auditory, it is an actual hailing or call by
an agent/representative of the state, a policeman: “Hey, you there”! When the policeman calls out, the subject will turn around. “By this mere one-hundred-and-eightydegree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized
that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’
(and not someone else)” (1504).
In Althusser’s theory of the subject, subjection plays a large role. The subject is
lured/forced into accepting ideal notions of the subject, which Althusser distinguishes by a capital letter, the Subject, the ideal person, image, or values the subject
attempts to be or to have. The force of authority involved in the hailing causes a reaction in the subject one of recognition or misrecognition (1503–05). Mrs. Miskin’s
ideal Subject is the White, Dutch colonial, or the values extolled, that she tries to
attain through her dress and tastes.
Language, recitation, and Mrs. Miskin’s voice act as key interpellative forces, the
ideology that shapes the girl. While language is the agent of her transformation into
a subject, sound in terms of voice and recitation are the means: a sonic interpellation. Yet the girl’s journey into colonial discourse, a passage from being viewed as
barely human to that of “the civilized world of the church” is an ambivalent one. For
in learning the language, her position within colonial discourse is made apparent.
Rather than securing her place in civilized society, she is placed into a liminal space,
as the girl learns to see herself through the eyes of others, and learns that she can
become “similar, but not quite.”35
The schoolbooks had pretty pictures in them. Of Ot and Sien and Trui. Children who
aged a year with every new book. They weren’t precocious. But they were very far away
in an unreachable world. We of St. Peter’s School could never be like them. We were
from a different world. (86)36
In school she is taught to read books about people she does not resemble, who lead
lives she does not recognize, in family situations she does not know, but has learned
to recognize as better, and to long for their lives. It is as if the world of Dutch literacy
holds promises unfulfilled.
This kind of complicated example of (mis) identifications in terms of language and
images is an important area in thematics of violence and ambivalence that run
through Caribbean and postcolonial theory as well as literature (Bhabha 121–31;
Nair 236–52). In the mission to remake the girl into a Christian, and a good colonial
citizen of Surinam, there is an inherent ambivalence in the whole project. The “mimic
man,” Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry” comes to mind: “colonial mimicry is the desire
for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the
same. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry must continually produce its
slippage, its excess, its difference […] Almost the same but not quite” (127).37 In
this case, almost the same, but not white. Failure is inherent in just how far the inculcation process of the protagonist can go. For language, in the quest for full citizenship/subjectivity for the colonial, appears to have its limits.
Alida Folktale in Print
The history of the reversed names was from long ago, from the time when there
were still slaveholders.38
‘If I told you how we were mishandled and humiliated in former days.’ She made a
face as if she were trying to suppress after pains. ‘Like a cancer, the worm of slavery
gnawed at every budding sprout which, with proper care, could have contributed to the
blossoming and prosperity of our country. You can get down on your bare knees and
thank our Dear Lord that you didn’t live in those times.
On my bare knees I thanked the Lord with devotion. (88, emphasis mine)39
It is in the use of the pronoun “we” that Ombre overtly identifies Mrs. Miskin as a
black woman. Mrs. Miskin continually reiterates the need for the girl to know history,
although generally she teaches her Dutch history and literature. In this case, however, that precedes and leads to the Alida folktale, Mrs. Miskin passes down history
about slavery. Mrs. Miskin acts as a kind of griot, a carrier of ancestral voices.
Her colonial identifications are so strong, it would not be apparent to many readers that she is not Dutch. That she herself is Surinamese, is only clear to those who
know the history of “kweekjes” in Surinam, for that was an intra-racial, class phenomenon. The pronoun “we” is in counter distinction to the former “our” she used
when dealing with Dutch history and literature. In this prelude to the recounting of the
Alida folktale, it becomes clear that Mrs. Miskin’s interpellations are varied and confusing: she consistently attempts Dutch, colonial, nation state identifications, tempered with very occasional attempts at ethnic communal building.
226 | Joy Smith
Two pages later, the Alida folktale is interjected into the text as Mrs. Miskin, once
again, gives history lessons, but this time she tells the girl something about her own
personal history too, the background of the place from which she came, and exactly
how the Spite and Remorse plantation received its name. In the recounting of this
oft-told tale, Mrs. Miskin is also imparting knowledge about the Creole girl’s particular legacy as a mulatta in Surinamese society. In this revision and repetition of the
folktale, Alida, appears here as the house slave Etrave. The story covers one and a
half pages:
Long, long ago, when slaveholders still had slaves, the plantation I came from was
the property of the wealthy Du Plessis family. Mr. Du Plessis was an incorrigible lady’s
man and his wife a jealous spouse who watched over her husband like a kidnapper
guarding his victim. She traced all his movements and noticed that he spent a noticeably large amount of time in the vicinity of a certain house slave, Etrave. One time the
jealous Mrs. Du Plessis saw how her husband, in an attempt at seduction, casually
stroked the young slave’s breasts as he passed her. The mistress was furious. She was
in charge in the house. With such behavior the slaveholder undermined her authority.
Outside he could go his own way and let his bestial drives run free. But inside the house
her rules applied. She summoned the plantation flogger and ordered him to chop off
the young slave’s breasts. That would teach her to make eyes at her husband. […]
‘Silently the couple sat down to their meal,’ she continued the story. ‘The man clearly
enjoyed it and smacked his lips heartily.
“Superb,” he said, praising his wife’s culinary art.
“Well then,” she said, when the meal was finished and the man had uttered a satisfied
belch, “I hope you’ve finally had your fill. You just ate the breasts of your beloved Etrave.”
The man stood up, with knees bent he tried to support himself on the edge of the
table. He tore the buttons off his shirt and grabbed at his throat. All that would come
out was vomit. It was like the explosion of Krakatoa. […] He fell down and vomited out
his heart and soul. Mrs. Du Plessis looked down with horror at her dying husband.
“Oh God, my Lord,” she called out in despair, “what have I done?” Her spite had
made way for remorse.
“ ‘Well’ she said, because there was silence, ‘what do you think of that?’ ‘I don’t
know’ I answered.” (90–91)40
On the level of narrative, the incorporation of the Alida folktale, one that centers on physical mutilation, is a representation of violence and dismemberment of slave bodies. This
dismemberment is doubled in the psychic fragmentation of the receiver of the tale, the
Creole protagonist, as well as the storyteller, Mrs. Miskin. The absence of roots, for the
girl, and the sense of lack of origins they both share, and that make up the New World
African American subject, would seem to offer a clue as to the importance and functioning
of the Alida folktale within the story’s plot. The girl lacks her own personal narrative, and
so it would seem the folktale anchors her into a communal identity and historical position.
Her status as mulatta carries with it a history of anxiety about hybridity in terms
of race and culture, a repulsion mixed with that of desire, contained within the folktale in that Alida, thus Etrava, is mulatta, carrying a generational context of miscegenation.41 The sexualized aspect is made apparent with the emphasis on the breast
as fetishized object of desire, even as mutilated flesh, that becomes a possession of
both the slave owners in its literal consumption.
In the case of the Creole girl, it is not only the girl’s personal past that is passed
down to her by Mrs. Miskin, an entire nation’s forgotten or disowned past and injustices, are explored in Ombre’s story. This fragmented history seems to spawn fragmented subjectivities for all involved. The hybrid, mulatta child’s presence, however,
bears the burden of this history. She is part of an on-going negotiation of forces that
come together in a particular part of the world. As Althusser asserts, a subject is
already a subject. The girl has been interpellated into Surinamese society long before
she actually physically entered into it. Her gendered, racialized, and sexualized
Creole body is “overdetermined” (Lionnet 87).42
As literary critic Françoise Lionnet asserts, in Caribbean women’s literature, the
female body, both “striking” and “disturbing,” acts as a revealing text. It may serve
as a privileged, symbolic site representing the clash of cultures (94). The “clash of
cultures” is captured in the folktale that harks back to the “subterranean history” of
rupture and death, of the Middle Passage, that “history of hurt,” of pained and dismembered bodies. This is not only true for characters in the story, but also for all
Surinamese readers/listeners of African descent in their continual collective return
to the folktale.
On the level of narration, it is as if the folktale comes to stand for the protagonist’s
lack of history and origins in Ombre’s implanting of it. The girl’s personal story is displaced by the folktale that provides a sense of a dark, inhospitable history. This function of filling in a missing gap in the girl’s past, is doubled on the narrative level in
terms of providing interpretative meaning to Ombre’s short story. Much in the way of
the folktale is alluded to and implied in the story without being overtly stated. What
is immediately apparent and resonates with the folktale, for those who are familiar
with it, is the servicing role of the girl in the Miskin’s household and the triangulated
relationship between the couple and herself.
By adding complexity and layers of meaning to the story, the folktale manages to fill
a gap, produce something that is lost, or absent in the storytelling. Some things are
not, and perhaps, cannot be said, and yet they are conveyed. They are, quite possibly,
“the hidden language of the slave” (Davis and Fido 5). The Alida tale in conjunction
with the short story, both reveals and conceals, and in the oscillation between what is
grasped and what is not, something is at once repeated and created anew.
Ombre seems particularly adept at engaging critical strategies in her fiction.43
Would it be too far off the mark, then, to suggest that Ombre’s story may also be read
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as deconstructing an entire emphasis on language and the written word, where, paradoxically, gaining literacy in her story plays such a significant role? The folktale, this
corporeal, communicative gesture, has been recounted, perhaps translated into the
written word, replacing while communicating, with a hidden polemic, what cannot be
spoken. The written language has the potential to be overridden in Ombre’s text by
the inclusion of sonic expressive culture in the form of a reiterated folktale.
Reader Interpellation
Althusser’s theory of interpellation extends to readers. Communal building is not only
going on between the girl and Mrs. Miskin within the text. Althusser’s theory of reader
interpellation allows that the text also has the power to hail and transform in terms
of forms of address. If as Ong states, “a code both interprets and itself needs interpretation,” the folktale is itself a code to be unlocked, filled with uncertainty and possibility (165). By “code,” I mean an interpretive guide for a particular community, a
starting place for meaning making. The inclusion of the folktale in “Fragments,” acts
as encoded information, a mise-en-abyme that functions on two levels, guiding the
narrative plot, while also hailing particular readers. While reader response theories
allow that there is no over-determined way in which a text can be read, issues of
authorial intention come into play when history, oral forms, and literature come
together.
From the first brief opening paragraphs, cultural codes, mnemonics of history and
collective memory, the ghosts of slavery are ever present, acting as interlocutor
between the writer, her protagonist, and the audience(s). The story begins,
I was born in the Commewijne district. Some of the plantations in this fertile, once
wealthy Surinamese district have meaningful names: Mon Souci, Mon Tresor, Newfound
Care, Peace and Delight. I come from Spite and Remorse. (78)44
The girl’s individual memory coalesces with collective memory when she remarks on
how the “plantations had meaningful names.” The names act as mnemonics, triggers
of cultural memory, evoking certain histories to some readers, mainly Surinamers,
particularly those of African descent. And while Ombre’s story is set during the colonial period, after the abolition of slavery, this slippage in time, between the past and
the present, is purposeful, and significant to the protagonist’s experiences and the
plot line. These plantation names add deeper levels of meaning to the story, and prepare certain readers for what will undoubtedly be a dark tale.
The well-known, slave-owning family Du Plessis, owned the Mon Tresor plantation
at one time, and Susanna du Plessis herself owned the plantation from which the
Creole girl was taken, Spite and Remorse. The Commewijne district has a history of
church-related foster care for Hindustani, Javanese, and black children. The mere
mentioning of the plantation names, perhaps anything associated with Susanna du
Plessis, may evoke a strong emotional reaction with certain audiences.45
The folktale’s oral performances connoted a public, communal type of call and
response that mobilized affiliations and demands for redress. In the written context,
this excess does not disappear, but these sounds “solicit the body” (Morris 33).
Remnants of the oral performance’s ability to engage the “body’s vibratory field” an
“articulatory stream of sound” within the body, a subvocalization occurs while reading, what Garrett Stewart calls the “phonotext.” In the volume Sound States, literary
critic Adelaide Morris’s article is concerned with epic composers and the modernist
epics of the twentieth century, “a handful of poems written in response to two world
wars, global economic collapse, and the development of nuclear armaments” (33).
What is important for this analysis is in the aural dimension, the hearing and listening that occurs in the body, and as Morris asserts, “their reach is requisite to the
magnitude, eloquence, […] they need to mobilize a culture’s historic, spiritual, and/or
mythic heritage and suggest a route toward durable release (33). The Alida folktale
carries a similar kind of cultural weight and public appeal for Surinamers and in its
retelling within fiction activates a “phonotext” for listeners/readers.
Sound and Silence
In following the principle of the folktale, that of impurity and powerlessness, the
Creole girl’s body represents the possibility of service, and pleasure. For at the end
of the story, Hannah’s job of providing manicures for Mr. Miskin becomes something
more intimate and terrifying. Mrs. Miskin has transferred many of her household
duties to the girl, and the latest job is filing Mr. Miskin’s nails. When she is in his private reading room performing her duties:
Mr. Miskin turned onto his side. He looked at me, stretched out his arm and spread
his fingers out on the towel. A smile played over his lips. ‘You see this hand?’ Mr. Miskin
moved his fingers forcing me to stop my task. “This is the hand that feeds you. Without
this hand you head, your belly, your limbs don’t exist, none of you exits. This hand turns
you into a big girl. Look at me.’ I looked him in the eyes. ‘What happens between the
walls of my reading room is our secret. Miss Treurniet, Mrs. Miskin, no one exists here
except you and me. You understand?’
I did what was asked of me. (102)46
The Creole girl’s journey has led her to confinement. She is an island, cut off from the
mainland of community with no escape.47 The road to Dutch literacy has become one
where the threat of speech and speaking are now a danger to her survival, part of her
imprisonment. Her journey into alienation and exile is complete. She’s come undone.
She’s become Hannah Miskin.
Not only does Hannah experience separation from others, but she is disconnectedness from herself, fragmented through her forced objectification. Her invisibility
becomes a kind of inexpressibility. She is only able to hint at her abuse, “I did what was
asked of me,” and her later depression. Language is fused with ambivalence in Ombre’s
230 | Joy Smith
story, for example the strange lack of communication between Mr. and Mrs. Miskin
despite her barrage of words. In the acquisition of the Dutch language, Hannah is paradoxically silenced. In a doubling of the Alida tale, Hannah is condemned to household
servitude, and sexual servitude.
The Alida folktale operates as an alternative way to communicate the violence
done to the girl and to others for centuries. The unspeakable that cannot be captured
by the sign, is encoded in the text through sound by the inclusion of the Alida folktale
in Ombre’s work of literature. Edward Glissant’s notion of opacity is appropriate here.
The linguistic is not always transparent. Caribbean proverbs, for example, are notoriously opaque for those who are not of the culture and they may not carry a literal
meaning. They convey a feeling, a culture, a history, and sentiment. What I mean to
say is that linguistic communication may lose some of its direct indexical meaning,
may not be transparent or easily understood, and illicit the same affective qualities
as say music, dance, or songs of mourning.
The girl’s “I don’t know” in response to Mrs. Miskin’s question about what she
thought of the Alida folktale is suggestive of the way readers may have thought
about the abrupt inclusion of the tale, which on the surface, appears to be loosely
tied to the story in terms of the girl’s origins. In actuality, it is a mise en abyme, one
that signifies a particular cultural history of slavery and terror. But it is something
much more.
The folktale functions as a trace, not a mere presence, but as a productive combination of presence and absence. It is a trace of the sound, the corporeal, and of
the Surinamese communal structures of affect that the textual alone cannot fully
capture. “Fragments” “exhibits the performativity of sound: sound that reveals transoceanic relation […] sound that animates sound-space and brings the living and the
dead into our presence” (Reckin 3). The recounting of the Alida folktale within the
short story acts as a kind of pastiche. And yet, it is not so much the modernist collage of rupture and digression, but instead it adds a “sense of enlargement and revelation,” similar to how Anna Reckin has described the way sound operates within
Brathwaite’s work.48
With the inclusion of the Alida tale, like a magician Ombre tells and conceals, elicits and critiques the power and limitations of the written word. Perhaps these kinds
of binaries are all questioned in Ombre’s work, that between the oral and the written,
authorial intention and reader’s interpretation, and that between the textual and the
sonic.
Notes
1. In his highly influential book The Signifying
Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr, provides an
analysis of the historical significance of writing for
enslaved black people. He asserts that slave
narratives were not only biographies of life under
slavery. The task and burden was for blacks to
write themselves into being, as proof of their
reason and rationality, becoming a “speaking
subject,” in order to gain recognition of their
humanity. In order for blacks to assume human or
civilized status, writing, a display of logos, was
crucial. These carefully crafted “autobiographies”
were necessarily political, and they were identity
performances. Written slave narratives were part
of a larger debate in the Western world about the
very humanity of black peoples. For as Gates
writes, “slaves possessed at most a liminal
status in the human community. To read and to
write was to transgress this nebulous realm of
liminality (128).
2. See Diggs’s article in this volume that
examines an acoustic legacy of lynching
invoked in a James Baldwin’s play.
3. For the importance of the drum and
drumming in Africa, it’s legacy in the Americas
in the black vernacular see Robert Elliot Fox’s
Masters of the Drum: Black Lit/Oratures Across
the Continuum. Westport and London:
Greenwood P, 1995.
4. I would like to thank Murat Aydemir, Sylvia
Mieszkowski and Isabel Hoving for their
comments on this article.
5. Neus-van der Putten’s book is devoted to an
entire study of the facts and myths surrounding
du Plessis.
6. For the difficulties and politics involved in
scholarly research and questions of historical
figures as recounted in oral historical accounts
(as opposed to written, often colonial history),
particularly its importance to black Caribbean
history, see Jenny Sharpe’s Ghosts of Slavery,
1–43.
7. Met eigen ogen: Een hedendaagse kijk op de
Surinaamse slavernij
232 | Joy Smith
8. Neus-van der Putten concurs with Accord
on the folktale’s importance and has written an
entire study on the facts and fiction
surrounding du Plessis.
9. Susanna du Plessis: Portret van een
slavenmeesteres
10. It is not clear whether the play is named in
Neus-van der Putten’s account. She cites
Michiel van Kempen’s book, Repertorium van
het Surinaams theater [The Repertoire of
Surinamese Theater] (1987) and mentions a
review called “Sussana du Plessis,” (131)
which may or may not have been the name of
the play.
11. I borrow the phrase “history of hurt” from
Saidiya Hartman’s book Scenes of Subjection,
49–78.
12. For a discussion of the Dutch national
slavery monument and memory politics see
Smith’s “Diasporic Slavery Memorials and
Dutch Moral Geographies” in Migratory
Aesthetics. Rodopi P, 2007 forthcoming.
13. See James Snead’s influential article
“Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture.” For
the “logic of the cut”, as it relates to literature
and music, see Copenhafer in this volume.
14. See Copenhafer.
15. See Keizer’s Black Subjects in the section
“Divided Subjects,” 25–30. See also Saidiya
Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection.
16. The titles in Dutch are Hoe duur was de
suiker by McLeod and Maalstroom by Ombre.
17. I am drawing on Hoving and Ong who
emphasize the importance of the audience in
shaping discourse, in the oral as well as the
literary experience. The reader’s role in
completing the text, is a potentially shared
process, a dialogue, and in the case of oral
forms as cultural mnemonics, this communal
bonding might play an even stronger role as a
result of “The situatedness of texts and
language practices” (Hoving: 139). In an article
titled “Text as Interpretation” (147–69), Ong
discusses similarities in the nature of
interpreting both oral and written texts. While
he acknowledges that there are differences,
they are similar in that they both are part of an
“ongoing interpretive negotiation.” In other
words they are part of an exchange, or
dialogue, which is perhaps easier to
understand in the context of a verbal utterance,
“where one utterance gives rise to another, and
another, and so on. Meaning is negotiated in
the discursive process.” One patterns their
utterances based on how they think others
might react or whether they will understand. If
the response does not fit the conjecture, then
one can accommodate in tone or clarify one’s
thoughts. “Oral discourse thus commonly
interprets itself as it proceeds. It negotiates
meaning out of meaning” (148).
Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were
Watching God, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo
Jumbo, are two paradigmatic cases, where the
use of Creole, dialect, and colloquial slang in
free indirect discourse “serves to privilege the
speaking voice” (Gates 131).
18. See Weheliye’s article “I Am I Be: The
Subject of Sonic Afro-modernity,” and his book
Phonographies.
25. “Bij het bevolkingsregister van deze stad
hebben mijn kweekouders me aangegeven als:
‘Hannah, kweekje behorend tot het gezin van
Eugenio Miskin en Esmerelda Miskin geboren
Schattevoo. Op het moment van aangifte, de
22ste februari 1939, vermoedelijke leeftijd vier
jaar’ ” (83). The diminutive noun “kweekje”
conjures memories of a racial caste system for
Surinamers. Poor children of color from the
rural areas in Surinam, were placed with
middle-class black, Creole families in
Paramaribo. A term in English that
approximates “kweekje” is foster child or
“ward.” In the van Dale Dutch dictionary, the
Dutch verb kweken is defined, as to “cultivate”
or “grow.” It means to foster, nurture, to help
grow and develop, generally used in relation to
plants or flowers. Historically, these children,
mostly girls, would do chores for these families
in exchange for food, clothes, a place to sleep
and access to school. They generally received
less in terms of quality in all that they were
given in these households compared to the
biological children in the host family. Most
importantly, they were completely at the mercy
of their foster parents.
19. In his majesterial literary history Mama
Sranan, Michiel van Kempen documents
Surinamese literature from well-known folktales
to the works of current authors of written
literature. While he acknowledges the influence
of orature on some Surinamese writers (13), he
does not analyze the way in which these forms
interact within these texts.
20. For example, see Hoving In Praise of New
Travelers.
21. What is important for Gates with regard to
black literature is the disruption that occurs
between signifier and signified, this doublevoiced quality, based on Bakhtin’s, notion of
dialogism, that language, despite authors,
speakers intentions, “expresses a plurality of
meanings” (Irwin 227), combined with the
practice of using black vernacular and
conversational speech within a written text,
giving the allusion of the oral within a written
text. He likens it to the Russian formalist
theory of skaz, a formal category for several
literary devices creating the impression of
expressive, spontaneous speech acts. Zora
22. Quayson’s book Strategic Transformations
is devoted to aspects of Yoruba beliefs and
storytelling rituals that appear in the works of
certain African writers.
23. “Wat zich in mijn leven heeft afgespeeld
voordat ik mijn verwanten moest verlaten om
overgeleverd te worden als kweekje in de stad,
set zich voort in een onderwereld van
schimmen en schaduwen” (78).
24. “Mijn bestaan begint in het huis van
meneer en mevrouw Miskin in Paramaribo”
(79).
26. “Je had een willetje, meisje, typisch het
karakter van een kaboegroe. Als een Indiaan en
een bosneger samengaan, dan krijg je een
soort…’ Ze kuchte, keek me ernstig aan en
fronste het voorhoofd. ‘Zo taai en
ondoordringbaar als een mangrovebos. Het
kostte me veel inspanning om dat willetje te
breken. Maar let op, waar een wil is, is een
weg (80).”
27. This is derived from Mary Klages’
exposition on “Ideology and State
Apparatuses” see 20 May 2005
⬍http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2011
Klages/1997althusser. html⬎.
28. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The
Location of Culture. 122–34.
29. For an article on the interpellative force of
recitation see Mutman in this volume.
30. “Het gaat om de kunst van het voordragen,
om de juiste klemtoon, sprak ze, maar daaran
vooraf gaat het onthouden, woord voor woord.’
En met nadruk op iedere letter-greep droeg ze
voo: Ne-ger-schap is als bloei-en-de vanille,
hoog in de bo-men van het bos. In wij-de omtrek laat de geur niemand los.’ Dit vers zit in
mijn hoofd gegrift. Even vanzelfsprekend als
date het mes, zoals mevrouw het me leerde,
rechts van het bord gelegd wordt bij het dekken
van de tafel” ( 87).
31. “ ‘O, wat zullen ze schrikken als ze je ooit op
Nijd en Spijt terugzien…. Niemand, niemand zal
je herkennen als je daar schoon en goed
verzorgd voor die primitieven staat. Ze zullen zich
afvragen wie die dame is. En wat zul je zeggen?’
‘Ik ben Hannah Miskin,’ antwoordde ik.
Ik probeerde me voor te stellen dat ik op Nijd
en Spijt terugkwam. Ik had alleen maar de
bescrijvingen van mevrouw om me aan vast te
houden. Primitiviteit, armoede, afgoderij,
ratelslangen en andere afschrikwekkende
dingen, zoals het verhaal over de
geschediedenis van de plaatsnaam Nijd en
Spijt dat ze me met overgave vertelde” (89).
32. “ ‘Te oproerig,’ vond ze dat, ‘te
negerachtig’.”
33. “ ‘Woorden, woorden, ik kan niet tegen dat
geroezemoes’ ” (89).
234 | Joy Smith
34. “Mevrouw was als een radio die de hele
dag zachtjes maar goed hoorbaar aanstond.
Ze was mijn achtergrondmuziek. Ik was
haar enige gehoor, we waren op elkaar
afgestemd” (88).
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The
Location of Culture, 122–34.
36. “De Leesboekjes op school hadden mooie
plaatjes. Van Ot en Sien, en Trui. Kinderen die
in ieder volgend leerboekje een jaartje ouder
waren. Woorlijk waren ze niet. Wel ver weg in
een onbereikbare wereld. Wij van de SintPetrus-school zouden nooit zo kunnen
worden.wij waren van een andere wereld (86).
Location of Culture, 127.
38. With the abolition of slavery, 1 July 1863,
the formerly enslaved had to choose names for
themselves. Many adopted a version or the
reverse of the name of the slaveowner, for
example, Desse became Essed.
39. “De geschiedenis van de omgekeerde
namen was van lang geleden in de tijd dat er
nog slavenmeesters waren.’Als ik je vertel hoe
wij mishandeld zijn en vernederd in vroegere
tijden.’ Ze trok een gezicht alsof ze napijn
probeerde te onderdrukken. Als een kanker
knaagde de worm van de slavernij aan ieder
ontluikend spruitje, dat bij behoorlijke
verpleging to bloei en welvaart van ons land
had kuunned strekken. Je mag de Lieve Heer
op je blote knieën danken dat je niet in die tijd
geleefd hebt.’ Ik dankte de Heer met overgave
op mijn blote knieën” (88).
40. “Heel lang geleden toen slavenmeesters
nog slaven haden, was de plantage waar ik
vandaan kom het eigendom van het rijke
geslacht Du Plessis. Meneer Du Plessis was
een rissige rokenjager en zijn vrouw een jaloerse
echtgenote die over haar man waakte als
gijzelhouder over een gijzelaar. Ze ging al zijn
gangen na en merkte dat haar man zich
opvallend veel in de omgeving van een zekere
huisslavin Etrave bewoog. Op een keer zag die
jaloerse mevrouw Du Plessis, hoe haar man in
een verleidingspoging bij het voorbijgaan
achteloos de borsten van de jonge slavin
streelde. De meesteres werd furieus. Zij was de
heerseres in huis. Met een dergelijk gedrag
ondermijnde de slavenhouder haar gezag.
Buitenhuis kon hij zijn gang gaan en zijn dierlijke
driften de vrije loop laten. Maar in huis golden
háár regels. Ze ontbood de plantagebeul en gaf
hem de opdracht om de borsten van de slavin af
te hakken. Dat zou haar het lonken afleveren.
De afgehakte borsten braadde ze, overkokend
van woede, eigenhandig voor haar man […].
‘Zwijgend zat het echtpaar aan de maaltijd,’
vervolgde ze het verhaal. ‘De man genoot
zichtbaar en smakte naar hartelust.
“Voortreffelijk,” prees hij de kookkunst van zijn
vrouw.
“Welnu,” sprak zij, toen de maaltijd was
beëindigd en de man voldaan oprispte, “ik hoop
dat je voorgoed je bekomst hebt. Zojuist heb jij
de borsten van je geliefde Etrave gegeten.”
De man stond op, met gebogen knieën zocht hij
steun aan de tafelrand. Hij rukte de knopen van
zijn hemd los en greep naar zijn hals. Het enige
wat hij kon uitbrengen was braaksel. Het leek
wel een uitbarsting van de Krakatau. Eerst kwam
dampend het onverteerde eten naar buiten, één
dikke brij. Daarna het galgele vocht en ten slotte
het kolkende schuim. Hij kon niet meer
ophouden met braken. Hij viel neer terwijl hij zijn
ziel en zaligheid uitkotste. Mevrouw Du Plessis
keek vol ontzetting naar haar zieltogende man.
“O God, mijn heer,” riep ze vertwijfeld, “wat heb
ik gedaan?” Haar nijd had plaats gemaakt voor
spijt.’
Nou, zei ze, want er was een stilte ontstaan
‘wat vind je hiervan?’
‘Ik weet het niet, antwoorde ik.’
‘Natuurlijk weet je het iet. Het is van lang voor
jouw tijd’ ” (90–91).
41. In Accord’s book she is mentioned as
house slave, which often has a connotation of a
lighter skinned slave, sometimes related to the
master (65). In Neus-van der Putten’s book she
is referred to as the “neergestoken mulattin”
(130). In English that is “Stabbed mulatta.”
42. Much has been written about the
sexualized bodies of creoles, mulattas, and the
history of the concept of hybridity as having its
roots in racial categories. For those who are
interested here are some references: Robert
J.C. Young, Colonial Desire; Ania Loomba.
Colonialism/Postcolonialism; Supriya Nair,
“Creolization, Orality, and Nation Language in
the Caribbean” in A Companion to Postcolonial
Studies; Jenny Sharpe; Ghosts of Slavery; David
Theo Goldberg. “Heterogeneity and Hybridity” in
A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. See also
Mark Reinhardt’s discussion of Margaret Garner,
in Critical Inquiry. Garner was the woman whose
story inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
43. Ombre is known for her general ironic
tone in her literary works. In a review of
another collection of stories by Ombre
called Vrouwvreemd, which shares similar
themes of subjects in motion and their
various experiences of alienation, literary
critic Isabel Hoving describes one of
Ombre’s stories as offering a critique on
Dutch discourses of nationality and
belonging, describing the effect of the oral
monologue device used within it as an
“ironic strategy of deconstruction.” (181)
44. “Ik ben geboren in het district
Commewijne. Sommige plantages van dit
vruchtbare, ooit rijke Surinaamse district
hadden betekenisvolle namen: Mon Souci, Mon
Tresor, Wederzorg, Lust en Rust. Ik kom van
Nijd en Spijt”(78).
45. When borrowing Neus-van der Putten’s
book on du Plessis at the Universiteit van
Amsterdam library, some of the books borrowed
from another library set off the alarm as I was
walking out. When I brought my bag over to the
security guards (all three of them black men
from Surinam) their reaction to the du Plessis
name on the book they inspected was sharp, a
bit critical at first, for they were perplexed at
why a black woman, who was not Surinamese,
would be interested in her. They then made
several attempts to make clear that du Plessis
was not a figure to be admired. This instant
and emotional recognition is in wild
contradistinction to the blank-faced reactions I
receive from my Dutch white majority population
colleagues at the University of Amsterdam
when mentioning du Plessis’s name.
46. “ ‘Zie je deze hand? Meneer bewoog
zijn vingers zodat ik mijn taak moest staken.
‘Dit is de hand die je voedt. Zonder deze
hand bestaan je hoofd, je buik, je ledematen
en al jouw andere lichaamsdelen niet. Deze
hand maakt dat je een groot meisje aan
het worden bent. Kijk me aan.’ Ik keek hem
in do ogen. ‘Wat tussen de muren van
mijn rustvertrek gebeurt is ons geheim.
Juffrouw Treurniet, Mevrouw, niemand,
behalve jij en ik bestaan hier. Begrijp je
dat?’ Ik deed wat er van me werd
verlangd” (102).
47. For the importance of the island as
metaphor and its prevalence in Caribbean
women writer’s work, see Out of the Kumbla, 25.
48. See Anna Reckin “Tidalectic Lectures:
Kamau Brathwaite’s Prose/Poetry as SoundSpace.”
Accord, Clark, and Nina Jurna. Met Eigen Ogen:
Een hedendaagse kijk op de Surinaamse slavernij. Amsterdam: Kit Publishers, 2003.
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Mixing Music: Event, Place and
Transculturality
“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black
Noise Andalusian Style in
Contemporary Spain
Susanne Stemmler
ABSTRACT
“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise Andalusian Style in Contemporary Spain
In contemporary Spanish music a new genre called “flamenco hip-hop” has arisen.
This “urban sound” combines elements of two different traditions: rap music, which
is embedded in the larger context of US African American and global hip-hop culture,
is blended with flamenco, which is a traditional musical and corporeal expression in
Southern Spain. Both their histories have been the subject of different narratives to
which the new hybrid genre of flamenco hip-hop connects. This contribution asks
about the “cultural matrix” that might link these two expressive forms and establishes three categories for a comparative analysis: the performative aesthetics, the
urban setting and the potential for cultural resistance.
Introduction
aquí un poquillo de jiphop flamenquillo/
pa toas las quillas, pa tós los quillos/
aquí un poquillo de jiphop flamenquillo/
pa que te metas por la vena cosa rica chica si!!!
here’s a little bit of flamenco hip-hop/
or all the girls, for all the guys/
“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise Audalusian Style in Contemporary Spain | 241
here’s a little bit of flamenco hip-hop/
for you to get something sweet in your vein, girl, yes!!!1
These lines are taken from the song “Tiempo de Soléa” by Ojos de Brujo, a band from
Barcelona. This first track on their Album Barí (“Joy”), released in 2002, introduces a
new musical style they call “jip-hop flamenquillo.” It is a soléa, a central flamenco form
(among about fifty song forms), originally a dance for women, with its music often sung
for the dancer. On the textual level the expression announces a combination of musical
genres that the group suggests to its wide audience. This fusion has its musical counterpart on the level of instruments, techniques and tunes. Within the song, we hear
scratching, palmas,2 rapped lyrics, flamenco guitar, human-voice beat-boxing and tunes
from North Africa. What is this hip-hop flamenco? Is it rap “aflamencado” or a “rapped
flamenco”? What kind of transcultural sound crossings is Ojos de Brujo creating by
doing this? How can cultural analysis deal with this new style? In order to answer these
questions, I will demonstrate how the group, Ojos de Brujo, is situated within the context of these popular musical forms in contemporary urban Spain and North Africa. I will
then briefly present (critical) histories of the two genres: rap music, embedded in U.S.
hip-hop culture, and flamenco, embedded in the historical and cultural context of
Andalusia. These genres are in constant exchange with other musical forms like jazz,
R&B, Reggae or salsa, and can thus be analyzed within the discourses on authenticity
of a (non-) genre called “world music” with its interacting technologies, markets and
imaginaries, as ethno-musicologist Ana Maria Ochoa points out (1). My hypothesis is
that there are structural as well as social affinities between the musical styles of flamenco and rap music, and their respective performances, which lead towards a new
mix. If sound structures are social structures (Feld), the new sound of “flamenco hiphop” creates a new, yet old imaginary space historically known as Al-Andalus.
Rap Meets Al-Andalus
During the last decade, there has been a comeback of flamenco in contemporary
popular music in Spain, and its extremely lively and young performers present themselves in concerts and festivals – especially in the southern part of Spain, and just
across the Mediterranean in Morocco. The new genre is called flamenco-rap, hip-hop
Andaluz, street-rumba, or – as Junior, a rapper from Málaga, puts it – rap with “sabor
al sur” (“southern flavour,” Rincón 15). The Spanish music industry has developed
the label “sonido ciudadísimo” (“urban sound”) for the acoustic fusions of hip-hop
and flamenco. This term is used to designate contemporary North-African music and
Rumba as well as Ragamuffin and Punk. It refers to that category of “urban music”
in the U.S., which has been developed by music marketing departments, and seems
to be as wide as the category “world music.” Among its representatives are La Mala
Rodriguez, Ojos de Brujo, Haze, La Excepción, Macaco, Ariana Puello, Sólo los Solo,
242 | Susanne Stemmler
El Payo Malo, Rakel Winchester, and Zur. Some of these groups can be found on the
double-album Barcelona Zona Bastarda, a sampler that unites the sounds of the
streets of Barcelona, a Barcelona “bastarda … negra y árabe, brasileña y navarra,
gitana y paya …,”3 as the programmatic liner notes state. On the cover of the booklet a container ship named “Bastardo” figures as a metaphor of Barcelona, the port
city within a globalized economy and with a multiethnic population. The boat, with its
heterotopic connotation in the Foucaultian sense, is a frequently used metaphor to
describe cultural exchange and movement with the Mediterranean. Another sampler,
Rap kañi Del Flamenco al Rap y del Rap al Flamenco, unites a variety of rap and flamenco artists on the same disc without stressing the fusion-aspect as much. Finally,
a more recent release, Hip Jondo: Hip-Hop Cañi and Flamenco Rap,4 puts some
emphasis on the music’s hybridity.5 On this CD, we can find the presumably “first ever
rap-flamenco,” Lola Flores’ “Como Me las Maravillaría Yo.” All these groups form part
of a movement that is very popular in Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, and Málaga in
Andalusia, but also in the Catalan capital Barcelona and in Madrid. It seeks to revitalize the multi- and transcultural traditions of Andalusia as an urban culture.
Pioneers like La Mala Rodriguez and Ojos de Brujo, are internationally successful and
collaborate with nationally well-known flamenco artists as well as with international
rap and Reggaetón artists from the U.S. like Full Nelson for example. Ojos de Brujo
refer to their music as “polyglot flamenco”6 and have released their first album
Vengue7 in 1999. In creating their own structures of production and distribution, Ojos
de Brujo go far beyond the musical dimension of flamenco and hip-hop: they invite
artists of different visual genres (e.g. graffiti) to collaborate during their live performances as well as on their CD designs, as the new release Techarí (Free) documents.
This links Ojos de Brujo to urban subcultures in the U.S. Hip-hop culture originated
during the mid-seventies in New York City as an integrated series of live communitybased practices like graffiti (the art of spray painting on walls or trains), breakdance
(hip hop dance), MCing (spoken word of the MC, the Master of Ceremony over a beat)
and DJing (the art of turntablism) (Dimitriadis 1).8
Southern Spain and parts of northern Africa have been designated as “AlAndalus” both on geographical and mental maps. From the late seventh century to
1492, the southern part of Spain was shaped by Arab, Jewish, Moorish and Christian
music, literature, architecture and food. In 1492, the Arabs and Sephardic Jews were
expelled by the “Reconquista” of the “Catholic King and Queen,” Ferdinand II of
Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. But the cultural traditions mingled and persisted, so
that today this period is still referred to – in an often idealizing and nostalgic manner –
as a paradise lost: a high culture, which has become a model for religious and ethnic tolerance (Liauzu 223). This space can be considered as a culturally heterogeneous but inter-related space. It is part of the geographic and historic Mediterranean
world that the French historian Fernand Braudel has described as an “intersection of
different worlds” (Braudel 6). According to Braudel, the Mediterranean is a world of
differences that is connected into a picture only in our imaginations, like a system in
which the differences are blended and then interlaced as an original unity (Braudel
6). This means that the historic space of Al-Andalus is subject to constant
re-interpretation. It is the space where cultural contact took place and still today takes
place. Following Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban sociologist, this process can be called
“transculturalization.” It is part of everyday life. Both Arabic and Jewish cultures are
as present in Spanish language as in contemporary musical performance around the
Mediterranean. This is clear in the great variety of fusion music, for example, the
recordings of the Sephardic Diaspora9 demonstrate. Groups, such as Radio Tarifa,
(re)combine flamenco from Andalusia with folk tunes from the Maghreb, using the
Arabo-Andalusian loud ud10 (Washabaugh 97). The band’s name is programmatic: in
considering themselves a radio station of Tarifa, Andalusia’s portal city at the Gulf of
Gibraltar opposite Tangier in Morocco, they de-link sound and place. Instead, sound
creates an imaginary space that encompasses both sides of the Mediterranean. This
“holistic” spatial concept also underlies the CD cover of Bari by Ojos de Brujo, that
depicts a map of the entire Mediterranean with sailing ships.
The sonic and visual material, present on Ojos de Brujo’s CDs and DVDs, clearly
aims to connect the “Andalusian” cultural heritage to contemporary globalized urban
culture. This goes far beyond the exoticism of nineteenth century literary or visual representations of Andalusia. On the album Barí the band Ojos de Brujo, whose artistic
name means “eyes of the witch,” juxtaposes graffiti with metaphors of nature (mountains, earth, stones), memory, or local traditions. By this kind of witchcraft they open
a new space for social and political critique: A critique of contemporary multi-ethnic
Spain that still seems for claim homogeneity and that closes its borders for immigrants from Africa. Technically Ojos de Brujo decontextualizes local elements, while at
the same time recontextualizes them within a deterritorialized culture by using the
global hip-hop “idiom.” This tendency is even stronger on the album Techarí. The DVD
cover shows a female Flamenco dancer in a pop art style. It reminds one of how the
lead singer Marina dresses during performances: She often wears a “classical” flamenco dress with frills, her hair pinned-up, sneakers, a pink feather boa, seventies
style make-up and lots of exotic plastic jewels. The stereotypes of the “gypsy dancer,”
the “oriental woman,” and the Indian belly dancer are all exposed in an ironic way. The
typical footwear, an important part of the flamenco performance, has been replaced by
sneakers, a symbol today of hip-hop fashion and culture. The aesthetics of graffiti,
scratch, and rap interrupt and mobilize the static representations of flamenco (as it
has been common in romantic travel writing) in a very dynamic way.
This syncretism corresponds to the musical fusion of flamenco, rap, Latin, and
banghra.11 On the CD Techarí, there are various guest artists, among them are Faada
Freddy from Daara J, a group of rap artists from Senegal who commute between
Dakar and Paris. Daara J’s music is already a hybrid mixture in itself: rap has come
full circle, “back” to West Africa where the slave ships began for the Middle Passage.
Aptly enough, the album, which mixes traditional Senegal tunes with the French banlieue rap, is called Boomerang. On Techarí, bandleader Marina, together with Faada
Freddy of Daara J, raps in Caló, in the song “Runalí,” the language of the Andalusian
Roma. She evokes the mystical and religious dimension of life, by integrating WestAfrican Yoruba saints and drum rituals. The opening song “Color,” a piece on “neighborhood taggers,” “aerosol nights,” drug dealers, breakers and skaters, unites
different and interrelated elements of hip hop culture.12 Even the recent phenomenon of Reggaetón, a rising new genre of rap-styled lyrics with a beat that is influenced
not by hip-hop, but by reggae, dancehall, merengue and techno is mentioned in this
song.13 This connects flamenco rap to the growing Spanish-speaking community
worldwide.14
Flamenco-rap is not the only the result of the constant change that flamenco has
been undergoing since the mid-seventies, which marked the end of Franco’s regime
and the fascist era in Spain: Since then, new innovations have occurred in flamenco
in the “song-text” (“cante-letras”) of “flamenco Nuevo” because of musicians like Paco
de Lucía, Camarón de la Isla, and Lole y Manuel, to mention a few. Composers also
began to incorporate harmonic progressions taken from jazz (as being performed on
Gerardo Nuñez’s album Jazzpaña or by the band Ketama) and Latin or South American
rhythmic patterns (Nieto) like Salsa (e.g. La Barbería del Sur). They added congas,
drums, cajun, keyboard, bass, flute and other instruments not originally used within
the flamenco tradition. Choreography began to change too, as dancers began to study
modern and jazz dance (Nieto). Purists of the genres are sceptical. They consider rap
and flamenco as distinct forms and criticize the reductionistic use of flamenco style
for commercial purposes: “Son cosas diferentes. […] Metes flamenquito y ya has triunfado.”15 But others, like Haze from Sevilla, defend this kind of “rap aflamencado”:
“Más calle que tiene el flamenco no lo tiene el rap nacional.”16 On his album Crónicas
del Barrio the artist Haze has published five tracks considered as “rap puro” and nine
tracks “de fusion con flamenco” (Rincón 13). He has chosen two female flamenco
voices from his neighborhood Los Pajaritos in Sevilla. In his statement, he points out
that rap was to the South Bronx youth, and still is today for millions of youth elsewhere
in the world, what flamenco used to be for him. Like rap music in the Bronx Flamenco
is what people in his barrio sing in the streets and the way in which his songs are
passed on “de boca en boca,” “from mouth to mouth” (13). The title of his album,
Crónicas del Barrio, alludes to rap’s eminent function as an orally transmitted “news
channel,” reiterating the characterization of rap music as the “Black CNN,” as Chuck
D, of the US rap group Public Enemy, has stated. Rap music is deeply embedded in
African American and Hispanic U.S. popular culture and has a specific way of using language and music that is rooted in Black Arts. For a better understanding of the cultural
borrowings and quotations of rap in contemporary Spanish pop music, I shall briefly
outline the history and context of hip-hop culture.
Hip-Hop – A Global Sound and its Local Histories
The hip-hop association H20, in New York has celebrated hip-hop’s 31st anniversary
in November 2005.17 Historically, the phenomenon of hip-hop was born in New York
City’s boroughs of the Bronx and Harlem and in the city of Philadelphia at the beginning and until the mid-1970s. It became very popular in the mid and late 1970s of
the twentieth century. Hip-hop combines various elements of African-American and
Latino popular culture which today is often connected to a specific place: the Bronx.
Hip-hop used to be a verbal musical performance that has defined a community
(Norfleet 1) and shaped the life-style of an entire generation. From the beginning, hiphop culture has been in constant change, to the extent that there is no static object
called hip-hop: “One cannot say what hip hop culture is; one can only explain the
process by which it changes” (Pihel 252). One important aspect of this process is
the transformation of New York City into a post-industrial city from the 60s onwards
(Rose, Black Noise 21–23). But there are a number of different narratives about hiphop’s origins: historically, rapping is considered an oral legacy from slavery. In terms
of its technical, musical production, however, it comes out of the Jamaican sound
system and the innovations of DJing and sampling (Rose, Black Noise 51–52;
Mitchell 4). In terms of its aesthetics, which means its forms, structures and its cultural references rap music may also be considered as an invention by a group of lyricists called The Last Poets, who have brought together music and the word in the
1960s.18 Scholars document the different contribution of races and ethnic groups in
the US to the evolution of rap music, be it the African-American community (Rose),
the Latinos or Puerto Ricans in New York and their interaction with African Americans
(Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop; Rivera, Hip-Hop and New York). Pioneers of hip hop
like Melle Mel of the Furious Five or L.A. Sunshine of the Treacherous Three emphasize the fact that the MCs emerged to “move the crowd,” to have fun, to have a party.
They claim that they created something of their very own out of nothing because they
had no access to clubs or sophisticated musical equipment.19
Today, hip-hop is no longer exclusively an expression of an African-American identity
but part of a world-wide movement. There is a global, urban hip-hop culture that
receives its main impulses from the transatlantic exchange and transfer. It is part of
the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 13), a system of historic, cultural, linguistic, and political
interactions and communication that has its origins in the Middle Passage. In Africa, as
well as in Europe, this has led to the development of specific hip hop forms during the
last two decades that are connected by one aspect: This art can be understood as an
articulation of local or regional conflicts and may have an integrative function for young
ethnic minorities and for those of different social classes. It arises from migration and
the coming together of different cultures, and this produces new cultural codes. Hiphop is part of youth culture and everyday life. Its practices are often divided into four
main aspects: rap, DJing, dance, and graffiti that may or may not overlap.
First of all, there is rap music, originally an expression that “prioritizes […] voices
from the margins of urban America. Rap (“to rap” means “to beat”) music is a form
of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music”
(Rose, Black Noise 2). Lyrics and rhythm are inseparable and take up Afro-American
oral traditions but also Dadaist-like puns, nonsense-verses that deconstruct meaning
and play with the poetic functions of language. Rap battles, competitions where rappers display their skills, ever-changing slang, referring to black cultural figures, word
games (“the dozens”), and quoting from songs or films, are all part of the AfricanAmerican contribution to U.S. popular cultural forms of rap. Originally, during the ritual of live performance, rappers were mediators (Master of Ceremony, MC) between
the music and the audience. There function was to encourage people to dance. As
time went on, the MC became more and more important and developed into the independent role of a commentator or storyteller. To this day, most of the artists consider
themselves MCs. This kind of a narrative mediation between performance and audience also exists in flamenco.
Secondly, the technical innovations of DJing add rhythm and beats. Examples of
these innovations in rap music are breakbeats, scratching, and human beat-boxing.20
Hip-hop is characterized by “bricolage”: the cut-and-paste principle that seems to be
characteristic for contemporary cultures. This challenges the opposition of “citation,”
versus the original, in high culture by attacking the notion of originality itself, and
problematizes the legal concept of “property.” Sampling was created by DJs who
recontextualized bits and pieces of recorded music in new combinations. Public
Enemy, one of the most successful rap groups of the 1980s and 1990s, use Diana
Ross’ soulful voice in “Yeah, Yeah,” half a second of Bob Marley’s “Don’t give up the
fight,” as well as extracts of a speech from Martin Luther King for the beginning of
their song “Party for your right to fight.” “The coded familiarity of rhythms and hooks
that rap samples from other black music, especially funk and soul music, carries with
it the power of black collective memory” (Kage 52). But there are not only quotations
of melody, rhythm, or text. There is also “noise.”21 The extra-musical sounds that are
used, however, do not qualify as noise, because they may be interpreted as indices
of place: gunshots, ambulance sirens or traffic noise are cited as signifiers of urban
soundscapes.22 Rose characterizes these principles as part of a “syncretic process
[that] is especially apparent in the relationship between orality and technology and
its production of orally derived communal narratives via sampling equipment” (Rose,
Black Noise XV).
Another aspect of hip-hop is bodily expression: in addition to voice and gestures,
there are the fluent moves of hip hop dance (break dance, smurf etc.) are characterized
by a unique body language. In the beginning, B-Boys und B-Girls were those men and
women dancing during the breaks (⫽B) of the beats. From then on, hip-hop dance
became an independent style on its own. Dancer’s freestyles very often overcome horizontal boundaries. Dancers conquer space with backspins, head spins and poses
(Gaunt 277). The movements are often inspired by Capoeira-dance or martial arts – and
are sometimes considered to represent symbolic fights between gangs. By this, hip-hop
produces real or virtual spaces, where peers are confronted with each other (Boucher
71). Also hip hop should not over-interpreted as a pathology of the city, urban violence
may be turned into creativity by hip-hop, at least this insight is the motivation for street
workers, and even police, to use hip hop as a pedagogical tool in “difficult” urban areas.
Finally, the visual aspects must be mentioned: with their different styles graffiti
and tags are “iconic texts” (Stemmler, Graffiti) that give new meaning and visibility to
the “non-places” (Augé) of the city. Graffiti blurs images and letters while undermining the power of representation and its hierarchies. Hip-hop artists often spray graffiti on walls and already existing structures, and by doing this, they create an urban
palimpsest. They are interested in engaging with the history of a place. Therefore
memorials and public spaces are privileged areas for graffiti artists.
Hip-hop culture is generally marked by its strong presence in media (TV, radio,
commercials, internet) and fashion; the medialization of hip-hop itself is a driving
force of its constant change. Artists constantly fight for the control of their image
because hip-hop is all about visual agency: images of mainstream and commercial
hip-hop are being transmitted via stereotyped images by MTV and the advertisement
industry. Artists of the more “underground” or “conscious” arena of hip hop often
point out that their images are taken away from them although they agree that these
images are already being produced for a certain purpose. As a lived culture, as part
of every day life on the very neighborhood all practices of hip-hop – rapping, writing,
and breaking – create a “home.” It is not the territorialized connotation of the German
term, “Heimat,” rather, it is a temporary or virtual home of shared experiences that
can be very abstract and distant (Augé 108). It is a transitional place of belonging
and connectedness with a transnational community often referred to as “hip hop
nation.” “Home” seems to be the habitual practice of mobility itself, a symbolic habitat, a way of life.
Hip-hop is not so much a cultural identity as it is a set of gestures, a nonrepresentational practice: although rap songs reflect every day life in many ways and
although the lyrics are in many ways grounded in street life, they tell stories and have
to be considered as rhymed fiction. The meaning of this poetry is being produced in
the very moment of its performance. Similarly, graffiti art relies on instantaneity and
context. Graffiti is more a “cry” (Milon) in the city than an argument, a longing for visibility in a majority society. Sampling, tagging, and signifying are hip-hop’s paradigmatic impulses, and may be called a lingua franca of the twenty first century (Tate
4).23 According to Arthur Jafa, the aesthetics of hip hop is characterized by “flow, layering, and ruptures in line” (quoted by Rose, Black Noise 38, 21–61). These three
movements might be a linking element between its different forms of expression.
Scratch consists of sound, repetition, and rupture. It defines an abstract space
beyond ethnicity or nation. It creates a sense of belonging that is metaphorically figured in the “cipher” (Tate 4), a term used for the circle rappers form while free styling.
U.S. hip-hop scholars James Spady, Samy Alim and Samir Meghelli have done extensive research on hip hop language and global hip hop culture. In their latest book
they give a very precise definition of “tha cipha” and its cultural traditions:
The cipha is where all (or some combination of) the Hip Hop cultural modes of discourse and discursive practices – call and response, multilayered totalizing expression,
signifyin, bustin, tonal semantics, poetics, narrative sequencing, flow, metaphoric and
hyperbolic language use, image-making, freestylin, battlin, word-explosions, wordcreations, word-pictures, dialoguing other voices, talk-singing, kinesics – converge into
a fluid matrix of linguistic-cultural activity. (Spady/Alim/Meghelli 5–6)
The cipha relates to the abstract concept of a global, or virtual, all-encompassing hiphop nation beyond the national. Its specific practices are deeply rooted in the local
contexts of a place that might be (as in this case) the urban environment of Sevilla,
Barcelona, or Granada with its specific history and culture, its class, race and gender
hierarchies. This is why Spady, Alim and Meghelli call their recent book on hip-hop culture and consciousness Tha Global Cipha (2006). In a similar way the German linguist Jannis Androutsopoulos speaks of hip-hop as a global culture and its local
practices. The relation of sound to a specific place, and the simultaneous opening
towards a wider yet abstract concept, is characteristic for the participatory aesthetics or “inclusiveness of hip hop” (Rivera, Hip Hop 239). It offers a flexible pattern for
the incorporation of jazz, funk, soul, salsa, as well as Arabic music. The examples of
Latin Rap or Reggaetón in New York, but also the aforementioned example of Ojos de
Brujo, are examples of how the notion of “African-American aesthetics” is being
changed by cultural shifts (Black Belt 15). These appropriations with their multiple
negotiations of a diasporic experience demonstrate that, within a span of thirty
years, hip-hop has shown its ability to move from an essentialist position, i.e. a declaration of identity, to a more open-ended and poly-cultural, ever-changing combination of styles and attitudes that might be called a dynamic constructivism.
During the last three or four years, it has become increasingly popular in parts of
the Bronx, Brooklyn, and East Harlem, to listen to rap in Spanish or Spanglish, as well
as to Reggaetón. Reggaetón is in itself a colonial vernacular of transnational communities in the Caribbean.24 “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Spanish-speaking
rappers […] began developing bilingual raps and made lyrical bridges between
Chicano and black styles” (Rose, Black Noise 59). Hispanic rap contributes to the
making of a very specific “Nuyorican” soundscape. The Puerto Rican immigrant’s
experience prefigured the transnational quality of the Latin presence in New York
(Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop 141). Being themselves an outcome of a century-old
process of transculturation the Caribbean diasporic communities are a source of creative cultural innovation (Flores, Créolité in the “Hood” 283). They create linguistic and
musical hybrids which renew the rap movement – a phenomenon which may be
observed as well in the aforementioned “jiphop flamenquillo.” Latin rappers, or reggaetón artists from the U.S. East and West coast, give concerts in Spain, sometimes
performing together, and Puerto-Ricans identify with their “Afro-diasporic Caribbean
latinidad” (Rivera 255). The “Latinization” of Rap in the U.S. shows the transferability
of this musical form that can be easily accessed all over the world as an “open
source.” Today, performers of Latin rap travel “back” to Spain, one of the former colonizers of the New World, and find a new audience.
Another outcome of such a formal dynamism is the fusion of flamenco and rap.
Flamenco is precisely one of those local art forms that adapts and re-actualizes the
global hip-hop culture. In the following, I will give a brief overview of the different histories of Flamenco and then show how the interpretation of flamenco shifted from an
essentialist to a more constructivist notion that might help us understanding the new
form of flamenco-rap.
Flamenco – Rough-cut Poetry within a Cathartic Spectacle
According to the anthropologist and flamenco scholar William Washabaugh, flamenco
refers to the popular musical style that emerged around the mid-1800s in southern
Spain, especially in and around the cities of Seville, Cadiz, Jerez, and Malaga.
Flamenco artistry involves various forms of rough-cut poetry sung solo to percussive
guitar accompaniment often in association with dance. Flamenco’s histories differ –
just as with rap – depending on who is telling them. Within flamenco music, several
elements of Andalusian cultures resonate together: the epic song traditions of the
late Middle Ages, the Islamic, Jewish, Christian liturgies, and Romani influences
(Washabaugh 32). Roma were the first performers of this Andalusian tradition that
had its golden age as an all-encompassing human expression during the last half of
the nineteenth century. According to this narrative, the “authentic” and “pure” flamenco has since been weakened by the romantic traveler’s exoticist tourist gaze and
by the popularization of flamenco towards the end of the nineteenth century
(Washabaugh 32). It was during this time that the term “flamenco” picked up its negative connotations as a music and dance of red light districts.
Flamenco is considered to be the music of “Gitanos,” the Spanish ethnic group of
Roma people. Roma were persecuted during the 300 years between 1492 and
1783.25 In this period they developed the core forms of cante gitano: tonás, soleares,
seguiriyas, alegrías, bulerías (Washabaugh, Flamenco, 34). New forms of flamenco
were later derived from Andalusian (e.g. fandangos, fandanguillos, malagueñas,
granainas) and South American folk traditions (e.g. rumbas, colombianas, guajiras).
These folk traditions had been re-introduced as an effect of the Spanish colonization
of South- and Central America, and the Caribbean, from the mid-nineteenth to the
beginning of the twentieth century (Washabaugh 35).
Flamenco’s “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” character was very attractive for
those who were in search for “another,” non-bourgeois Spain like the playwright and
poet Federico García Lorca. In 1922, Lorca, together with the composer Manuel de
Falla, and other notables from Granada sought to revitalize Andalusian flamenco by
promoting the Concurso del Cante Jondo, a two-day contest of song held in the
Granada’s Alhambra (Washabaugh 31). Instead of using the devaluating term “flamenco” they used “cante jondo” which means “deep song” in order to distinguish it
from the commercialized, “lamentable” flamenco spectacles of the ópera flamenca,
the cafés cantantes, or the bars (Lorca 221). Instead, Lorca insists on the “primitive”
aspect of cante flamenco – obvious in the title of his essay “El Cante Jondo. Primitivo
Canto Andaluz” – as a “survival” of Andalusian culture (Washabaugh 34). By initiating this “rehabilitation” of flamenco, Lorca and the other intellectuals who participated in the programmatic movement of the Generación de 27, re-invented flamenco
completely. Like hip-hop flamenco is a “cathartic” spectacle.26 Flamenco songs perform a “double catharsis,” exposing and relieving both the pain of the poor and the
guilt of the wealthy bourgeois public. In this way, it knits together the elements of the
bipolar society of the “new” Spanish nation state.
To analyze flamenco as the voice of opposition and resistance might be the most
interesting way of linking it to hip hop culture. The “songs of the outcasts” (Totton)
tell about the experience of migration, denigration, and repulsion of an ethnic group
within a mainstream society. Today flamenco is – very similar to hip-hop – a lived
experience, a whole lifestyle. There is more to flamenco than music (guitar, rhythm,
voice). Song, dance, and guitar are interrelated within the performance. Washabaugh
argues that every flamenco performance, commercial or non-commercial, is
a multidimensional, multi-accentual experience that almost always includes crosscurrents of political signification. […] Flamenco performances are knotted and snarled performances of complex meaning that deserve careful interpretation. (Washabaugh 31)
Both, rap and Flamenco are often criticized for being commercialized and therefore
non-authentic.27 Mainly, this argument can be found in contemporary critical comments on hip hop videos. The American music critic Stanley Crouch criticizes them as
part of a violent hedonistic black culture with “gold teeth, drop-down pants and tasteless jewelry [sic]” (Eakin). But you can also find these same kinds of criticisms of professional flamenco, which assert that commercialized spectacles have diluted the
“Andalusian soul” of this music, or cloaked its “Gitano heart,” or blunted its oppositional edge, or intensified its power to delude the masses (Washabaugh 38). It is surprisingly and ironically the same Adornian disparagement of commercialized artistry
that those critics share with the Spanish intellectuals of the 27-Generation mentioned earlier.
I would like to argue that flamenco in itself must be considered a syncretistic construction of “the popular.” Popular music has become a source of inspiration for the
avant-garde literature in Spain. During the late nineteenth century it became fashionable to read texts or visit operas that were set in rural areas and whose main characters behaved “wildly.” This was a general tendency in European romanticism that
“invented” (Hobsbawm/ Ranger) folk cultures like flamenco. It was during the period
of romanticism, between 1820 and 1860 that the most important rules of flamenco
were developed. This art form is an attempt to revitalize traditional, agrarian cultures
within the urban milieu of a modern, industrialized society (Steingress 67–9). In
today’s flamenco rap, in a situation of historical and social change, the popular genre
of cante flamenco is reinterpreted again – as a popularized urban street culture.
The Cultural Matrix of Rap and Flamenco: Performative Aesthetics
What are the cultural implications of the fusion between flamenco and rap? What
happens if a musical form that seems to be rooted in a very specific local context
appropriates a global and highly mediated culture like hip hop? And what if both bear
a long tradition of cultural crossings, are “intersticial” (Bhabha) and highly mediated
cultures themselves? In the following, I will present three aspects of the cultural
matrix that constitute the sound syncretism of rap and flamenco: the performative
aesthetics, the urban setting and the potential for cultural resistance.28
What is perceived as song in one context might be considered spoken word in
another (Zumthor 160). Both genres – rap and flamenco – oscillate between these
two extremes. Rap has its roots partly in African traditions: in the storytelling
“chanté-parlé” of the griots in West Africa or the mvets bom in Central Africa (Arnaud
56; Störl). Given its affinity to oral, verbal tradition, rap can be compared to flamenco’s vocality, i.e. the importance of the voice within in the flamenco performance.
In his analysis of the African spoken song tradition as a pre-figuration of rap, musicologist Gérald Arnaud (56) from Cameroon compares rapping to the saeta (“the
arrow of song”). This is the oldest (religious) type of “deep song” in Andalusia, which
is usually sung without accompaniment during Easter procession.29 In a saeta, a participant of the procession starts talking singing to the sculpture of the Virgin Mary.
Far from being a simple listener or consumer of the music, which is played during the
procession, s/he becomes a performer instead and enters a dialogue with the Virgin
Mary, observed and acclaimed by the surrounding audience in the streets. Saetas
have no musical accompaniment, but rely solely on the performer’s voice. The saeta’s
creative pattern within the religious ritual, which integrates and localizes the individual’s expression, has a potential for cultural translation.30 As illustrated by the saeta,
flamenco may be analyzed in categories of form or setting on the one hand, and class on
the other, since the saeta is sung in a specific performance context, and because of
this, transgresses categories of class (similar to the carnival). Raps are told in imaginary dialogues, competitive “battles,” and slang. The first category concerns form or
setting, the second is the linguistic category of code switching with its inclusive or
exclusive effects (class and group identity).
As in the flamenco performance, “tha cipha” (Spady/Alim/Meghelli) becomes the
physical arrangement for the performance. “The Rapper’s voice is the voice of experience, taking on the identity of the observer or narrator”(Rose 2). Hip-hop critic Andre
Willis points out that “rappers create their own raps, which is rare among pop vocal
artists” (Adjaye/Andrews 167). I want to argue that both rap and flamenco depend on
the constellation of a situation, hence they are “situationist” art forms. If the circumstances of the performance are changed, the musical meaning changes too.31 No
sophisticated equipment is needed, with human beat-boxing or clapping hands as a
rhythmic structure and it can be practiced without any technical support. This is not an
elitist culture, its techniques are available to everybody with skills; musical innovation
depends much on style – the way a single artist performs his voice.
The voice can be considered as a musical instrument in both rap and flamenco.
Flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia points out that there is “[t]he voice first, then
rhythm… all the rest comes after” (Totton 71). The rhythm of the human voice seems
to be the most important in flamenco and rap. Both are characterized by polyrhythm
and a special materiality of sound: speech, traffic noise e.g. is integrated in rap via
samples. In flamenco we have a strong bodily presence in the sound with the clapping of hands (palmas) and the specific voice timbre of a certain singer. The boundaries between singing and speaking are fluid. As a result, the singer creates an
ambiance, a new space that gives one the feeling of being at home, “chez soi”
(Deleuze/Guattari 382). Sometimes the meaning of language may be of less importance than its poetic function and the voice almost becomes independent (382). In
both rap and flamenco genres the verbal is linked to gestures in the performance and
the gesture in musical performance is a social event (Swiboda).
Both, rap and Flamenco share the oral transmission of popular proverbs, songs
and expressions full of complex political, social and sexual rhetoric. Their meaning is
grounded in a highly coded language or slang that is embedded in the discursive
practices of lived experience. Their use of language is distinct from the “norm” and
excludes speakers of the mainstream society.32 Monika Sokol, who has done extensive research on the use of language and the function of code switching within rap
music, points out that there are similarities in verbal dueling between rap and the
coplas or flamenco (56). Rap is hard to understand for non African Americans
because it uses vernacular, puns and so on. Flamenco verse is often sung in Caló.
This is the language of the Andalusian Roma that combines elements of different languages like Romani, Spanish, and Arabic. Considered as a language of its own, it is
almost impossible to understand for the Spanish-speaking majority. The complex
metaphors of Caló are embedded in a cultural imaginary that is only shared by people who have the same experiences.33 By utilizing this repertoire today, musicians
actualize older meanings and combine them with the new.
Another common characteristic of rap and flamenco is irony used as a strategy for
survival of a minority group within a majority society. Flamenco, as a “heteroglossic
and multi-voiced event” (Washabaugh 39), relies on a specific set of ironic social
practices that had been developed in Spain during an almost 300 year period beginning from the year 1492. Starting with the conquest of Granada, followed by
Inquisition and the monarchy until early nineteenth century, it was irony that enabled
resistance to opposition and a – more or less forced – play with identities
(Washabaugh). Rap, too, is a genuinely ironic practice. Its irony results from using
words with a double meaning attributed to it. Henry Louis Gates has pointed this out
as the “signifyin’ tradition,” a contribution of African Americans to the American narrative tradition (Adjaye/Andrews 19). Rap’s often-controversial irony – especially in
the sexualized language of both male and female rappers or in gangster rap – is a
constant source of public debate.
It can be concluded that both genres depend on the circumstances of their very performance. The “immediacy” of magical art forms and practices can be found in both rap
and hip hop. Their distinct qualities are grounded in performance, which is defined as
a social and creative act, but that gains its particular meaning in the moment that it
occurs (Zumthor 133). It relies on the uniqueness of a presence and on the situation
as well as on the spontaneous interaction of public and performer. It is through the body
that both performer and audience are grounded in time and place (Zumthor 134).
The Urban Setting
The city, or the urban context, is a common setting within rap texts. The first recorded
rap with a political content was “The Message” (1982) written by Melle Mel (Furious
Five) and performed by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It describes the living conditions in the Bronx in the late 1970s:
Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station
Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge
I’m tryin’ not to lose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under.
The metaphor of the city as a jungle leads to a complex critique of a chaotic cityscape,
that takes you “to the edge” and which makes you “lose your head”: inflation, a strike
that disrupts your routine, and, of course, public transportation. In the urban environment the fragmentation of space appears to go with a fragmentation of perception.
The city is present as a stage, especially in contemporary hip-hop, where the urban
environment is quoted as background and used as a guarantee for authenticity.
The fact that hip-hop comes from the ghetto seems to be its number one point of
reference. It is very obvious that beyond its value as party music hip hop has to do with
segregation and disintegration, with missed urban policy and ethnical tensions. Postindustrial shifts in access to housing, demographics, and communication networks
formed the conditions that nurtured hip-hop (Rose 26). The reference to “el barrio,”
the block, the posse, the neighborhoods, the projects, the corners, or the street in general, seems to be a unifying element not only of hip-hop culture but flamenco as well.
I want to argue that rap may be read as “street flamenco” and vice versa. This
approach harks back to a time before sound moved indoors, before recordings, when
music was embedded in every aspect of everyday life (Van Leeuwen 1). This urban
experience, and the struggle for a voice, is transferred into other urban areas, as well
as non-urban environments. Hip-hop “re-imagines the experiences of urban life and
symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style and
sound effects” (Rose 22). This means that the experience of urban life is transformed into a specific sound and this sound again becomes transferable into other
contexts, away from where it originally occurred when recorded. The sound of the
street – in rap as well as in flamenco – is reclaiming the cities’ public space. If graffiti uses the city as a screen for visibility, then noise, volume, and verbal expression
become a symbol of the struggle for audibility.
Increased migration into the metropolis has given rise to the growth of ethnic districts and communities. These communities share a language of self-parody and constructed tradition. This unites them so that we can think of New York City, for
example, within its multiple relations to San Juan, because of its large Puerto Rican
immigrant population. Sound cultures, like rap or flamenco, are movements against
the territorializing drive of the nation-state. Interaction between urban spaces takes
place within these “contact zones” (Pratt). Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, a Bronx born artist
speaks of a hip hop as a “zone,” a “multilayered space” she lives in: “we are multilayered people in all what we do.”34 Hip-hop seems to be “a virtual island where people with different experiences of migration meet,” as Enemigo, a rapper from Puerto
Rico, puts it.35 People migrating from rural to urban areas, within the boundaries of a
nation state, will refer to hip-hop as helping to create a sense of “home” as well. This
creates a sense of belonging in a new urban context, as we can see in barrios of the
cities of Southern Spain as well. Music, although it often has its roots in rural traditions, is always radically transformed by urban dwellers.
New York, Berlin, Dakar, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Seville, Marseille, Algiers, Tangiers,
etc. – hip-hop phenomena are linked to an urban environment but at the same time
hip hop has been expanding to rural areas. Hip-hop video-clips, the lyrics of rap
music, the body movements in break-dance – directly or indirectly they all refer to the
origin in the urban metropolis. It replicates and re-imagines the experiences of urban
life and symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance,
style and sound effects (Rose 22). Contemporary language tries to avoid talking
about hip-hop as a “black music” and prefers the term “urban music.” This seems to
be very interesting for a comparative analysis of flamenco-hip hop on both sides of
the Mediterranean: “urban” in this context tries to make issues of race and ethnicities disappear. The “popular” art of flamenco in nineteenth century can be seen as
a relocation of an art form characteristic of a disappearing traditional agrarian society within a modern, industrialized urban milieu. Today, by using flamenco verses with
metaphors of nature within a scratched rap song, something interesting happens:
there is “non-urbanity” cited in an urban context in which issues of gender, race and
ethnicity are negotiated. The already “urbanized” flamenco is in a way re-urbanized in
the new context of the post-industrial city with its new ethnic and racial divisions and
segregational practices.
Cultural Resistance
There is an outsider-feeling both in hip hop and in flamenco. Several histories of flamenco and African-American music, such as blues, jazz, and rap, strengthen the argument that this kind of music is born out of a marginal position within a majority
society and a melting of different musical and cultural traditions. In his liner notes of
Miles Davis’ and Gil Evans’ album Sketches of Spain, recorded 1959 in a New York
studio and originally released in 1960, Nat Hentoff, co-editor of the Jazz Review,
emphasizes that Davis “can so absorb the language of another culture” and compares the “deep song” of flamenco with the “cry of the blues” (Davis 1997). He
speaks of a “universal emotion of authenticity” (Davis 1997). Flamenco has often
been compared with Jazz music’s potential for resistance.
Both rap and flamenco have been considered outside the categories of Western
definitions of music. Tricia Rose argues that rap in the beginning was considered a
“style nobody could deal with” (Rose, A Style Nobody Can Deal With). Perceived as
“black noise” (Rose, Black Noise) by the mainstream it became “rebel music” not
only for the black population, but as well for the Puerto-Rican immigrants in the ghettos of the South Bronx (Rivera 2003). This tendency has a clear parallel in depictions
of flamenco coming from “the poorest of the poor” (Totton 23). The flamenco artist –
regardless whether he is of gypsy origin or an Andalusian peasant – is considered as
a slave, an illiterate, or a homeless person by the majority (Totton 23).
Histories of flamenco have been linked to histories of Jazz. Comparisons have
also been made between black Americans and Roma because of the traumatic experience of racial persecution (Zern). If the U.S.-group Public Enemy raps, for example,
“the nigga you love to hate,” they use the stereotype to express the ambivalent feeling of attraction and rejection that underlies racism and that can be called the fetishcharacter of stereotype (Bhabha 66–8). This same race dynamic appears in the
“Gitanofilia” of current Flamenco discourses as a substitute for the “Maurofilia” in
Andalusians “Golden Age” (Baltanas). The attributed, stereotyped violence of a marginalized ethnic group appears in the “gangsta” images of rappers as well in readings of patterns of social behavior amongst Roma.
A very interesting similarity between rap and flamenco is their ability to overcome the
boundaries of race or ethnicity and to unbind (social or geographical) place and music
in terms of the audience. In both cases it seems to follow the pattern “Black music –
white audience” (Kitwana) with all its economic implications. Rap music’s most devoted
listeners consist of economically potent, young white listeners from the suburbs living
far from the inner-city population (Rose, Black Noise 4) or overseas, for example in
Japan. Flamenco gains a larger and larger audience among payos (the “non-Romani”),
living in Madrid or the Northern Parts of Spain, but in Berlin or Tokyo as well, who definitively do not share the experience of the Gitano population. The social position of
African-Americans in the U.S. and Roma within the Spanish nation-state has been and
still is ambivalent. If a suburban kid listens to rap music s/he appreciates this art form
and temporarily identifies with a “cool” street style. If a payo/paya listens to flamenco
this is a very similar act of self-positioning that goes beyond the appreciation.
The reception of rap and flamenco among “white” listeners and the fusions of both
genres with other musical forms illustrates that they can be consumed away from the
social context. This might show their ability to integrate and attract a wide audience
beyond the limited spaces in which these musical forms originated. These musical forms
mobilize social, racial and ethnic positions within society, albeit on an abstract level.
Both groups – labeled payos by the Roma or “white negroes” by the hip hop community
(Mailer) – document the ambivalent fascination for “insiders” to identify temporarily with
“outsiders.” The outsiders have gone mainstream and rap has become the dominant
U.S. pop culture beyond the color line: “hip hop has made ‘black’ into a political color for
a whole new generation of African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, women, and
white youth” (Scott 143). Maybe this will be the case with flamenco to which an ethnic
minority has contributed and has gained a national and world-wide reputation.
In contrast to the mobilizing forces of rap and flamenco as genres within the imaginary, they continue to be “articulations of difference” (Papapavlou) within a social
system. Contemporary rappers inside and outside the U.S. often are immigrants, and
the musicians who produce “flamenco nuevo” (“new flamenco”) often are of NorthAfrican origin, commuting between Morocco and Spain. The diasporic situation of
those producing sounds like rap (Afro-diasporic) or flamenco (Romani) seems to play
an important role. This marginal position can be taken over in counter-hegemonic
discourse within majority society.
Conclusion: Hybrid Style
The overview of the features common to both flamenco and rap leads to the conclusion that from these musical forms, already hybrid themselves, a new genre
emerges. This genre takes advantage of the cultural matrix of the – at first sight –
different traditions. Flamenco and rap music, like other forms of popularized music,
are subject to constant reinterpretation that explicitly aims to transgress national
borders. According to Craig Watkins, “[h]ip hop is creating very interesting bridges
across racial and ethnic communities” (Randall 2). The refashioning of diasporic conditions and migratory peoples contribute to a grounding of transnational formations
in a specific place and time as Juan Flores, a New York based scholar of Puerto Rican
and Black Studies puts it when talking about popular cultures. Flores refers to the
concept of “hybrid cultures” that has been developed by the Mexican anthropologist
Nestor Garcia Canclini. Transnational formations characterized by cultural hybridity,
which is more than the mere fusion of cultural traditions, that results from the mutual
influence between intersecting groups. There is also mixing and interpenetration of
cultural domains themselves, the blurring of distinctions between high and low,
between elite, folkloric and mass cultures.” (Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop 26).
Articulations like the “jiphop flamenquillo” can be considered as hybrids in the aforementioned sense, as an appropriation of a global culture by a local surrounding,
transgressing social and class boundaries and questioning the notion of high/low
culture itself. The term “local” has to be understood not as a fixed, but as a contested and negotiated space (Bennett 52). Flamenco hip-hop re-contextualizes an
urban Afro-American culture and recombines it with very different and hybrid musical
traditions. The ethnical and political dimension of “black noise” is transposed to the
Mediterranean area. It meets another dimension of cathartic art, an embodied “politics of passion,” flamenco. Both, rap and flamenco are musical expressions that are
embedded, each in its own specific way, in the everyday life of an increasingly young,
urban population in former “Al-Andalus.”36 Rap and Flamenco are musical styles that
integrate speech, music and other sounds, often in a public space or by creating a
public space. Via symbols, ritual, connected histories and traditions new, transnational spaces are created. They establish a new relationship between place and identity. By this, the local space of former “Al-Andalus” – today politically more and more
separated by the inequalities of a north-south-dichotomy – is appropriated, perceived
as a cultural unity and “made habitable” (Bennett 69) by a new generation of musicians and a young audience. If Claude Liauzu, a specialist on Mediterranean history
and culture, says that the Mediterranean still has to be invented (224) – the music
of Ojos de Brujo is a contemporary attempt to invent it as an African-EuropeanAfrican-American space.
Notes
1. 2 Feb 2005
⬍http://www.ojosdebrujo.com. ⬎
2. Spanish for rhythmically clapping hands.
3. A “bastardized Barcelona with Black people
and people from Brazil, from the Navarra region
of Northern Spain, with Roma people and nonRoma people.” (Translations by myself, unless
otherwise indicated).
4. The expression “hip jondo” refers to the
term cante jondo (“deep song”) Federico García
Lorca and others invented to found a new genre
in 1922.
5. I use the terms “hybridity” and “hybrid” in
the sense of Nestor García Canclini. The term
“hybridity” refers to the fusion of cultural
traditions resulting from the mutual influence
among intersecting groups. In putting some
emphasis on the process of reconversion, he
describes the interpenetration of cultural
domains, but also adds the blurring of age-old
distinctions between high and low, between
elite, folkloric, and mass cultures.
6. 2 Feb 2005
⬍http//www.ojosdebrujo.com⬎.
7. In Caló, the Roma language, vengue means
“energy”.
8. Stylistic mixing has a long tradition as well
in the history of classical music, jazz and pop
music. Flamenco often served as a pars pro
toto for the imaginations of “Spanish music” or
simply ‘the popular’ There are many examples
of European composers that incorporate
elements of Southern Spain into their own
avant-garde or modernist art such as Richard
Schumann, Franz Liszt, Maurice Ravel or
Georges Bizet. “Claude Debussy, Michail Glinka
and Nikolai A. Rimski-Korsakov were looking for
structures of ‘the popular’ not only in Russia
or France but also in Andalusia,” as Lorca
points out in his essay El Cante Jondo. Primitivo
Canto Andaluz (203). Miles Davis, for example,
works on flamenco elements on his album
Sketches of Spain (released in 1960) or in the
song “Flamenco Sketches” (1959). Elements of
the flamenco aesthetics are used in
contemporary pop music, for example in MTV’s
“hip hopera” entitled Carmen (2001) the
famous setting of Sevilla’s tobacco factory is
moved to the streets of New York and an
African-American Carmen expresses herself in
rap. Songwriter Björk collaborates with
flamenco artist Raimundo Amador for her song
“So Broken” on Jóga (1996).
9. For example on Primavera en Salonico.
Sephardic Folk Songs with Savina Yannatou
(1994) or on the album Primavera en Salonico.
Songs of the Mediterranean (1998) of the same
artist.
10. The ud (or oud) is one of the most
important instruments in Arabic and Islamic
musical communities. This short necked,
fretless instrument is a direct ancestor of the
European lute. Probably the ud originated in
Persia, but it has gained popularity among
musicians across the Middle East, North
America and southern Europe, especially Iberia.
Generally, there are two main types of
instruments: Turkish uds, usually crafted in
Istanbul, and made from a very light wood
which produces a bright tone; and Arabic uds,
typically made in Cairo and Damascus. 2 Feb
2005
⬍http://www.si.umich.edu/chico/instrument/
pages/ud_gnrl.html⬎.
11. “Bhangra is a form of folk music and
dance that originates from Punjab. People
traditionally performed Bhangra when
celebrating the harvest. During Bhangra, people
sing Punjabi Boliyaan lyrics, at least one person
plays the dhol drum, and other people may play
the flute, dholak drum, or other musical
instruments. While Bhangra began as a part of
harvest festival celebrations, it eventually
became a part of such diverse occasions as
weddings and New Year celebrations. Moreover,
during the last thirty years, Bhangra has
enjoyed a surge in popularity worldwide, both in
traditional form and as a fusion with genres
such as hip-hop, house, and reggae.” 16 May
2007 ⬍http://www.punjabonline.com⬎.
12. English translation by Rob James: 2 Feb
2005 ⬍http://www.ojosdebrujo.com⬎. The
expression “neighborhood taggers” refers to
graffiti writing, a tag is the most basic writing of
an artist’s name in either spray paint or marker.
A graffiti writer’s tag is his or her personalized
signature. “Aerosol nights” refers to the spray
cans graffiti artists usually use. Because this is
illegal it is practiced mostly by night.
13. “The neighbors are murmuring in the
windows:/they can’t stand listening to
reggaetón every day!” (transl. Rob James, 2 Feb
2005 ⬍http://www.ojosdebrujo.com⬎.
Reggaetón is a reggae-based dance music that
was first performed by Panamanian artist El
General in the early 1990s. It became very
popular with Latino youth and spread to North
America since 2000. Reggaeton blends
Jamaican music influences of reggae and
dancehall with those of the Caribbean, such as
bomba and plena, as well as that of hip-hop.
Starting in Panama, Reggaetón has given the
Hispanic youth a musical genre that they can
claim as their own. The genre’s influence has
spread to the wider Latino communities in the
United States as well as to Latin American
audiences. See also Julian Henriques’ article
on Jamaican Sound Systems in this volume.
14. The Latino population in the U.S. is
increasing in numbers and visibility. Today,
approximately 26% of New York’s population is
“Hispanic.”
15. “These are two different things. […]
Present yourself as flamenquito and you have
already won.” Rincón 15.
16. “There is no more ‘street’ in national rap
than in flamenco.” (Rincón 13)
17. 21 April 2007
⬍http://www.hiphopassociation.com.⬎
18. The Last Poets were modern day griots
expressing the nation-building fervor of the
Black Panthers in poems. According to Amiri
Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), the Last Poets were
rappers of the civil rights era. “With politically
charged raps, taut rhythms, and dedication to
raising African-American consciousness, the
Last Poets almost single-handedly laid the
groundwork for the emergence of hip-hop.”
Ankeny, Jason. “Last Poets.” 15 April 2007
⬍http://www.allmusic.com⬎.
19. Interview recorded by the author
22 Apr 2007, New York City.
20. According to hip hop scholar Tricia Rose
the break beat is “one of rap’s earliest and
most central musical characteristics. […]
Dubbed the ‘best part of a great record’ by
Grandmaster Flash, one of rap’s pioneering
DJs, the break beat is a section where ‘the
band breaks down, the rhythm section is
isolated, basically where the bass guitar
and drummer take solos.’ […] Playing the
turntables like instruments, these DJs
extended the most rhythmically compelling
elements in a song, creating a new line
composed only of the most climactic point in
the ‘original’ ” (Rose 73–74). For “scratching,”
a technique created by DJ Grand Wizard
Theodore, I “a rhythmic sound made from
sliding a turntable needle back and forth on top
of a vinyl record” (Westbrook 121). Human
“beat-boxing” refers to “the ability to make
instrumental sounds using the mouth”
(Westbrook 121). See also Julian Henriques’
article in this book.
21. Noise, as Massumi points out, is the
condition of emergence of music. It is the
unperceived substrate from which soundpatterning differentiates and against which its
stands out. We hear the background noise of
existence that is expression (Massumi 776).
22. The production of space by sound in New
York’s cityscape is a constant topic in
postmodernist fiction, see for example Toni
Morrison’s novel Jazz (for a brilliant analysis
how Morrison relates sound to Harlem, “the
City,” see Löbbermann).
23. “Sampling” refers to the “use of other
recorded music in the creation of a new of
updated music” (Westbrook 120). For a
definition of “signifying” see Gates. For a
definition of “tagging” see endnote 12.
24. It started with La Familia, Wu Tang Latino
and Daddy Yankee.
25. For more details on Roma history see
Anikó Imre’s article on world music and identity
politics in this volume.
31. This means that CD recordings of around
three minutes change the character of a lived
practice both in rap or flamenco.
26. Interview with the artist MC Protious
Indigenious recorded by the author 21 April
2007, New York City.
32. This does not mean that this art cannot
become part of mainstream culture.
27. See the debates on “realness” in hip-hop
and on “flamenco puro.”
28. For a different reading of hybridity and
cultural resistance see Imre’s article in this
volume.
29. Processions in the streets of cities and
villages in predominantly catholic Spain are the
highlights of the Semana Santa, the “Holy week”
during Easter. Statues and relics, often taken
from churches, are decorated, put on display
and carried by different fraternities during the
procession, which mostly take place at night.
30. This has been acknowledged by Miles
Davis and Gil Evans in “Saeta” on the album
Sketches of Spain (1960). Davis works and
improvises on the topic of a Saeta. Instead of
picking up the guitar, he takes up the voice of
the saeta singer within the “noise” of the ritual
marching band with his trumpet.
33. Part of this imaginary is for example
pantheism. The Romancero inspired Lorca to
renew this tradition with his Romancero gitano
in which he uses metaphors of nature, like an
animated olive tree.
34. Recorded by the author at the Conference
“Latinos in the Hip Hop Zone,” Museo del
Barrio (5 Nov 2005, New York City).
35. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz.
36. Another home-grown musical style being
used to articulate a specific range of local
knowledge and issues is Algerian raï music:
Similar to hip hop it helps young Algerians,
immigrated to France, to negotiate the
restrictions placed upon their sexual and
emotional desires (Bennett 59–60).
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Hip Hop Nation and
Gender Politics
Anikó Imre
ABSTRACT
Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics
This essay compares how hip hop is deployed in the support of local identity politics
in the work of musicians from The Netherlands, Israel, Hungary and the United
States. In each case study, the argument examines the paradoxical dialectic between
authenticity and hybridity that characterizes contemporary world music. Particularly
instructive are the cases where hip hop, an inherently hybrid, global musical form,
provides the tools and expression for a masculinized, often militaristic form of
authenticity to be constructed. In global contexts outside the United States, such a
masculine identity tends to serve as a rallying point for nationalistic causes, which
strategically render feminist critiques irrelevant.
Introduction
A recent documentary film festival I attended screened two films about hip-hop, one
after the other.1 The first one, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, made by former college quarterback and self-identified hip-hop fan Byron Hurt, interweaves direct commentary by
the filmmaker and his interviews with African-American rappers such as Mos Def, Fat
Joe, Chuck D, Jadakiss, as well as with critics, activists, and young rap consumers.
The picture is bleak: the current state of hip-hop in the U.S. is devoid of the initial, justified anti-establishment anger and resistant spirit that propelled this musical form
from inner-city ghettoes onto MTV. Instead, rich “white guys in suits,” as a critic puts
it, those in charge of the global music industry, have consolidated a self-hating, violent
Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics | 265
and disturbingly misogynistic rap culture, which is designed to appeal to a large white
audience. Because this is the most lucrative package in which hip-hop sells, the rappers featured in the film, exhibiting attitudes from denial through irony to cynicism, see
no other way but to continue supplying the mainstream music industry with what it
rewards.
The second film, Saz (Israel), by director Gil Karni, features Arab-Israeli rapper
Samekh Zakhut, whose declared mission is to enlist hip-hop in the service of
Palestinian nationalism. Hip-hop is to be reunited here with its original mission as a
politicized artistic tool with which to negotiate – or, in this case, violently stage –
social conflict. Only the ongoing debate between Samekh, who sees the Arab minority in Israel as increasingly marginalized, and his communist grandfather, who argues
in favor of peaceful coexistence, introduces some ambiguity into the film’s apparent
justification of Samekh’s anger. During the one-year period that the camera follows
the rapper, he becomes increasingly successful. The film wraps up as he is boasting
to his grandfather of a likely record deal that would shoot him onto the Euro-American
market. The audience is left wondering what will happen to his commitment to the
cause of Palestinian nationalism.
Watching these two films about the politics of hip-hop side by side inevitably
brings to the surface some of the contradictions embedded in “world music” today.
It is a commonplace to claim, Steven Feld reminds us, that music’s deep connection
to social identities has been intensified by globalization (189). However, hardly any
further generalizations can be issued about this connection. Byron Hurt’s account of
the American hip-hop scene confirms anxious narratives, which describe the commodification and cooptation of ethnic difference by the moguls of global entertainment
media. Saz may inspire more optimistic projections, which emphasize the active,
glocal reappropriation of pop music – in this case, African-American hip-hop – by young
people around the world and celebrate the “endlessly creative conversation” among
such reappropriations, which refuse to become trapped in a quest for authenticity
(Feld 196).
The two films display and solicit two markedly different approaches to very similar
musical performances: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, set in the hub of the hip-hop culture
others emulate worldwide, is informed by a gender-conscious critical perspective, which
allows it to point to patriarchal ties between black and white men. Through its divideand-conquer mechanism, Hurt argues, the white media establishment can manipulate
black men into violently asserting their illusory power over black women. The fact that
black rappers inadvertently foreground their own sexual insecurity and lack of social
power and that such performances revive racist stereotypes about black people is the
source of the pleasure so many white boys take in hip-hop. Both the feminist critique
and questions about the corrupting strategies of the music industry seem alien to
Saz – something that can be safely generalized across worldwide adaptations of
266 | Anikó Imre
African-American hip-hop. The political negotiations in which Samekh’s tendentious
music engages, although overtly masculinist and militarized, are performed exclusively
between an oppressive nation-state and the oppressed diasporic national community
for which he volunteers to speak.
I am interested in how the claim of “authenticity” returns to justify the sexual politics of hip-hop in performances and performer personas that are evidently derived,
hybrid, transplanted. The sexism and misogyny that underscores performances of
combative, “real” black masculinity has recently opened up hip-hop to criticism in the
United States. However, such a model serves as inspiration and justification for hiphop performers around the world to become the authentic voices of their nations or
other marginalized communities. It is perplexing that such performances, unlike
those of African-American rappers, are seen as exempt from gendered critique, even
though feminism has had so much to say both about the patriarchal structure of
nationalism and the fragmentation of identity politics into the commercialized matter
of individual choices. The alleged authenticity of political statements by hip-hop
artists such as Samekh should logically be undermined by their derivative, staged
and commercialized participation in performing world music.
In particular, there is something profoundly contradictory in the alliance between hiphop and territorial nationalism. A migratory, hybrid musical form is employed to confirm primordial boundaries and blood ties. This connection works against what many take to be
the logic of world music, hip-hop in particular. In her chapter in this book, devoted to the
new musical mix of flamenco-rap, or “hip hop Andaluz,” Susanne Stemmler argues that
the inherent hybridity, openness, and performative irony that hip-hop and flamenco share
is amplified in their combination and creates a new space for social and political critique.2
Rap, in this account, is not only a highly politicized news channel connecting transnational
communities of the “Black Atlantic” but is also a musical form that functions as an easily accessible open source. Hip-hop, then, provides a virtual home of shared experiences,
a space of connectedness and belonging to a transnational community often called “hiphop nation.” In this sense, “home seems to be a habitual practice of mobility, itself a symbolic habitat, a way of life.”3 According to Stemmler, hip-hop and flamenco are both sound
cultures that act against the territorializing impulses of the nation-state.
While this is a contagiously optimistic account, I would like to argue, with reference to transnational rappers such as Zakhut, that it overlooks the gendered, sexualized and racialized dimensions of hip-hop’s transnational migration. In the case
studies I discuss, one can trace an unspoken, re-territorializing effort by ethnic or
minority rappers who, similar to most African-American rappers, stake out their turf in
the essentialist language of rather old-fashioned sexism and homophobia. Such blatant sexism goes hand in hand with territorial nationalism or militarism, undermining
the celebratory ideal of a global hip-hop nation. Even in cases where rappers do not
speak for a nation, discourses of nationalism and the interests of the nation-state
permeate the construction of “authentic” racialized bodies on the global musical
marketplace.
The celebratory logic of world music often simply equates hybridity with resistance
and labels a feminist critique frivolous. But a critical feminist approach is crucial to
sorting out how Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean masculinities, constructed as
objects of exoticizing emulation by transnational record and media companies, come
to underscore nationalistic purposes. While my inclination is to critique a simplistic
equation between hybridity and resistance, I would also like to resist other kinds of
sweeping generalizations about “world music” and hold out the possibility that there
may be versions, or at least moments of hip-hop music that could be seen to provide
spaces of resistant expression in-between established state and corporate channels. In the last part of this essay, I will speculate about such moments in relation to
versions of world music generated by Roma musicians in post-communist Eastern
Europe. However, as I will argue, even the freshness and mobilizing power of such
musical expression should not exempt it from a transnational feminist criticism of its
implication in nationalism and (neo)imperialism.
Israeli Eminem, Moroccan Minority Model
In an age when no political expression remains untouched by global media entertainment, hip-hop has been increasingly adopted worldwide as the tool of resistance to a
range of institutions. For instance, Kobi Shimoni, the “Israeli Eminem,” who also calls
himself “Subliminal” to mystify his own hybrid persona, has risen to wide popularity
since the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks failed in 2000 and violence has escalated in
Israel. His music represents a sharp departure from traditional Israeli music, which
has been “a mix of Hebrew-language rock and Mediterranean crooning” (Mitnick).
Subliminal blends American hip-hop styles with traditional Hebrew and Persian music
samples “layered with fat bass lines and catchy choruses,” evoking a Jewish history
and tradition with Middle Eastern overtones. But the lyrics reveal a perspective that is
identified as “patriotic” at best and violently anti-Palestinian at worst, announcing the
claims of a divisive territorial nationalism in the “tough” macho language of L.A.
“thug” rappers. Shimoni and his band all come from military backgrounds. The military
also provides their widest fan base (“Q’s Interview”). The rapper says he sells “pride
and a dose of reality” through his songs, which he considers his weapons. In the song
“Divide and Conquer,” he sings: “Dear God, I wish you could come down because I’m
being persecuted. My enemies are united. They want to destroy me. We’re nurturing
and arming those who hate us. Enough!” (“Israel’s Eminem”).
It appears that the name “Subliminal” refers less to the subtlety than to the ambiguity of Shimoni and his sidekick’s, Yoav Eliasi’s a.k.a. “Shadow’s” patriotic politics.
They are directly supported and sponsored by the Israeli government. The rapper
sells more than patriotic pride: he has a lucrative clothing line, under the logo TACT
268 | Anikó Imre
or Tel Aviv City Team. All of the items, from caps to baggy pants, are decorated with
a Star of David, which he claims to have rendered trendy, along with a stitching that
reads, “The Architects of Israeli Hip Hop” (“Israel’s Eminem”). The cover of Shimoni’s
second album, “The Light and the Shadow,” portrays a muddy fist menacingly clutching a silver Star of David pendant. In the song “Bottomless Pit,” violence appears
self-serving, divorced from the national cause, as he warns an unnamed enemy:
“Anybody who messes with me ends up in a coffin.”
A similar, highly politicized set of identity negotiations between white national
majority and, in this case, immigrant Muslim minority has been carried out by Ali B,
perhaps the most popular rapper in the Netherlands. Unlike Shimoni, however, who
gives voice to majority nationalism, Dutch-Moroccan Ali B has been welcomed by both
Moroccan/Arab and Dutch constituencies. His career has risen amid increasing
national tension over post-Cold War immigration, the European Union’s eastward
enlargement, and the unresolved situation of guest workers that have settled in the
Netherlands over the decades. Taxed religious and ethnic relations burst through the
surface of the traditional Dutch national self-image of tolerance in November of
2004, when controversial director Theo van Gogh was murdered by another DutchMoroccan, Mohammed B. Ali B, who raps mostly in Dutch but straddles both cultures,
is seen in the Netherlands as a figure of great political relevance. His hybridity makes
him both flexible enough to represent the Moroccan community and easy to appropriate as the poster boy for Dutch multiculturalism, used to keep in check resistance
to the very process of fortifying borders and clamping down on immigration that his
figure as an “alien” foregrounds. The music and entertainment media industry have
been glad to tap into the interest created by yet another exotic identity mix, whose
“authenticity” is enhanced by his controversial political position (Taylor).4
In both cases, it is in the rappers’ performance of African-American hip-hop masculinity that their perceived authenticity and political mobilizing potential lies. While
their cultural politics is exploited by both the nation-state and the commercial media
industry, their power to mobilize is formidable. This is particularly obvious in the case
of Ali B, who is a frequent celebrity guest and topic of discussion in mainstream
Dutch media. In his seductive music videos, such as “Till Morning” and “Ghetto,” he
is typically featured as a ghetto rapper surrounded by a multiracial cast of dancers
and singers. The lyrics of the songs address the sense of abjection that pervades the
Muslim immigrant ghetto in a mix of languages. “Ghetto’s” chorus goes,
This goes out to my Tatas in the [ghetto]
My Toerkoes in the [ghetto]
My Mokros in the ghetto [ghetto]
This goes out to the Antis in the [ghetto]
Malukus in the [ghetto]
The Joegos in the [ghetto]
[Ghetto living]
These streets remind me of quicksand [quicksand]
When you’re on it you’ll keep goin down [goin down]
And there’s no one to hold on to
And there’s no one to pull you out
You keep on fallin [falling]
And no one can here you callin
So you end up self destructing
On the corner with the tuli on the waist line just got outta the bing doin
state time
Teeth marks on my back from the canine
Dark memories of when there was no sunshine
Cause they said that I wouldn’t make it
[I remember like yesterday]
Holdin on to what God gave me.5
The video clip of the song “Zomervibe” (“Summer Vibe”) shows a less threatening but
even more seductive side of Ali B’s, and, by extension, the Moroccan immigrant’s,
seductive masculinity: It showcases the half-naked rapper in a sunny Mediterranean
setting, surrounded by desiring white women on a luxury boat, basking in the glory of
his celebrity life. It is likely that such images of successful, powerful immigrants mediate and positively alter the perception of the stereotypical violent Muslim to which the
Moroccan minority tends to be assigned in Dutch mainstream culture. However, the
same concerns emerge here, perhaps even more forcefully, that Beyond Beats and
Rhymes raised: to the extent that hip-hop is a predominantly male and explicitly heterosexist genre, it seems that the empowering potential inscribed in its cultural politics remains limited to men who are, or aspire to be, rightful representatives of their
communities. The lines of opposition and resistance presuppose and confirm a
national, by definition male-populated field of action. One suspects that hip-hop’s sexual politics consolidates an alliance between men of national majorities and minorities, grounded in and serving binary gendered and sexual relations that have proven
harmful, in which women have a choice between staying silent or engaging in the game
like men.
Todd Boyd writes:
Ultimately, hip hop’s concern with cultural identity has been about affirming authenticity, in what would otherwise be considered a postmodern, technologically driven,
media-dominated, artificial world. To “keep it real” means to remain true to what is
assumed to be the dictates of one’s cultural identity. (23–24).
270 | Anikó Imre
As Boyd readily admits, this quest for authenticity “often translates to one’s perception in the marketplace” and one’s relationship to capital (24). The tension around
authenticity that is at the heart of the global migration of hip-hop is also captured by
Stuart Hall in his description of cultural identities in his native Caribbean as a play of
difference within identity. His description provides a model that helps to foreground
the contradiction embedded in each of these global musicians’ performances: that
between their own transnational, hybrid cultural and economic constitution and their
supposedly pure representative politics, that enables them to rap for an allegedly
homogeneous national or minority group.
According to Hall, in a situation captured by Derrida’s “differance” on a theoretical
plane, the “authentic” state of being from the Caribbean is continually destabilized by
the historical, colonial ruptures and discontinuities that constitute Caribbean identities.
While “being” of a certain essence is always “becoming” just like, in the deconstructionist model, absolute difference is always a sliding difference, on its way to new meanings without completely erasing traces of other meanings, imposing a single imaginary
coherence on an area so obviously fraught with dispersal and fragmentation would be
very hard. It is this evidence of imagined roots and positioned identities that makes Hall
turn to “play” to evoke instability and permanent unsettlement, differences inscribed
between, rather than within, identities. Besides the full palette of skin hues, he argues,
the complexity of this cultural play can be most powerfully experienced in the play of
Caribbean music (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora”).
It appears that what maintains the authenticity of transnational hip-hop is precisely
the hyperbolic performance of racialized, heterosexual manhood. From the point of view
of feminist postcolonial and transnational theorists, this is a very problematic connection. In their work one finds the most acute critique of representation – of the violence
involved in the act of speaking for the subaltern, even if the speaker has the best intentions (Spivak, Chow) as well as of the control over women by nationalistic discourses
and technologies strategically employed by both the nation-state and transnational
business corporations (Grewal and Kaplan, Kaplan et al., Marciniak, Mohanty).
World Music and Post-Communist Romany “Authenticity”
Hall’s point about cultural identities and musical performance has a more universal
potential, which can serve analogically to contest the essentialist unity that nationstates impose on the identities they claim to contain within their state borders. It is
also a useful lens through which to examine the alleged “authenticity” of world music’s
politics vis-à-vis nationalism. The relationship between the two senses of play Hall discusses – diasporic dispersal and unsettlement on the one hand and musical play on
the other – is especially relevant for the Roma.
The Roma have been the most deprived and marginalized ethnic group in Europe
for centuries. Popular opinion, reinforced by media representations and state policies,
universally wraps the Roma in the imagery of Orientalism, judging them inferior, barbaric, tribal, nomadic and childish – that is, naturally incapable of rising to the level of
civilized, rational, modern nationalism. Like children, the Roma are only good at playing music and dancing. The Roma, who first arrived in Europe in the 14th century, settled in Eastern Europe in large numbers because they were expelled from Western
lands and forced back eastward. While in the eastern parts they were also kept out of
the respectable professions that defined citizenship, they were tolerated as entertainers and were confirmed in this role as a result of the forced assimilationist policies of the Habsburgs (Kállai). For centuries, this imposed distribution of labor –
reinforced by violent policies of segregation – has helped maintain a racist hierarchy
at the heart of East European nationalisms.
The situation of the Roma – which has only worsened since the fall of communism –
has received increased political attention and media coverage in recent decades.
Lashing out openly against the Roma after 1989 then was an almost predictable consequence of the liberation of racist fantasies suppressed under the manifestly “egalitarian” regimes of socialism. East European nations, having thrown off the “backward”
Soviet yoke that had kept them in the past, considered it essential to prove themselves
a hundred percent European by identifying and casting out any element that would throw
suspicion on to their commitment to modernist progress (Iordanova 213–33). After
1989, with capitalism gaining full force as a result of privatization, joint ventures, dwindling economic state support, and, above all, fast-growing unemployment, the Roma
were the first to be forced out of employment and demonized as the hopeless ludic element, who are unwilling to work and study.6
One can also see, however, that excluding the Roma from the national body altogether will not help state governments purify the national self-image. Rather, it is precisely this unfavorable collective self-image, the result of long-term economic
inferiority to the West, that has been projected onto the visibly different and initially
nomadic Roma. Obeying a colonial logic, Eastern Europeans are so anxious to distinguish themselves from Gypsies because they are treated “like Gypsies” in the
West. Indeed, in many representations, Romanians, Hungarians, or Serbs are not
only indistinguishable from the Roma, but Gypsies often even stand allegorically for
certain nations. Roma music, due to its ability to incorporate varied forms of musical
expression while maintaining a strong connection to Roma identities, belies nationalistic efforts to maintain the barrier between Roma and mainstream national cultures. It is indistinguishable from folk music traditions in Hungary, Serbia, or Bulgaria,
particularly when it comes to such countries’ touristic appeals (Sárosi).
The Roma’s associations with musical entertainment and their ability to adapt different musical traditions have recently been revalorized as serious assets on the global
media market that has invaded East European cultures since the end of the Cold War,
as well as resources for a newly emerging Roma politics of identity. The decline of
272 | Anikó Imre
socialism and the arrival of global television, particularly MTV, in Eastern Europe, also
brought about a generational and ethnic shift in musical sensibilities. Rock continued
to be harnessed in the service of nationalist sentiment, most notably in the Serb
Turbo/Folk/Rock scene that had led up to and thrived during the Yugoslav wars of succession.7 But, to many in the younger generation, the violent purity and whiteness of
such music pales in comparison with the cool and erotic energies of the AfricanAmerican ghetto. Eastern European Roma have now come center stage as the local
embodiments of the spirit of ghetto music. While Roma musicians have always maintained extended international networks regardless of the musical genre they pursued,
during socialism, their activities were monitored and regulated by nation-states. States
provided contracts and visas for foreign venues, and took credit for the achievements
of “their” “good” Roma (Kállai).
Since the fall of the Wall, the European popular music market has turned towards
post-socialist Eastern Europe and the Balkans in search of novelty and originality.8
There is no shortage of neologisms that describe the varieties of world music transplanted into and growing out of East European soil: Along with Gypsy techno and Roma
rap, one hears of speed-folk, Transylvania-pop, Balkanrock, and so on. Romany musicians have taken advantage of Western interest, easier travel, and international family networks to build transnational careers.9 But it was the infiltration of Eastern
Europe by world music, particularly by MTV, that had first shored up Roma musical talent and turned the East European ghetto, the place of the urban ethnic underclass and
the site of Roma segregation of exclusion, into a resource for politicized pop music.
The results of such a convergence are Roma rap bands, playing East European varieties of world music, which draw on the identification of Roma musicians with the rappers of the Black ghetto and are popular among Roma and non-Roma youth alike.
It seems quite likely that hip-hop has introduced Roma voices into national cultures
that had not been heard before. The image and sound flows of hip-hop help Roma rappers transform their own ethnicities by re-appropriating the image of the Gypsy musician formerly tamed by the state in the service of a transnational identity politics. There
are many examples of such success stories. The band Gipsy.cz from the Czech
Republic has recently made it onto the World Music Charts’s European Top Ten. Led by
rapper “Gipsy” (Radoslav Banga), the band of Roma musicians perform in Romany,
English and Czech and mix Romany sounds music with various pop styles. Gipsy’s first
CD, Romano Hip Hop, released in 2006, has been distributed Europe-wide by Indies
Scope Records. The title song was named “Song of the Year” by the readers of the popular Czech music magazine Filter.10 Another Roma band, Fekete vonat, or Black Train,
from the Eighth District of Budapest, the local “Harlem,” mixes standard love songs
with social commentary about the Roma minority’s situation.11 Some of their songs,
such as “Ghettosoul,” consciously turn the poor district into a metaphorical space of
budding Romany identity politics in the language of music (Fáy 24). “Our lyrics talk
about our problems as Gypsies, and the problems of Gypsy people in general. This is
one of the things that makes this music Roma rap,” the musicians say in an interview.
And, “[w]e also try to attack everyday racism and throw back in the gadjes’ face what
they say about us, Roma” (“Roma rap,” my translation).
At the same time, when one takes a closer look at the ways in which most Roma
rappers try to carve out new spaces of identity in Eastern Europe, their efforts seem
to leave them suspended between global media and nation-state more often than
allowing them to critique both. For instance, following Black Train’s success with both
Roma and non-Roma audiences as well as abroad, the band signed a three-album
contract with the Hungarian EMI in 1997. When making the third of these albums,
however, a changed Hungarian EMI leadership refused to allow the band to record
songs in Romany. A statement from the parent company, EMI London, summed up
the situation succinctly: “It’s not good business to be racist.”12
Browsing the YouTube selection in Hungarian, one finds many hits for LL Junior,
one of the most popular Roma rappers, whose song lyrics open this essay. His offerings, for the most part, are romantic songs, which infuse traditional Roma tunes with
Afro-Caribbean influences. LL Junior was a founding member of Fekete Vonat but has
also launched a solo career. He has also lent his voice to the successful animated
2004 feature Nyócker/The District, in which his character plays a streetwise Roma
teenage rapper. The singer is featured in numerous music videos, most of which are
in Romany, some with Hungarian subtitles. In the Romany-language song “Korkorro,”
he appears as a Latin lover, in white slacks, sleeveless shirt, suspenders and a hat,
pining for a dark-haired girl in a red dress. The dance numbers that pepper the courting narrative increase the joint exotic lure of the Gypsy lover and the flamenco dancer
almost to the point of camp. This is a marked departure from the image of the Roma
buffoon, or “dancing slave,” in which Roma musical performances had been contained during the communist decades. While Junior taps into discourses of Gypsy
romanticism, he remixes them – along with the music—to reassert a kind of racialized virility that is an object of transnational envy rather than national subjection. On
YouTube, the narrative comments from viewers are partly in Romany, confirming the
existence of a transnational Romany audience. Unsurprisingly, the Hungarian comments are intensely racist, infused with homophobic overtones. A few additional comments are in Spanish and English. For the most part, the latter express shock over
the intensity of racism evidenced by viewers who identify themselves as Hungarian.
As Black Train’s and LL Junior’s mixed success stories show, the new opportunities for travel, marketing and distribution outside the channels controlled by the state
constitute a transnational opening for Roma musicians. However, national languages
and racist discourses continue to permeate the distribution and reception of Roma
music. As a result, Roma musicians invariably need to make allowances in order to
be heard in their own countries. The local versions of the popular musical talent show
274 | Anikó Imre
American Idol have provided rich case studies of the ambivalent relationship between
Roma musicians and their nation-states. As I argued elsewhere, they provide the best
illustration of the minefields that Roma entertainers, easily exploited by both commercial media and state politicians for the economic and political capital they represent, have to negotiate.13 Romany singer Vlastimil Horvath won the 2005 season of
SuperStar in the Czech Republic at the same time as Caramel, a.k.a. Ferenc Molnár,
won Megasztár in Hungary. While these national winners’ ethnicity was at the center
of public debates speculating about whether the rise of Roma stars will elevate the
status of the entire minority, the singers themselves have been eager to shed the
burden of representation.14
Embracing selected Roma musicians has long been a strategy employed by the state
and the moral majority, with which to hand-pick and isolate from their communities
“model” representatives of the minority, most of whom will remain all the more excluded
from the national community. György Kerényi, long-time manager of the minority station
Rádió C in Hungary, reminds us that urban Gypsy musicians have always been a part of
the Budapest bohemian intellectual world.15 It is easy to see how such tactics continue
in the state’s and the national media’s management of Roma pop stars.
Ibolya Oláh, who finished close second in the 2004 season of Megasztár, was officially chosen to represent Hungarian culture in the European Parliament in Brussels,
where she performed a patriotic song in the spring of 2005. Unlike Gipsy or even LL
Junior, whose hybridized Roma images are carefully calculated and cultivated, the
YouTube presences of Oláh and Caramel reveal nothing about their ethnic origins. In
the eyes of the global media world, these national media stars are represented as
simply “Hungarian.” Oláh, an orphan girl with a spine-chilling, powerful voice, marched
forward in the 2004 Megasztár race performing two kinds of music: one of her sources
were popular songs from the Hungarian classical pop repertoire of the explicitly nationalistic variety, such as Péter Máté’s “Hazám” (“My Country”). The lyrics speak the sentimental language of patriotism from the position of the white male intellectual. They
open with the metaphor of paternal lineage to confirm the genetic bond between family and country, patria and patriarch: “I can hear my father’s voice. You may not like
this, but this is my country.” In Hungarian, the word used in the song for “country,”
haza, joins “home” and “country” in one. The Gypsy woman, by definition excluded
from both categories, is symbolically included on stage while performing the role of the
model exception that confirms the rule about the bad minority. Oláh’s other choices
consisted of international hits, mostly by black singers, such as Queen Latifah’s song
from the musical Chicago, “When You’re Good to Mama.” Oláh’s ethnic difference
became acceptable on the national talent show when removed by a degree of separation and colored by the image of the nurturing, mythical black mother.
The embodiment of the doubly excluded, the Gypsy woman, has been fixed in subsequent appearances to demonstrate the state’s programmatic multicultural outreach
and European generosity towards minorities: her performance of the song “Magyarország”
(“Hungary”), has been employed to enhance the spectacle during the television coverage of the patriotic fireworks twice in 2005: on New Year’s Eve and on the state holiday
of August 20th, the birthday of King Stephen, legendary founder of the Kingdom
of Hungary.
Caramel’s image and music have been similarly whitewashed and nationalized,
with the singer’s voluntary participation. His hit song and video clip, “Párórára” (“For
a Few Hours”), features the singer sitting on the grass in a baseball hat, baggy pants
and a long shirt, absorbed in the timeless existentialist art of observation among
people rushing by. Caramel moved audiences during the 2005 season of Megasztár
with his performance of “Egy Elfelejtett szó” (“A Forgotten Word”), rendered classic
by the Hungarian 1980s rock band LGT. The song was a cult item of the “rock revolution” that sustained youthful national opposition to the communist state and has
become a nostalgic brick in the construction of post-communist national unity. The
irony that the Roma were generally assumed to be the recipients of state favors and
therefore allies of the Party leadership is erased in this performance along with
Caramel’s ethnic minority status. The singer’s more recent rap song “Mennem Kell”
(“I’ve Got to Go”) features the voice of a confident and well-to-do star on the rise. The
clip shows Caramel, who is hardly an athletic type, emerging from an elegantly
disheveled bed shared by a sleeping blonde bombshell. The song announces that the
world is waiting for him and therefore he cannot be tied down by a woman. We see
him enjoy the blowing wind and his new mobility while driving a Mercedes (emphatically emphasized by an otherwise gratuitous shot of the car).
As Todd Boyd argues, hip-hop revisits the dilemma of assimilation in the United
States: that of pushing for integration but constantly asking at what cost (22). Roma
musicians face a similar dilemma, but, it appears, with even more limited choices. The
continued racism of the post-communist state and moral majority and the co-opting
seductions of the transnational media market leave a very narrow space in which to
assert a positive Roma difference. Oláh can thus be employed by the state as an
object of token exchange between Hungarian and Roma minorities as well as between
the state and the European Union. Caramel, whose success is intimately tied to his
rise on a national reality show, plays out the scenario of upward mobility that renders
him indistinguishable from Hungarians and unthreatening in the patriarchal rivalry
between majority and minority.
The most extreme example of the dangers of double cooptation, by both state discourses and commercial media, is Roma singer Gyözö Gáspár, leader of the band
Romantic. Gáspár’s music and declared intentions are barely concerned with identity
politics. He wants his band to be the nation’s favorite, to be simply embraced by
Hungarians and the Roma alike. It is no surprise that the first primetime television show
starring a Roma in Hungary revolves around the non-offensive, slightly overweight
276 | Anikó Imre
Gáspár: The Gyözike Show, in its third season on the commercial channel RTL Klub, is
reality TV, which records the daily life of Gáspár and his family. While the fact that a
Romany man and his family occupy precious primetime televisions space, attracting a
large non-Roma audience, is a significant development, the family’s life in the expensive
villa they inhabit more closely resembles the Beverly Hillbillies. The décor is in bad taste,
family members constantly shout at one another in the stereotypical Roma dialect familiar from cabaret scenes, and most of Gáspár’s efforts to assert himself backfire in some
ridiculous way or another. The show seems to confirm nothing but Gypsies’ inability to
function as hard-working citizens. It displays the results of putting childish Roma entertainers in the china shop of an expensive house, comically performing a lifestyle that they
will never be sophisticated enough to appreciate. The “real Roma” that this reality show
delivers appear to be hopelessly hovering among various stereotypes. On the show, in
live concerts and in his web presence, Gyözike seems eager to please by offering himself up for easy consumption and by dedicating his own life and music to consumption.
Perhaps the most explicit of these consumptive performances is the song “Fogyni
volna jó” or “It Would be Great to Lose Weight.” In a concert video on YouTube,
Gyözike performs the song with two other Roma dancers, to the lukewarm applause
of a predominantly gadje, or white, audience. The song’s message amounts to this:
“It would be nice to lose weight but I like bacon and sausage too much.” Gyözike’s
chunky appearance certainly underscores this message, providing for a depoliticized
common ground with many out-of-shape Hungarians. On YouTube, the spectatorial
comments on the clip, invariably in Hungarian, tend to express national shame about
being represented in terms of such a performance in an “international” forum.
Roma Rappers of The District
The recent animated feature Nyócker – literally, “Eight district,” also translated as
The District, constitutes a more promising solution to the dilemma of assimilation. As
I will show, however, its critical postmodern stand towards both the nation-state and
global media is undercut by its uncritical, retrograde gender politics.
The film was produced in Hungary in a collaboration of Romany and non-Romany
artists. It stars LL Junior in the role of Richie, the teen gang leader. The ghetto, the
living space of the economically left-behind and institutionally excluded ethnic-poor
classes, becomes re-eroticized in the film. The hip-hop culture of the African-American
urban ghetto provides the inspiration and model of identification for the film. The real
“Nyócker” in Budapest is the center of urban poverty, prostitution and drug traffic.
The film’s carnivalesque storyline proceeds from a Shakespearean romance to a
national and global social satire. It is populated by the urban post-socialist ghetto’s
typical underclass characters: the white “entrepreneur”-pimp and the group of prostitutes he manages, the accented Chinese restaurant-owner and his martial-artsobsessed son, the alcoholic but charming Jewish plastic surgeon, members of the
Ukrainian mafia, corrupt and dumb policemen, and, most prominently, members of an
extended Roma family.
The District rejects the idealized national homogeneity that earlier forms of antistate resistance assumed: it speaks in a mix of languages, including Russian,
Hungarian, English, and, most important, Romany, mocking and subverting the ethical and political registers to which each had been assigned earlier. English, the language of American media imperialism, MTV, and the African-American ghetto
constantly contaminates Hungarian. One the film’s greatest attractions are the hiphop numbers that interrupt the plot, performed for the most part by Roma musicians.
The film’s very theme song, “Ghetto Star,” performed by LL Junior, announces:
Listen to me! In case you don’t know, this is the District, the ghetto; if you don’t like
it, too bad. You only know rough life from the news, but it is reality for us here,
Hungarian reality… This is not the elite of Buda … you’re buried here in poverty
instead. Corruption and lawlessness flourish, and the police couldn’t care less. You see
flickering stars here, but they quickly become fallen angels. No good fairy, no three
wishes. I’m telling you kids, this is Hungarian reality.
Come and try it without worry. Believe me, it’s cool, that’s how the ghetto lives.
Everyone’s a ghetto star. Come and be one yourself. That’s how we can make this a
ghetto soul. [My English translation.]16
The film features a variety of musical styles, dominated by hip-hop. The most remarkable musical achievement of the latest “national” animated feature is that it buries the
“official,” allegorically inclined tradition of anti-socialist rock music, and legitimizes on
its grave a global hybrid adapted from “ethnic” world music, represented by Roma
images and voices. The District’s entire plot capitalizes on the empowerment of Romany
as “authentic” ghetto entertainers. The film’s rap duels between gadje and Roma teens
are a testimony to this new, cool “black” power. The lyrics from the song “Watch Out!”
(“Vigyázz!”) leave no doubt that Richie/LL Junior, is the guy to identify with.
Tell me what you want from me and I won’t hurt you
But if you pick on me, you’d better be tough!
Here is the Gypsy force, the power is mine,
We’ll find out who will win out.
In the district I am the coolest kid, watch out!
[…]
The Gypsies are the blacks of Europe
They will rule the district!
This new voice of celebrating the hybridity of the ethnic underclass expelled from the
nation into the ghetto is represented as a Roma voice that is no longer disconnected
278 | Anikó Imre
from Romany identities. While the Roma’s status remains ambiguous, they are not
dissolved altogether in a monolithic idea of the “we” that only nominally includes
them. It is a metaphorical construction at least partially on Roma turf, controlled at
least partially by Roma agencies, which provide apt metaphors for new kinds of hybrid
communities within the nation precisely because of their own elusive transnational,
multilingual identities. The District’s musical inserts represent a variety of pop musical styles and evoke as many representative geographic regions of pop music, from
the South Bronx to the Caribbean to China. They also speak to the diversity and
adaptability of Roma music and identities, reminding one of Stuart Hall’s Caribbean
identities.
While The District undoubtedly represents a new voice in the politics of Romany
representation, in one aspect, such representation remains revealingly conservative.
Let me turn to Stuart Hall once again for analytical tools: In his description of the
“new ethnicities” that emerged in Britain in the 1980s, Hall identifies a shift in
British ethnic politics from the initial Black struggle to come into representation in
the first place, and to direct attention to relations of representation, towards a more
complex concern with the politics of representation. The latter entails the recognition
that the machineries and regimes of representation in a culture give “questions of
culture and ideology and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics – a formative, not merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and
political life” (“New Ethnicities” 375). While the earlier phase of ethnic identity politics is grounded in the binary desire to replace hegemonic, fetishizing, marginalizing
representations with positive black images, the more recent one offers a more complicated mapping of diverse subjective positions, social experiences, and cultural
identities, acknowledging the constructedness of “Blackness.” This new politics of
representation no longer conceives of dimensions of gender and sexuality as fixed,
subordinated to those of race and ethnicity (378).
This perspective helps crystallize how far The District and, by extension, new popular cultural representations of Romany are willing to go in critiquing the state’s violent attempts to appropriate ethnic categories. While the film issues a democratic
address, this address remains steeped in masculine, nationalistic principles. Even if
one resists reducing representational critique to an “images of” approach, it is hard
not to notice that when women in the film do not fade into the background or are absent
altogether, they are arranged into age-old and rather crudely reproduced stereotypes,
which are offered without any hint of the self-conscious mockery that accompanies
ethnic stereotypes of men. The theme song, “Forog a pénz” (“The Money Rolls”)
establishes the district’s trademark prostitutes as practically part of the neighborhood’s architecture, willingly and naturally ensuring the inhabitants’ proper masculine
psychosomatic health. The cynical mantra of the film comes from Richie’s uncle
Guszti, who advises his love-struck nephew, Richie, to make lots of money to get
girls, or, as he puts it “pussy.” “Pénz és pina” or “money and pussy” is what everyone
– and there is no doubt about the film’s selective gendered address in this choice,
also posed to the viewers as a poll on the film’s website – ultimately needs in order
to be happy. Love will follow once you have the other two, according to Uncle Guszti.
While prostitutes are at least believable in a story about the eighth district, the
total absence of mothers is less easily explained. Single fathers are not a common
feature of Hungarian society in general, and particularly not of lower-class and immigrant families. The filmmakers do not appear to consider it necessary to explain
where the mothers are. One suspects that mother characters would be an unnecessary baggage in a social satire focused on ethnic strife and politics – a playing field
reserved for brothers and fathers.
From a gendered perspective, the film’s musical register is equally ambivalent.
While The District’s valorization of Roma rap undermines the nation-state’s ethnic hierarchy, it fails to criticize the gendered hierarchy of state-sanctioned anti-communist
rock. In itself, this is not surprising, as it is characteristic of the very global trend on
which Roma rap draws. In this view, The District in particular and other popular forms
of Roma music in general never depart from “cock rock” of anti-communist rock movements. The only female performers who contribute their musical talents to the film are
the sister rap-duo Ludditák (Luddites), two college students who carved out a loyal
underground following who appreciate their untranslatable, sarcastic language games,
often employed in the service of gendered, if not feminist, social critique. Their lyrics
offer a humorous and sophisticated critical mirror of transitional Hungary, with a sensitive eye to the differences between urban and provincial transformations, reflecting
on their own transition from a small village to the capital. They are especially keen on
mocking pretentious masculine or macho attitudes, and rejecting the media-fabricated,
seductive body image doubly imposed on young women by an advertising-driven image
culture and local patriarchal tradition. For instance, their song “I’m so Pretty” announces
(in my own literal translation),
You’re killing me by saying
I’m not pretty like Britney Spears
But your ideal won’t do it for me
I’m an MC girl, an MC girl.
You want a tip-top girl,
I want the hip-hop noise.
Your figure is like King Kong’s, man,
Your brain is like a ping-pong ball
Screw it, I won’t be ascetic because of you.
You dumped me like a rocket
280 | Anikó Imre
But who cares, when your idol,
Your ideal is too poor for me…17
Hungarian pop music criticism, a male-dominated territory that selectively welcomes
male Roma rappers, is either openly hostile or sarcastic towards the Luddites, at best
condescendingly allowing the “girls” into an underground sub-pocket of the national
music scene. “A girl should not rap,” as one interview sums up what there is to know
about them (“Sokan azt mondják”). As if internalizing the widely held opinion that they
are impostors, the Luddites often talk about their own music in self-deprecating terms.
At the same time, they also try to complicate this view by referring to ideas of gender
without identifying them as such, however tentatively, as in this conversation:
We’ve just completed a rap number, together with four other girls. Our contribution
addresses the opinion that girls should not rap but stick to singing instead. This is a typical stereotype, that a woman should be beautiful, kind, smiling, and if she’s even a little different, we’ll deny her femininity. But I don’t understand why you couldn’t talk in
masculine style just because you’re a girl. Feminine and masculine styles are not
bound to whether one is a boy or a girl. You have your style and your biological sex, and
there isn’t a necessary correlation between the two. (“Sokan”)
The argument against nationalized authenticity grounded in the male body could not
be made more clearly here. The Luddites’ own tough and combative lyrics announce
the legitimacy of a new, less male-defined body image and persona, and may even
empower a lesbian aesthetics, much more in line with gendered punk music than
with “cock rock.” It is shocking then that after the producer of The District, Erik Novák,
proudly takes credit on the online discussion forum for recruiting the Luddites for the
project, in the first images of the film we recognize the girls’ faces on top of hooker
characters’ bodies. The prostitutes’ bodies combine Barbie with pornographically
large-breasted computer-game characters. The Luddites’ musical and linguistic talents are only put to use in a single short rap number, in which they exhaustedly
bemoan the hardships of a prostitute’s work, striking various seductive poses.
It appears that while the film has successfully complicated the relations of media
representation through which Romany identities are inevitable filtered, the new space
it opens up for ethnic negotiations not only remains a masculine space but might actually be conditioned on shutting out women. The players who animate the new national
allegory are multicultured, multicolored, and transnational, engaging in new, perhaps
even more democratic relationships made possible by the interaction between state
politics and the consumer culture of global capitalism. However, gender and sexuality
remain very much fixed in the essentialist categories promoted by the nation-state. On
the one hand, the filmmakers criticize the state for its ethnic divide and conquer; on
the other, they adopt the same divisive nationalistic strategies when it comes to the
gender and sexuality. This amounts to a strategic separation of state from nation,
assuming that the former is rotten but the latter still refers to a collective affiliation in
which ethnic difference matters a whole lot more than gender difference. Whereas The
District uproots and throws into play ideas of Romany authenticity and national primordialism, in the very same gesture, it imprisons women in discursive, representational ghettos.18
Hip-hop’s global migration opens up and renders problematic its twin claims of
authenticity and political resistance. When hip-hop becomes a global open resource,
unmoored from its Afro-American home, its effort to “keep it real” is thrown into relief
as a specifically American construction. In order to reconstruct hip-hop’s authenticity,
rappers need to reinvent and insist on the naturalness of the exotic, racialized male
body borrowed from African-American performances, which are themselves enhanced
and manipulated by the record industry for mainstream consumption. This act of reinvention rests on problematic imperialistic assumptions and is easily exploited by or
willingly collaborates with the nation-state’s desire to pose as natural. The examples
of rappers from Zakhut and Shimoni through Ali B, and Roma rappers Gipsy, LL Junior,
Caramel and, most corrupted and least seductive of all, Gyözike, show rather ambivalent efforts at minority empowerment in relation to the nation-state and consumer
culture. To account for this ambivalence, it is clearly not sufficient either to fall back
on celebration or to cynically dismiss all of global hip-hop as always already co-opted.
To analyze the enduring patriarchal strategies of nationalism and the nation-state,
one needs to engage postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches. Such an
examination should also ask whether African-American hip-hop’s “authenticity” itself
is conditioned on the unspoken, taken-for-granted national privilege of Americanness
and thus on an oppositional binary relationship with American nationalism.
282 | Anikó Imre
Notes
1. Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, 6–9
April Olympia/Wa, USA.
2. See Susanne Stemmler’s “ ‘Sonido
ciudadísmo’: Black Noise Andalusian Style in
Contemporary Spain” in this volume.
3. See also Susanne Stemmler’s article in this
volume.
4. I am grateful to Christine Taylor, whose
unpublished paper on Dutch multiculturalism
and Ali B has provided the core of the
information presented here.
5. From Ali B’s official website:
⬍http://www.alib.nl⬎.
6. Commenting on the emigration of an entire
Romany community who sought refugee status
in Strasbourg in a highly publicized affair in
2000, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán defended one of his openly racist, raging
ministers who, in a twisted logic that is
characteristic of anti-Roma racism, called the
Roma traitors and liars, and declared that “our
Roma compatriots” would not be discriminated
against if they stopped being lazy and got down
to work (“Hungarian Prime Minister”).
7. This culminated in such absurd events as
the televised mega-concert, complete with
celebrities, staged to celebrate the marriage of
“Ceca,” the star of Turbo Rock, to “Arkan,” the
commander of the Serbian military (BarberKersovan, 77–78).
8. German, Belgian, and Italian managers in
the industry, in particular, take advantage of the
new communication opportunities provided by
the internet or satellite TV as much as star
candidates from Eastern Europe. This is the
way the Russian Tatu duo or the Romanian
Cheeky Girls have made it in Europe – the latter
ironically resurrecting the Dracula myth and
emphasizing the lesbian connotations of the
vampire image, offering all this in a
combination of Hungarian folk melodies, rap,
rock, and Gypsy techno. “Cigánytechno,
balkánrock.” Népszabadság, 3 July 2003.
⬍http://www.romapage.hu/
kulthirnews2.php?id⫽223⬎.
9. Szalai, Anett. “Roma csillagok.” A review of
an international musical festival, held in
Budapest in August 2000, notes that most of
the Hungarian participants were Roma. It also
predicts that, similar to many of their
predecessors, some of these Romani
musicians will end up with contracts with wellknown Western bands. Klezmatics.
“Filmszakadásig.” Magyar Narancs 12.30,
2000: 27. ⬍http://www.romapage.hu/rovatok/
kultura/hir/hirek.php?id⫽3097⬎.
10. See ⬍http://www.gipsy.cz⬎.
11. Schubert, Gusztáv. “Fekete lyuk.” Filmvilág
42.1 (1999): 16–18. “Roma rap: avagy
beindult a Fekete Vonat.” Amarodrom.
⬍http://www.amarodrom.hu/archivum/98/
vonat.html.⬎ Fáy, Miklós. “Mit ér a vér, miszter
fehér?” Filmvilág 42.1 (1999): 24.¨
12. ⬍http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
balkanhr/message/2029⬎.
13. Anikó Imre. “Play in the Ghetto: Global
Entertainment and the European ‘Roma
Problem’.” Third Text, 20.6 (2006): 659–70.
14. Noémi Sümegi. “Romakép-zavar.” (“Troubled
Roma Images”). Heti Válasz, 23 June, 2005,
⬍http://www.romapage.hu/hirek/hircentrumforummal/article/75165/165⬎.
15. Sümegi, op cit.
16. Figyelj rám – ha nem tudnád-, ez itt a
nyócker, a gettó és ha neked ez nem jó, akkor ne
mondd, hogy frankó! Te csak a hírekból ismered,
mi az a vadság, de nekünk ez az élet itt, az igazi
magyar valóság.… Ez itt haver nem a budai elit,
.. helyette itt a csóróság beterít! Virágzik a
korrupció és a törvénytelenség, hatalmas itt a
rendórségi érdektelenség! Itt is ragyognak
felfényló csillagok, de ezek gyorsan el is bukó
angyalok! Itt nincs jótündér és nincs három
kívánság, mondtam már gyerekek nektek, ez a
magyar valóság!
Gyere csak, próbáld ki! (nyócker, nyócker) Nem
kell beparázni! (ne, ne, ne) Hidd el jó, (nyócker,
nyócker) így él a gettó! Mindenki gettósztár!
(nyócker, nyócker) Gyere, válj azzá! Így lesz jó
(nyócker, nyócker), ez a gettó – soul!
17. Kinyírsz, mer’ csak szidni bírsz,
Hogy nem vagyok pretty, mint a Britney Spears,
de a bálványod nekem túl silány,
én egy MC-lány vagyok, egy MC lány.
Neked a tip-top csaj,
nekem a hip-hop zaj kell.
A termeted, mint egy King Kong, aszti!
Az agyad viszont egy ping-pong laszti,
baszki, aszkéta nem leszek miattad,
mint rakétának, az utam kiadtad,
de ki bánja, mikor a bálványa,
az ideálja nekem túl silány…
18. The term “discursive ghetto” is Hamid
Naficy’s. See Naficy, Hamid. “Phobic Places and
Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film
Genre.” Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal
Dissanayake, Global/Local. Durham: Duke UP,
1996. 120.
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2005.
Situating Sound:
The Space and Time of
the Dancehall Session
Julian Henriques
ABSTRACT
Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session
This research situates the multiple body of the Jamaica Dancehall “Crowd” (audience)
in the intensities of the Sound System Session. This is a heterogeneous “acoustic
space,” and discontinuous ritual time, in which sexual expression and orientation,
and racial attitudes, diverge from Jamaican norms. This essay proceeds to account
for the propagation of this temporality and spatiality in terms of the electromechanical processes of the Sound System “Set” (equipment), that is control, power and
transduction. It looks firstly at the Sound Engineers’ sensorimotor engineering technique of compensation for monitoring and manipulating the auditory performance of
the Set. Secondly it discusses the sociocultural procedures of the cutting and mixing
of the music the Selector plays in the Session. The essay identifies these practices
and procedures as the basic elements for many cultural, cybernetic, linguistic, or communication systems. In conclusion, it is suggested that for the Engineers’ and Selectors’
instrumental techniques to be affective and effective they have to be brought into a
proportional relationship with the Crowd’s experience. The Crew does this through
their embodied experience and expert evaluative judgment – which is considered as
an example of analogical, rather than logical, rationality.
Introduction
Every night of the week huge stacks of speakers and massively powerful amplifiers,
known as the “Set” of the Sound System, are assembled on the streets of inner-city
Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session | 287
Kingston, Jamaica. These attract a substantial “Crowd,” or “Massive,” as the audience
is called, who have, over fifty years established the “bashment,” or ‘Dancehall Session,’
as a unique, shared, popular, open-air event.1 In Jamaica the Sound System is an
emblematic musical instrument, technological medium, and cultural apparatus. For
many Sound Systems – such as the world famous Stone Love – are a livelihood, for
many more, a way of life.2 The current genre Dancehall music is popular achieving
international recognition, with Sean Paul, for example. Also the culture and technology of the Sound System has had a huge impact internationally on Hip Hop, Rap,
Jungle, Drum & Bass, Garage, and currently in the UK, Grime. Sounds Systems have
also been a powerful influence on DJ performance techniques, recording studio practices, and the pleasures of listening in Raves, Clubs and Carnival.3
The auditory sense has particular value and importance across Jamaican society,
especially in the downtown ghetto areas of Kingston where Dancehall music originates.
Here, the open windows and corrugated zinc walls make sonic privacy impossible.
The tropical heat downtown pushes people out onto the streets. This makes for a rich
cacophony: children playing, car horns, motor bikes, radio, television, church services,
sound systems, cocks crowing, not to mention the occasional gun shot. This distinctive shared open-air sonic “levity” (form of life) also forms part of Jamaica’s rich
African musical heritage.4 The fecundity of traditional rhythms, like Kumina for example
(Ryman), continues as a source for current Dancehall hits.
The Phenomenon of the Crowd in a Dancehall Session
The Dancehall Session is situated as a living, embodied place, a habitat, or even a
habitus, to use Bourdieu’s (1992) term.5 Within this the Crowd is immersed in an
intensive auditory field, described as “sonic dominance” (Henriques). This is generated by the massively powerful amplifiers in the “bowl” of sound between the stacks
of speakers (see Figure 1), as described below. Approaching the upper limits of the
auditory sensory threshold, sonic dominance is experienced as a subjective and
deeply felt all-embracing sensory environment. The Crowd’s sensorimotor experience
of the Session in this way draws attention to its bodily, haptic, visceral and material
experience of the medium of sound. This might be contrasted, for example, with privatized or individual listening, at more moderate levels, such as with an MP3 player,
where the sound is, as it were, placed in the person, rather than the person in the
sound. In the Session the sound touches the entire sensory surface of each of the
listening bodies of the Crowd. But rather than accentuate the auditory sense alone,
sonic dominance tends to merge sensory stimulation in a haptic multi-sensory flux.
Intense auditory stimulation circulates, resonates and amplifies a sensory “ecology”
of perception, to use Gibson’s concept (Gibson, Gallagher).
The multi-sensory character of the Dancehall scene is evidenced by the value it
places on style, fashion, attitude and dance moves, in addition to the music. All this
288 | Julian Henriques
Figure 1
Erecting the Merritone Sound System speaker stacks, Skateland,
Kingston, July 2002.
is often literally enlarged in the Session, with live video cameras projecting images
of members of the Crowd onto screens between the speaker stacks. The visual
sense, the senses of touch, taste and temperature, and the kinetic sense of dance,
share a combined intensity in the Dancehall Session that escapes ever being fully
described, recorded, or reproduced. In the Session, the Crowd experiences a unique
specific “thisness,”6 that has to be experienced as such – by “being there.” As MerleauPonty put it: “The body is our medium for having a world.” The Crowd is pleasurably
Figure 2
Screen, dancers and camera (bottom right) at Chuchu Benz August
Town Session, June 2004.
compelled to allow the aural to monopolize their attention. Csordas describes this
somatic mode of attention as “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with
one’s own body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others”
(Csordas 244).
There is also a particular relational or inter-subjective quality to the intensities
when one is listening in this manner. This has been described by Roland Barthes with
reference to the interlocutors of patient and analyst. This kind of listening is
Not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits such listening is supposed
to develop in an inter-subjective space where “I am listening” also means “listen to me”
[…] The injunction to listen is the total interpellation of one subject by another: it
places above everything else the quasi-physical contact of these subjects (by voice and
ear): it creates transference: “listen to me” means touch me, know that I exist. (Barthes
245–51)
In the Session, of course it is the sound itself that is listened to – the “speaker”
being the Set’s loudspeaker. Such a state of listening can also be compared to what
the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu describes as the “sonic envelope” experienced by
the unborn baby in the womb (Anzieu). But for the Crowd this is a shared experience –
as a multiple whole, assembly,7 or a collective social body, in which many are one,
and one is many (Canetti). What the Crowd may share with the fetus is a feeling of
comforting warmth and security, and perhaps pleasure. The late Louise Fraser Bennett,
co-founder of the Sound System Association of Jamaica, expressed this idea of the
Crowd as a multiple whole, most eloquently. She described the Sound System’s crucial role as
bringing together a set of people who shares the same habit and have the same way
of life, the same movements, the same beliefs, the same heritage from that time to this
[…] It brings a oneness, it brings together a people in one surrounding […] it generates
a vibes that brings one generation to the other generation, breaking down social barriers. There is nothing in this world that can contest that level of the Sound System that
brings so much components together.8
This intensive multi-sensory, multi-subjective relationship the Crowd has with the
event of the Session – through sound – helps to generate a particular kind of spatiality, which is uneven, heterogeneous and contradictory. It is also full of feelings.
This is evident, for example, in the confidence that the Dancehall Crowd has to assert
its own rules and norms, as in a carnival parade, against those prevailing at other
times and places. Dancehall culture positively asserts its own particular African inspired
frame of reference to the female body and sexual display, against the specifically
European conventions of modesty and propriety upheld in Jamaican middle class media,
for example. This has an intensity that may urge one to apply a Marxist vocabulary,
to describe the Crowd as being, a Crowd for itself, rather than merely in itself.
For the Crowd the special kind of place and spatiality of the Session is one in
which the norms of sexuality and sexual orientation can be inverted, in a manner consistent with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. Over recent years Dancehall
artists such as Beenie Man and Sizzla have met press criticism and protest over their
anti-gay lyrics, to the extent that their 2004 tour to the U.S. and UK was cancelled.9
The fact that this homophobia is part of the conservative and biblical inspired conventions of Jamaican society, does not, of course, offer any justification for such
lyrical content.10 What is particularly interesting then, is how within the event of
the Session itself, such homophobic attitudes are in fact suspended. At any other
place or time such “batty man” behavior would endanger the person’s life. In fact,
such male sexual display, elsewhere considered “effeminate,” is quite central to the
event of the Session, and Dancehall style itself. Examples of this include elaborate
plated hairstyles, large fake diamond ear-studs, and the body-tight fitting trousers
and T-shirts favored by dancers such as the late Boggle. The dancers I filmed at a
Firelinks Hot Mondays Session in 2004 repeated a stereotypically camp “limp-wrist”
gesture. Further at another Session I witnessed such “effeminate” males taking
part, completely whole-heartedly, in the chanting of the same homophobic lyrics.11
The spatiality of the Dancehall Session is also a place where normal Jamaican
racial attitudes and prejudices can be suspended. These commonly include not only
chauvinism against islanders from the rest of the Caribbean, but also Afro-centric
anti-white ideologies and religious beliefs such as Rastafarianism. Yet the Dancehall
Figure 3
Dancehall Queen Stacey at Chuchu Benz August Town Session,
June 2004.
Session often appears, remarkably, to embrace racial diversity. This is indicated, for
example, by that fact that the 2002 Dancehall Queen was the Japanese Junko
“Bashment” Kudo,12 and the winner of the 2005 World Cup Clash was the German
Sound System Sentinel.13 Both these highly competitive positions were awarded by
popular vote from the Dancehall floors, in Montego Bay and Brooklyn, respectively, by
almost entirely Jamaican Crowds.
So how can these inversions and reversals of prevailing norms and attitudes be
understood? The role of music in religious rites, to create trance and ecstatic (ex stasis,
literally out of standing) states, has been described by ethnomusicologists (Rouget). But
it is the work of Marshall McLuhan and his collaborators in the 1950s that is perhaps
more useful for exploring the particular character of the space of sound. They made
an explicit connection between sound and space, coining the term acoustic space.
The essential feature of sound […] is not that it be located at a point, but that it be,
that it fill auditory space […] Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. It is a
sphere without fixed boundaries with ourselves in the center. (Williams 17)
This lack of a “favored focus” characteristic of acoustic space – an absence of standardized structure, hierarchy or ‘normality’ – resonates with the reversals and inversions
found on the Dancehall scene. Acoustic spatiality is to be found in the particular,
irregular and living place, or habitus of the Session.14 Describing what we would
now call the pervasive and ubiquitous character of contemporary media, McLuhan
identifies acoustic space as being “like the ‘mind’s ear’ or acoustic imagination […] It
is both discontinuous and nonhomogenous. Its resonant and interpenetrating processes
are simultaneously related with centres everywhere and boundaries nowhere”
(McLuhan 71). By contrast, the topography of visual space is considered as rational –
as distinct from embodied.15 This is linear, generic and organized round the single
perspective of a point of view – without reversals or inversions:
Space perceived by the eyes when separated or abstracted from all other senses.
As a construct of the mind, it is continuous, which is to say that it is infinite, divisible,
extensible, and featureless. (McLuhan 71)
And the particularly important qualities of acoustic space that make it useful for
describing the Dancehall Session, is its tendency to evoke emotions:
Auditory space has the capacity to elicit the gamut of emotions from us, from the
marching song to opera. It can be filled with sound that has no ‘object,’ such as the eye
demands. It need not be representational, but can speak, as it were, directly to emotion. (Williams 19)
The limitations of McLuhan’s approach is, however, his tendency to essentialize and
romanticize acoustic qualities and pre-literate oral traditions – rendering them strangely
at odds with his theoretical ideas about historically specific technological mediations.16
As well as its particular spatiality, the Crowd’s auditory engagement with the Session
also generates a particular sense of time. Again, this is an uneven, embodied and
intense kind of temporality that appears to accommodate reversals and inversions.
This moment-to-moment duration of the event of the Session necessarily involves
movement, just as any sound, to be heard at all, requires a vibration of air molecules.
Sound is always “in time,” requiring continuous propagation – and therefore often
features rhythm and repetition. Repeating time is cyclical, called kronos by the
Ancient Greek philosophers, though this does not mean that kronos is monotonously
the same.17 Indeed the opposite, as Lefebvre reminds us in his Rhythmanalysis of
Mediterranean Cities: “Cyclical rhythms, each having a determined frequency or period,
are also rhythms of new beginnings: of the ‘returned’ who is not opposed to the
‘become’ […] Dawn is always new” [my emphasis] (Lefebvre and Régulier 231).
Indeed in Kingston, Sessions are often named by the regular night of the week on
which they are staged, as with the Firelinks’ Hot Mondays, or Stone Love’s Weddi
Weddi Wednesday, for example. There is also a particular cycle to the duration of the
event of the Session, which is mapped, from midnight to dawn the next morning, in
the various styles, tempos, moods, and period of music tracks played by the Sound
System’s Selector, as discussed below.18
Further to its cyclical time, the Session can be described as generating the metaphysical temporality, eternal timelessness, or aion, typical of sacred events (Deleuze,
1990 162–68, Turetzky, 1998, Bogue).19 The anthropologist of religion Marcia Eliade
describes such temporality as the Eternal Return, the Golden Age, “‘in those days’ in
illo tempore, ab origine” (Eliade 4),20 or, as Fraser Bennett put it: “the same heritage
from that time to this.” Eliade describes this as a special ancestral time, in which “all
sacrifices are performed” as being:
At the same mythical instant of the beginning [where] through the paradox of rite,
profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds true for all repetitions,
i.e., all imitations of archetypes; through such imitation, man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed. (Eliade 35)
This is not to suggest that the Session is a sacred place, though there are many
connections between Dancehall and Church hall (Beckford). The Session is a moment
for pleasure, and the hope for the satisfaction of desires.21 Sound is used to make
the Session a special liminal event, geared towards becomings, ritual transformations, rites of passage, and journeys over thresholds and across boundaries (Turner).
But further it is equally important that such wishes are only fulfilled temporarily and
in the particular place of the Dancehall Session. This allows the Crowd to go about
their “normal” lives at dawn, and motivates them to return to the Session on another
night, for another journey. The Session allows the Crowd, already a multiple whole
in the moment-to-moment duration of the event, to become situated as a spatial
multiple – different places at the same time, and situated as a temporal multiple –
different times at the same place.22
So, rather than having to explain such reversals and inversions of such heterogeneities, the question becomes: what stops these multiples from simply flying
apart? Both kronos and aion, as senses of time, are synchronized with the more
familiar linear, accumulative or progressive sense of time. For Sound System this is
a relevant consideration, for example, in respect to the technological equipment of
the Set being “up to date,” or the Selector having “the latest” tunes to play. But in
addition the auditory sense is critically important – particularly rhythm. Rhythm
abounds in the Session: in the massively amplified stomach-churning bass-line, the
syncopated beat of the music, the unique role of “riddim” tracks on the Dancehall
scene (Marshall and Manuel), the particular tracks played, and the procession of the
night through the different tracks the Selector plays.23 And rhythm also holds
together auditory and non-auditory material, as Turetzky reminds us:
Rhythms group heterogeneous material elements together. In music such elements
include pitch, volume, timbre, and other aspects of sound, but rhythms may take up a great
variety of other material […] rhythms deploy parts of human bodies, their various motions.
However rhythms, themselves, are always temporal intervals (that) become grouped
together by distributing accented and unaccented moments. (Turetzky, Rhythm 124–25)
In this way rhythm can be said to situate temporal and spatial material together. This
is another of the points Lefebvre makes when he says:
Concrete times have rhythms, or rather, are rhythms – and every rhythm implies a
relation of a time with a space, a localised time, or if one wishes, a temporalised place.
Figure 4
Bashment poster naming MC, Artist, Sound System and Videoman.
Rhythm is always linked to such and such a place, to its place, whether it be the heart,
the fluttering of the eyelids, the movement of a street, or the tempo of a waltz. (Lefebvre
230, my emphasis)
These rhythms generate the heterogeneous and uneven spatiality and temporality of
the Dancehall Session in which the “object” of the event and the Crowd are situated,
and indeed from which they are constituted (Fraser).24 Space and time do not exist
as pre-given abstract dimensions. As Fraser, Kember and Lury put it:
The co-ordinates of space and time are not understood to be external to (relations
between) entities. Change, that is, does not occur in time and space. Instead, time and
space change according to the specificity of an event. The event makes the difference:
not space and time. Importantly, motion and change are attributable to difference
within the event. (Fraser et al. 3–4)
The present investigation is concerned with the changing flux of relationships,
processes, differences and becomings, rather than the fixed objects, structures,
equivalences and being. So we now need to examine exactly how these rhythms are
propagated in the performances, practices and procedures of the Crew and the
Crowd, starting with the processes of the Set.
Electromechanical Processes: Power and Control
The Sound System Set is a multiple body, like the Crowd, but of technological
component parts. As a phonographic apparatus the Set assembles amplifiers,
pre-amps, FX boxes, equalizers, crossovers, mixers, mikes, cables, driver units,
speaker bins, record and CD decks, mixing consoles and numerous other gadgets
and devices. In contrast to the sensorimotor experience of the Session on the part
of the Crowd, these operate in the electromagnetic and electromechanical milieux
within its circuitry. To generate the rhythms and intensities required for sonic dominance, most Sound Systems today are capable of about 15,000 watts of music
amplification.
The operation of these Sets can be understood in terms of a pair of processes:
those for control and information on the one hand; and those for power and
energy, on the other.25 This distinction between control and power processes is critical. The cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, gives the example
of the energy of the pressure of water in the pipe and the control mechanism of
the tap to turn the flow partially on, fully on, or off. And even more important is the
relationship between these processes: “the combining of the two systems (the
machinery of decision and the source of energy).” As Bateson tells us with another
example, this
[m]akes the total relationship into one of partial mobility on each side. You can take
a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. The drinking is his business. But
even if your horse is thirsty, he cannot drink unless you take him. The taking is your
business. (Bateson 102)26
And there is a further process entirely critical for the operation of the Set – if the Crowd
is to hear anything. This is the relationship between amplified electromagnetic signals
within the Set, and the auditory sound waves in the Session itself. This requires a
process of transduction, which takes place in the transductive devices of the loud
speakers, built up as columns of boxes round the dance area (see Figure 1).27 The
MC’s microphone reverses this transduction process, converting of audible sound
waves into electromagnetic signals for the Set to amplify. The cartridge is another
transducer, converting the stylus’ vibrations from the mechanical indentations in the
groove of the record, into an electronic signal. It is these power processes, and these
of transduction, that the Engineers have to control – with their monitoring and manipulating practices, to which we now turn.
Sensorimotor Practices: Monitoring and Manipulating
The Sound Engineers who design, build and maintain the Sets have a particularly
important part to play, given the crucial generative role for the spatiality and temporality of the Session attributed to auditory stimulation. The Engineers are responsible for the parameters, characteristics and qualities of the auditory output of the Set,
as distinct from musical rhythms that it might be used to play.28 For this they use a
technique of compensation to fine-tune the output of the Set. “What’s the most
important thing you learnt from [your teacher] John Jones?” I asked Denton Henry,
Chief Repair Engineer for the Stone Love Sound System.29 He replied with one word:
compensation, and went on to explain why:
He [John Jones] always tells me to compensate for this and compensate for that.
If it don’t sound right use the condenser and the resistor to compensate to get the sound
that you [spoken loudly] want to hear […] (You) either cut the bass, or to lift off the high
frequency, cut the treble. With this now can juggle juggle. Compensation is a filter circuit
[loudly]. You set it up for any frequency you want to hear.30
This technique requires both acts of monitoring, sensing, and listening for it to
“sound right,” as well as manipulating, that is adjusting to “cut the bass, or to lift off
the high frequency […] juggle juggle.” Describing compensation in this way identifies
it as a sensorimotor technique – a practice that is both haptic, concerning sensory
impressions and feelings, and kinetic, concerning bodily expressions and movement.
All techniques require appropriate instruments or devices. With compensating these
are the “gates,” crossovers or filters to restrict electromagnetic frequencies that may be
manipulated by means of variable controls knobs or faders. “Back in the day,” Denton
Henry told me, tuning the Set required digital dexterity – de-soldering one component,
and re-soldering another in its place,31 as each frequency had its own compensation
circuit: “At that time when you tune it was fixed [loudly]. You couldn’t go out there and
use the equalizer and vary it. No knob, couldn’t adjust it. Afterward now I put on rotary
switch.”32 Every component of the Set can be subject to compensation, from the needle on the record, to the positioning of the speaker stacks on the Dancehall floor. The
Engineer listens, and then adjusts, monitors and then manipulates the value of one
of the components. He monitors, he compensates, he listens again, and makes another
adjustment, and so on. With the auditory feed-back of what he hears, as part of goalorientated cybernetic system as it were, gradually the Engineer closes the gap between
what he is hearing and that for which he is listening.33 Then the tuning is complete.
So what is the sonic goal the Engineers are trying to reach? “Clarity,” “bounce,”
and “sweetness” are some of the key terms I heard used to describe the sonic qualities for which the Engineer aimed their fine-tuning. But most import of all was “balance.” Denton Henry told me “I put balance between the bass, the mid and the top.”
Further, Horace McNeal explained how: “I listen for everything I know in the tune supposed to come out of my box. If I don’t hear what I know in it I not stop tuning,
Figure 5
Stone Love Set under repair, Skateland, Kingston, July 2002.
turning, push down this, carry up this, until I hear what I want.”34 Thus the Engineers
fine-tune their Sets to produce the very best sound they are capable of producing,
just as a musician tunes their instrument.35
But how does the Engineer know when the tuning is complete? How does he know
the desired sound is “supposed” to be? Compensating clearly requires qualitative
evaluations and personal subjective judgments. This means that the technique
cannot be considered as a sensorimotor practice alone, but also has to be included
in the sociocultural milieu. Sound Engineers have to professionalize their listening,
develop specialist skills and expertise (Levin), to become connoisseurs of sound, so
to speak. They have to listen with understanding, sensitivity, knowledge, sympathy,
appreciation and discrimination to the fine grain details and nuances of sound. Such
listening, it was found, has been developed through an apprenticeship system
between the generations of Jamaican Sound System Engineers.36 This achieves the
aural sophistication critical for the way they engineer, which is almost entirely “by
ear,” rather than with reference to technical manuals, I was told by Horace McNeal.
And as his teacher Denton Henry told me, it was his own teacher, John Jones, who
“shape[d] my whole listening.”37 These listening skills are evidently passed from generation to generation of Engineer.
This makes the critical distinction between hearing and listening in terms of evaluation. As Jonathan Sterne emphasizes in The Audible Past: “Listening is a directed,
learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not
simply reducible to hearing” (Sterne 19, my emphasis). Barthes put this important
point as follows:
Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act. It is possible to describe the physical conditions of hearing (its mechanisms) by recourse to the
physiology of the ear; but listening cannot be defined only by its object or, one might
say its goal. (Barthes 245)
Further than the object of hearing, it is of course the listening subject that is required
to define the practice of listening. This inter-subjective character of the Engineers’
listening, like that of the Crowd, does not make it any the less a personal, subjective
and embodied issue. This point was by DJ Squeeze, who told me, while tuning up his
Set, what he was listening for was “my harmony with the sound.”38
Sociocultural Procedures: Cutting and Mixing
From the Crowd’s point of listening in the Session, it is the Selector’s music, rather
than the Engineer or the Set itself that absorbs their attention. The Selector is so-named
as the Crew Member whose job consists of choosing the vinyl records from the record
box, and placing them on the turntable, while the MC (Master of Ceremonies) “chats”
on the microphone.39 In the sociocultural milieu of the Dancehall Session, the procedure brought into play here is cutting between different pieces of music. Mixing is the
other procedure by which the Selector accomplishes a smooth transition from one record
to the next, through the entire musical flow of the night.40 This is achieved by means
of the device of the faders on the mixing desk. This pair of procedures resonates
both with the processes of the Set, and those of sonic engineering. Furthermore, the
music producer in the studio is also entirely familiar with the cutting procedure, as he
or she selects one particular music multi-track to adjust in his or her mixing.
One important feature of the relationship between the cutting and mixing pair is they
are practiced together in the same spatial and temporal event: as selecting and mixing,
cutting and pasting, sampling and splicing, for instance. The second feature of cutting
and mixing is that they are always situated at the same event in time. There is only ever
a re-mix, never a pristine un-re-mixed mix, as it were, for the Engineer, Selector or
Record Producer to listen to (it may be the Crowd’s wish to deny the material fact of
this re-mixing that is their own fleshly corporeality that motivates their journey for the
ab origine, the perfect time before time). Though inseparable in practice, cutting and
mixing can be analytically isolated. As an abstract process, cutting involves separating, dividing things up, sorting, fragmenting, dis-aggregating, parting, tearing, splitting
the whole, differentiating, creating boundaries, making a choice and analyzing. Mixing
by contrast is a process of combining, amalgamating, aggregating, bringing things
together and synthesizing. It tends to be much easier to do than undo, like mixing
sugar in a coffee for example, or recording two instruments onto a single audio track.
Mixing, as a power process, generates intensities, feelings and energies.
Two features of cutting and mixing are remarkable. One is their ubiquity. The cut
and mix, for Hebdige, means identifying the present era of popular music: “Cut ‘n’
mix is the music and the style of the 1980’s just as rock‘n’roll and rhythm‘n’blues
formed the bedrock for the musics and styles that have made such an impact on our
culture since the 1950’s” (Hebdige, Cut ‘n’ Mix 10). Cox and Warner, discussing DJ
culture of the 1990s, identify these same two processes:
DJ Culture has worked with two essential concepts: the cut and the mix. To record
is to cut, to separate the sonic signifier (the “sample”) from the original context or
meaning that it might be free to function otherwise. To mix is to reinscribe, to place the
floating sample into a new chain of signification. (Cox and Warner 330)
The second remarkable characteristic of cutting and mixing is how they play a part in
all manner of different communication systems. The cutting and mixing pair can be
described as elemental linguistic procedures, as they are by Roman Jakobson, in Two
Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances. He states “speech
implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic
units” (Jakobson 58, my emphasis). Cutting takes place in the paradigmatic or
metaphoric relationship between units of language system (see also Gates). Mixing
is the syntagmatic or metonymic combination between linguistic units. As with every
particular tuning of a Set, every particular linguistic utterance is made from a mixing
or combination of both paradigmatic selection and syntagmatic combination. In
System and Structure Anthony Wilden makes this point as follows:
Metaphor and metonymy are not linguistic processes: they are communicational
processes. Selection from the code and combination in the message must and do
occur in any communications system whatsoever, whether in the genetic code of the
DNA molecule, or in the organism, or in the life processes of bacteria, or in a social
system […] All communication in systems of communication – ecosystems – involves
an axis of selection and an axis of combination. (Wilden 351–52, my emphasis)
Identifying cutting and mixing as elemental procedures – in both sound engineering
and language use – suggests that both non-representational communication systems,
like the Sound System, and representational ones, such as a language system,41 can
be understood as operating in a similar manner.42
Situating sound: ratio and kairos
But the operating characteristics of communication systems, whether linguistic or
electromechanical, are not sufficient to account for how they are used, or what for.
While compositional rules may prescribe what counts as correct selection and combination for linguistic – and indeed musical – performance, it is the Engineers’ and
Selectors’ embodied personal judgment that has to be at the heart of any understanding their performance in the Dancehall Session. In each case, it is suggested
here, qualitative judgments are being made on the basis of the proportional relationship between subjectivities of experience on the one hand, and the objectivities of
the situation on the other. This is a relationship of the continuous analogue variation
of sensation, rather than the distinct diacritical differences of a communication system. It concerns the material as distinct from the ethereal aspect of sound (Henriques).
Auditory propagation needs to be an energetic power process before it can be controlled for the purposes of communication. The linguistic equivalent of such material
processes is the prosody of vocal production of an utterance – the aspect of language
that formalist approaches find easiest to overlook. This is what gives every utterance
and every speaker, and every instrumentalist, their unique individual tone. Indeed the
Engineers, and some of the Crowd, consider a Sound System Set, with its particular
components and power and control settings, as having its own character, or distinctive voice. Such particular qualities of sound cannot be reduced to the technologies
their production requires, any more than the elements of a language system are sufficient to account for what it is used to say, or the mechanisms of hearing could gave
an adequate account of listening.
The Engineers’ recognition of the correct sonic quality of “balance,” for example,
can be identified as an example of a proportional relationship, or ratio (Critchlow).
Other examples of such spatial relationships include the golden section in architecture, or the musical octave in sound, that is an intuitive recognition of balance or harmony (Bass).43 Bateson’s cybernetics also provides a grounding for this emphasis on
the importance of relationships, both from its origins in the study of biological organisms, that is fleshly bodies, and from his definition of information as “news of difference” (Bateson, Mind and Nature 69) and “differences that make a difference”
(Bateson, Mind and Nature 99).44 Information is thus not an object, or a statistical
probability, isolated in the material physical world of quantities, but a human evaluative
Communication Axis
System
METAPHOR
METONYM
SET
electromechanical
control
transducer
power
amplifier
ENGINEER
Sensorimotor
monitoring
ear
manipulating
hand
SESSION
Sociocultural
cutting
intensities
mixing
“groove”
Language
paradigmatic
syntagmatic
Figure 6
Axes of communication for Engineer, Set and Session.
relationship. As Bateson explains: “difference, being of the nature of relationship, is
not located in time or space” (Bateson, Mind and Nature 98, my emphasis).
Nevertheless, such relationships have to be tangible by means of the medium
through which they are expressed – sound in the case of the Sound System.
The Selector’s skilled judgment as to exactly which tune to play when, provides
another example of his or her embodied, intuitive and subjective evaluation of the
proportional relationship between the subjective feelings of the Crowd and the objective fact, so to speak, of what they have in their record box. This is a temporal proportional relationship that will always escape rules. The key quality to any such live
performance is the performer’s sense of timing, being “in time,” on the beat, or “ridding
the rhythm” as would be said. This is timeliness or the opportune moment, or kairos
(χαιρóς) at the heart of every particular improvised performance, or interpretation
(Onians 343–51, White). The term kairos describes the entirety of the Session, as
rhetorical scene, in the moment-to-moment proportional relationship between aion,
or timelessness, and kronos, or cyclical time. Such embodied evaluations make the
literally vital link between the subjectivies and objectivities of the Session. It is the
Crew and Crowd’s embodied know-how that forges a chiasm, to use Merleau-Ponty’s
term, holding the elements of different practices together. This is a proportional relationship between electromechanical, sensorimotor and sociocultural milieux: for the
Crew between ear and hand, monitoring and manipulating, cutting and mixing. For the
Crowd this is between body and mind, haptics and kinetics, music and dance as their
experience of the rhythms and intensities of sonic dominance, resonating with their
multiple bodies.
The spatiality and temporality of such proportional relationships – as ratio or
kairos – can be identified as an example of analogical rationality (Critchlow). Analogy
and metaphorical thinking (Lakoff and Johnson, Johnson) requires such relational
qualities, as is recognized to some extent in the selecting or metaphorical axis of
communication. This may be distinguished from what is more familiar in theory that
is the logical rationality of representation, quantities, discrete differences and calculation. This research has concerned itself with situating sound in practice: the
Crowd’s embodiment in the heterogeneous time and space of the Session, the
Crew’s procedures along the axes of communication – as well as their proportional
evaluations. One of its aims has been to investigate how both analogia and logic are
equally important aspects of rationality, or logos.
Notes
1. This paper is part of a larger research
project on the music, culture and technology of
the Reggae Sound System in downtown
Kingston, Jamaica. The research material on
which it is based comes from my observation of
Sessions and in depth interviews with Owners,
Engineers, Selectors, MCs and Crowd (audience)
and Followers (dedicated fans) mainly of the
Stone Love Sound System, as well as
observation and filming the Dancehall scene up
to 2004.
7. The term assembly resonates with the
character of the Dancehall Crowd, as Mazzio
notes in the entirely different context, of the
Renaissance experience of theatre. “A word used
as often as ‘spectator’ and ‘audience’ to
describe playgoers in the Renaissance was the
‘assembly.’ A word worth reintegrating in the
sensory dimensions of theatrical experience,
because it implied not only a coming together of
persons, but a physical touching of bodies in
space” (Mazzio 87).
2. Stone Love is the particular Sound System
that I have researched most closely. See
⬍http://www.imexpages.com/stonelove/compa
ny_profile.htm⬎. 5 July 2005. See also Cooper
(1993, 2004) Katz (2000), Chude-Sokei (1997),
Bradley (2000), Stolzoff (2002), Salewicz and
Boot (2001) Bakare-Yusuf (2001), Stanley-Niaah
(2004) and Hope (2006). For the British Sound
System culture see the somewhat less recent
chapter five of Gilroy (1987) and Hebdige (1979,
1987).
8. Bennett, Louise Fraser (Press Secretary for
the Sound System Association of Jamaica).
Personal interview. 26 July 2002.
3. Those friends and colleagues I would
particularly like to thank for their helpful
comments, encouragement and inspiration
include Couze Venn, Steve Goodman, Jeremy
Weate, Bibi, Bakare-Yusuf and David Morley. Also
I would like to thank my interviewees for sharing
their knowledge and insight, particularly the late
Ms Louise Fraser Bennett, Winston “Weepow”
Powell, Horace McNeal, DJ Squeeze, Denton
Henry and Hedley Jones.
9. See BBC reports and others at Freemuse
website. Freemuse Website 12 January 2006.
⬍http://www.freemuse.org/sw7765.asp.⬎
10. Gary Younge. “Troubled Island.” The
Guardian. 27 April 2006, 14 June 2006
⬍http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/
Column/0,1762156,00.html.⬎
11. This was at one of the longest established
and most mixed, in terms of age, Sessions
“kept” at Rae Town in downtown Kingston on
Sunday nights.
12. Bashment Vibes Website. 25 February
2006. ⬍http://www.bashmentvibes. com/
pro_junko.htm.⬎
4. As researched by Cheryl Ryman (1984), Olive
Lewin (2000) Garth White (1984) and Fernando
Henriques (1953).
13. For a report of the event see Glaat.com
Website 12 February 2006. ⬍http://www.claat.
com/article/articleview/1032/1/25/.⬎
5. The aspect of situating resonates with Guy
Dubord’s and others inspiration for the 1960s
French “Situationists” political movement, and
with the latter “happenings,” as unique live, oneoff events (Knabb).
14. Romanyshyn (1989) distinguishes
between the medieval city as an example of
higgledy-piggledy auditory spatial layout, as
distinct from the wide open perspectives of
Parisian boulevards as an example of visual
space.
6. The idea of “thisness” is attributed to the
medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus who
contrasted the haecceity of a particular quality of
an object with their quidtitity, or “whatness.”
15. This idea of the rationalisation of vision was
first explored by Ivins (1938) and more recently
Latour (1986).
16. For a useful critique of McLuhan in this
respect see Classen. Further Sterne (15–19)
provides a pointed analysis of the shortcomings
of what he terms the “audio-visual litany” which,
although targeting McLuhan’s contemporary
Walter Ong, is equally applicable to McLuhan’s
position.
discussion of how even control processes
require what he terms “collateral” energy.
17. For a seminal discussion of Hegel and the
Western philosophical tradition’s abhorrence of
the idea of repetition see Snead.
28. Women play a crucial role on the Dancehall
scene in numerous important respects, but
none, as far as I have found, have become
Sound System Engineers. I therefore refer to
Engineers with the male pronoun.
18. The Sound System Crew has highly
specialized, principally Selector, who selects the
records, DJ or MC who talks on the mike, and the
FX responsible for sound effects (Campbell).
19. This suggestion clearly requires much more
detailed and substantial investigation than the
space here allows, and indeed is part of my
ongoing research.
20. Deleuze (1997 159, note 12) refers to
Eliade in his discussion of his concept of
Repetition in Itself.
21. Ernst Bloch would describe this as a utopia
(Zabel) and Michel Foucault (1986) a
heterotopia.
22. In a structuralist theoretical framework this
would be considered as “diasporic” and
“syncretic” respectively.
23. Rhythm as both as a patterning of flows,
and a particular feature of Dancehall music, is
central to my research concerns.
24. This could be theorized in terms of
metastabilities, that is the persistence of nonequilibrium over time (for Simondon’s use of this
see Hansen), or with the concept of the climax of
an ecologically stable and mature communities,
such as desserts or Tropical rain forests
(Clements, Roughgarden).
25. This distinction also parallels mine between
ethereal and material aspects of sound
(Henriques).
26. It should be noted also that Bateson’s
discussion of this point is in the context of a
27. The process of transduction as a
relationship between different milieux has been
important for Simondon, see Simondon (1992)
and MacKenzie.
29. During this research I tended to make the
assumption that there was a homology between
the Sound Engineers’ understanding or know-how
of their own practices and my own theoretically
informed conception know-what about their
practice (for a discussion of this distinction see
Varela, 1999). Of course this need not be the
case, but it is important that the status or
veracity of what they say is questioned. The
Sound Engineers might have all kinds of motives
for thinking or talking about what they do the way
they do.
30. Henry, Denton. Personal interview. 24 June
2004.
31. Currently the graphic equalizers and variable
crossovers with their own visual displays offer
the Engineer an even finer degree of control.
Also, as DJ Squeeze with his Skyy [sic] Sound
System showed me on his mobile Sound System
truck, Thunder, different mixes can be digitally
stored ready for use at different venues.
32. Henry, Denton. Personal interview. 24 June
2004.
33. A cybernetic system may be homeostatic,
maintaining a system’s stability across varying
conditions, as with the thermostat maintaining a
consistent room temperature, or a steam engine
governor maintaining a constant speed across
variations of load (Bateson, Mind and Nature
103–09). This discipline was defined by Norbert
Wiener as “the science of control and
communication, in the animal and the machine”
(Ashby: 1, Wiener, Heylighen 1993) and
developed with respect to social theory by
Gregory Bateson.
34. DJ Squeeze (a.k.a. Mr Glenworth Samuels).
Personal interview. 22 June 2004. Unlike of the
other interviewees, DJ Squeeze is has no official
connection with Stone Love. Since the mid
1990s he has owned and operated his mobile
sound truck Skyy [sic] Sound System and since
2002 owner and CEO of Magajamz Radio
Station.
35. This suggests that the mediating processes
of fine-tuning, are as important for phonographic
re-production (Weheliye), as they are for
“original” sonic production. See also Eshun
(188–89) for a critique of Benjamin’s famous
concept of the “aura.”
36. As is detailed in my ongoing PhD research.
37. Henry, Denton. Personal interviews. 24 June
2004.
38. DJ Squeeze (a.k.a. Mr Glenworth Samuels).
Personal interview. 22 June 2004.
39. In other popular music genres, besides
Reggae and Dancehall, the roles of the Selector
and the MC are both performed by the DJ.
40. As with the variable control knob facilitating
the compensation that could previously done by
re-soldering components (mentioned above),
both the fader and indeed the second turntable
on the Set were historically specific innovations,
that I have detailed elsewhere in my research.
41. Though it can be noted that for Structural
linguistics this matter of representation is
indefinitely differed, in so far as the relationship
between signifier and signified is considered to
be arbitrary, and signification is considered a
property of the signifying system alone.
42. These two processes are certainly central to
Freudian dream theory as condensation and
displacement, that according to Wilden, can be
traced back to Locke’s theory of the association
of ideas by contiguity; and association by
similarity (Wilden 37).
43. Proportional relationships were certainly
recognized in the Ancient Greek philosophy of
Pythagoras and Plato for whom the Beautiful as
well as the Good and the True were equally
valuable for philosophical enquiry, see Tarnas
(1991).
44. This is taken as favoring MacKay, as against
the widely accepted Shannon-Weaver Information
Theory, see Hayles (1999).
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The Contributors
Carolyn Birdsall is a Ph.D.-candidate at the
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
(ASCA), where she is writing a dissertation
about sound and music during Nazi Germany.
More specifically, this research project tries
to expand the analysis of the Nazi period to
consider the “soundscape,” investigating
case studies that raise attention to issues of
sound, landscape and power, sound technology and modernity, identity formations, voice,
hearing and corporeal perception.
David Copenhafer received his Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature in 2004 from the
University of California, Berkeley. He has
taught in both the Departments of Music and
of Comparative Literature at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is currently writing a book
on the philosophy of music and resides in
Berlin, Germany.
Soyica Diggs is an assistant professor of
English at Dartmouth College whose work
focuses on African America drama and performance. Her book project, From Repetition to
Reproduction: African American Performance,
Drama, and History, argues that African
American drama demonstrates ways of interpreting historical evidence embedded in black
performance (e.g. cakewalking, singing the
blues, and delivering a sermon). “Historicizing
the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight” is derived
from its fourth chapter. Soyica Diggs contributed entries to North American Women’s
Drama Collection and Encyclopedia of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Julian Henriques studied Psychology at
Bristol University and worked as a policy
researcher and journalist before becoming a
television researcher. Then as a producer and
director he made documentaries for London
Weekend Television, BBC Television Music
and Arts Department and with his own production company Formation Films, for
Channel 4 Television. He has been a senior
lecturer on film and television at the
University of the West Indies, Kingston,
Jamaica and is currently the convenor of the
MA Script Writing programme at Goldsmiths
College and course leader for Music as
Communication. Recent publications include
“Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound
System Session” in Michal Bull and Les
Back, The Auditory Culture Reader.
Anikó Imre is an assistant professor of Critical
Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts of the
University of Southern California. As a threeyear postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam
School of Cultural Analysis, she participated in
a collaborative project on globalization, the
media and the transformation of identities in
the new Europe. She has published articles in
Screen, Camera Obscura, Framework, Third
Text, CineAction, Signs, and various book collections. She is editor of East European
Cinemas, published in Routledge’s Film
Readers series (2005), and co-editor of
Transnational Feminism in Film and Media,
forthcoming in Palgrave’s Comparative
Feminist Studies series. Currently, she is completing a book entitled Identity Games:
Globalization and the Transformation of PostCommunist Media Cultures.
Sylvia Mieszkowski took her first degree and
Ph.D. in comparative literature. Funded by the
Graduiertenkolleg für Geschlechterdifferenz &
Literatur at the university of Munich, she published her thesis on dysfunctional tales of
seduction as Teasing Narratives. Europäische
Verführungsgeschichten nach ihrem Goldenen
Zeitalter. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2003.
Having spent some time as an ASCA post-doc
in Amsterdam, she is now an assistant professor for English literature at the university of
Frankfurt/Main and working on her second
book called More Than Meets the Ear. Sound
and the Fantastic. She was one of the organizers of the Sonic Interventions conference in
2005.
The Contributors | 311
Fred Moten teaches American and Ethnic
Studies at the University of Southern
California. He is the author of In the Break:
The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
(U of Minnesota P, 2003); and two chapbooks, Arkansas (Pressed Wafer P, 2000) and
I Ran from it but was still in it (Cusp Press,
2007). He is currently working on a book,
also to be published by Minnesota called
Stolen Life.
Mahmut Mutman teaches cultural and critical theory at the Department of
Communication and Design, Bilkent
University. He has published several scholarly
articles on Orientalism, postmodernism, feminism, nationalism, media and film, in various
academic journals.
Marisa Parham is an assistant professor at
Amherst College, where she teaches classes in
African-American literary and cultural studies,
American popular culture, and Anglophone literatures after colonialism. She earned her Ph.D.
from Columbia University in English and
Comparative Literature, and is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Haunted:
Memory, Space, and African-American
Modernity.
Joy Smith is a Ph.D. candidate at the
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis,
University of Amsterdam. She is researching a
dissertation, on Dutch-Caribbean literature,
cultural memory and postcolonial identities in
the Netherlands. Her article, “Diasporic
Slavery Memorials and Dutch Moral
Geographies” in the volume Migratory
Aesthetics, is forthcoming at Rodopi Press
(2007). She was one of the organizers of the
Sonic Interventions conference in 2005.
Susanne Stemmler is Postdoc-Fellow at the
Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin. She
312 | The Contributors
studied German, French and Spanish language and literature and was a lecturer for
Media and Culture Studies. She received her
Ph.D. with a dissertation on Topographies of
the gaze. A Phenomenology of 19th century
Orientalism in French Literature (published
2004). She has published on visual and
hybrid cultures and is co-editor of Romania
Raps: Hip-hop Cultures in France, Spain, Italy,
Algeria, Cuba and Latin America (2006).
Website: www.metropolitanstudies.de
Milla Tiainen, Licentiate of Philosophy, is
Research Scholar in the Department of
Musicology, University of Turku, Finland. She is
currently completing her Ph.D. entitled “A
Thousand Tiny Voices: Transformations of Sex
and Corporeality in Opera”. In addition to several articles, she is the author of the book
Säveltäjän sijainnit (Locating the Composer,
2005), published by The Research Centre for
Contemporary Culture at the University of
Jyväskylä, which combines feminist musicology
and cultural studies. She has also edited an
anthology on re-theorizations of authorship in
music and theatre.
Marijke de Valck is an assistant professor at
the Department of Media Studies, University
of Amsterdam. After completing her Ph.D. on
international film festivals (cum laude) in
2006, she worked on a project for the Royal
Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences while
teaching Film Studies. Her publications
include an anthology on Cinephilia: Movies,
Love, Memory (2005) and a monograph Film
Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global
Cinephilia (2007). She was one of the organizers of the Sonic Interventions conference in
2005.
Index
A
Appadurai, Arjun, 284
Abbate, Carolyn, 154, 160, 165–66
Armstrong, Louis, 172–80, 185–86, 188–89,
190–91
Abel, Samuel, 165–66
Abraham, Nicolas, 108, 116, 129, 130,
143–44, 207–08
Arnaud, Gérald, 252, 261
Arndt, Susan, 123, 236
Abrams, Harry N., 309
Arom, Simha, 40
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 15, 25
Asad, Talal, 115–16
Accord, Clark, 214, 216, 235–36
Ashby, William Rosh, 306
Adjaye, Joseph K., 253–54, 261
Ashton, E.B., 53
Adorno, Theodor W., 20, 32, 39, 51–3, 171,
Augé, Marc, 248, 261
191
Ahmed, Jamilah, 168
Austin, Joe, 262
Aydemir, Murat, 232
Aisha, 107, 113, 115
Ali B., 269–70, 282–83
B
Ali, Abdullah Yusuf, 115
Back, Les, 18, 20, 25
Alighieri, Dante, 179
Badiou, Alain, 115–16
Alim, Samy, 249, 253
Baird, Jay W., 80–3
Allen, Lewis, 196
Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi, 304, 306
Alter, Nora, 80, 83, 85
Baker Jr., Houston A., 25, 198, 207–08,
Althusser, Louis, 22, 103, 107, 116, 223,
225, 229, 236
212–13, 215, 219–20, 236
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 233, 236, 291, 306
Amador, Raimundo, 259
Baldwin, James, 23, 193–95, 197, 205–08
Amidon, Stephen, 122, 144
Baltanas, Enrique, 257, 261
Anaya, Rudolfo, 55
Banga, Radoslav, 273
Anderson, Laurie, 149
Baraka, Amira aka Leroi Jones, 47, 54,
Andrew, Regina, 198
200–01, 207–08
Andrews Sisters, The, 53
Barany, Zoltan, 15, 25
Andrews, Adrianne R., 253–54
Barber-Kersovan, Alenka, 284
Androutsopoulos, Jannis, 249, 261
Barthes, Roland, 109, 290, 299, 306
Ankeny, Jason, 260–61
Bass, Steven, 301, 306
Annibale, Picicci, 142
Basso, K.H., 26
Anzieu, Didier, 290, 306
Bateson, Gregory, 296, 301–02, 305–06
Index | 313
Bathrick, David, 73, 83
Bradley, Loyd, 304, 307
Battersby, Christine, 148–49, 166
Brady, Mary Pat, 43–4, 49, 53–4
Beauchamp, Ceola J., 208
Braidotti, Rosi, 147–49, 151, 152, 156, 158,
159, 163, 166
Beauchamp, Edgar, 208
Beauchamp, Keith, 208
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 12, 25, 219–20,
231, 236
Beckford, Robert, 293, 307
Beenie Man 291
Braudel, Fernand, 243–44, 262
Begley, Adam, 123, 144
Bray, Abigail, 150, 166
Behnken, Klaus, 83
Brecht, Bertolt, 51
Bendix, Regina, 215, 236
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 131, 144
Benjamin, Walter, 110
Brown, Wendy, 53
Benko, Georges B., 85
Bubenden, Friedrich, 74, 82
Bennett, Andy, 258, 261
Buchanan, Ian, 166
Bennett, Herman, L., 43–4, 53–4
Buck-Morss, Susan, 64, 83
Bennett, Louise Fraser, 290
Budach, Gabriele, 263
Benson, Christopher, 208
Buisson, Matthieu-François-Régis, 142
Berchtold, Josef, 81, 84
Bull, Michael, 17, 18, 20, 25
Bergeron, Katherine, 190
Burwell, Tom, 198
Bey, Ali, 208
Butler, Judith, 138, 144, 151, 154, 166
Bhabha, Homi K., 226, 234, 236, 252,
Byrd, James, 197
257, 262
Bijsterveld, Karin, 15, 25–6
C
Birdsall, Carolyn, 21, 57–86, 311
Cage, John, 88
Bizet, Georges, 259
Campbell, Andrew C., 305, 307
Björk 259, 264
Campbell, Bruce B., 80, 83
Black Belt, 262
Canetti, Elias, 290, 307
Black Panthers, 260
Caramel aka Molnár, Ferenc, 275–76, 282
Black Train 274
Carter, Erica, 80, 83
Blackmer, Corinne E., 161, 166
Caruth, Cathy, 130–31, 144
Bloch, Ernst, 305
Caton, Steve C., 15, 25
Boggle, 291
Chandler, Nahum, 43
Bogue, Ronald, 294, 307
Cheeky Girls, 283
Boot, Adrian, 304, 309
Cheng, Ann Alin, 14, 25
Born, Georgina, 164, 166
Cherry, Gordon E., 85
Bosma, Hannah, 165–66
Chion, Michel, 148, 166
Bost, Suzanne, 91, 100
Chow, Rey, 271, 284
Boucher, Manuel, 248, 262
Chuck D, 245, 265
Bourdieu, Pierre, 288, 307
Chude-Sokei, Louis, 304, 307
Bowen, Michael, 89, 100
Clarke, Kenny, 41
Boyd, Todd, 270–71, 276, 284
Classen, Constance, 305, 307
314 | Index
Clayton, Martin, 152, 166
Debussy, Claude, 259
Clément, Catherine, 164, 166
Deleuze, Gilles, 110, 115–16, 147, 151–52,
156, 158–62, 167–68, 253, 262, 293,
Clements, Frederick Edward, 305, 307
305, 307
Cloonan, Martin, 63, 83
Clouzet, Jean, 51, 54
DeLillo, Don, 22, 119, 124, 132, 135–37,
141, 142, 144
Cohen, John, 51, 53
Colebrook, Claire, 150–52, 156–57, 162, 166
Derrida, Jacques, 109, 110, 115–16, 270
Coleman, Ornette, 33–4, 37–8, 40–1, 53
Descartes, René, 105, 106
Collins, Bootsy, 48
De Valck, Marijke, 11–28, 236–37, 312
Collins, Loretta, 215, 216, 236
Di Prete, Laura, 129, 130, 143–44
Coltrane, John, 37
Didi-Huberman, George, 262
Cook, Nicholas, 164, 166–7
Diggs, Soyica, 23, 193–209, 232, 236, 311
Cook, Susan C., 152, 166
Dimendberg, Edward, 84
Cooper, Carolyn, 212–13, 219, 307
Dimitriadis, Greg, 243, 262
Copenhafer, David, 22, 143, 171–92, 232,
Dissanayake, Wimal, 284
236, 311
Courbin, Alain, 25
DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, 260
DJ Squeeze aka Samuels, Glenworth, 299,
304–06
Cowart, David, 123, 131, 144
Cowley, John, 53
Djebar, Assia, 110–13, 116
Cox, Christoph, 300, 307–08
Dolphy, Eric, 41
Critchlow, Keith, 302–03, 307
Donne, John, 31, 49, 54
Crouch, Stanley, 51, 54, 251
Dorham, Kenny, 33
Csordas, Thomas J., 290, 307
Douglas, Susan, 15, 25
cummings, e.e., 89, 100
Douglass, Frederick, 34, 51, 54, 193–95,
207–08
Currid, Brian, 66, 81, 83
Cusick, Suzanne G., 152, 166
Doyle, Laura, 51, 53
Du Bois, W.E.B., 193, 195, 198, 207–08
D
Du Plessis, Susannah, 214–16, 232, 235
Daara J 244
Dudley, Shannon, 39, 40, 42, 51, 54
Daddy Yankee, 261
Dumas, Henry, 32, 35, 41, 54–5
Davies, Carole Boyce, 228, 236, 238
Dunn, Leslie C., 153, 167
Davis, Miles, 100, 256, 259, 264
Duns Scotus, John, 304
de Certeau, Michel, 104, 116
Dylan, Bob, 41, 52
de Falla, Manuel, 251
de la Isla, Camarón, 245,
E
De Landa, Manuel, 150, 156, 164, 167
Eakin, Emily, 251, 262
Delany, Samuel R., 47, 54
Echols, Alice, 51, 54
de Lucia, Paco, 245, 253
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 13, 14, 25, 44, 51,
De Man, Paul, 178, 191
De Vries, Hent, 115–16
53–5, 190
Edwards, Sam, 34
Index | 315
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 46
Franklin, John Hope, 197
El General, 260
Fraser, Mariam, 295, 307
El Payo Malo, 243
Freud, Sigmund, 22, 108, 115, 119–20, 123,
Elfferding, Wieland, 72, 83
130–31, 135–39, 143–44, 154, 203–05,
Eliade, Mircea, 294, 307
207–08
Eliasi, Yoav aka Shadow, 268
Frick, Wilhelm, 82, 83
Ellington, Duke, 41, 89, 100
Frith, Simon, 262, 284
Ellison, Ralph, 22, 171–2, 180, 185, 187,
Fritzsche, Peter, 80, 84
190–91
Fuhrmeister, Christian, 74, 80, 83–4
Eminem, 268–69, 284
Full Nelson, 243
Enemigo, 255, 264
Furious Five, 246, 254
Eng, David, 208
Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 82
Engel, Gisela, 144
Epping-Jäger, Cornelia, 80, 83
G
Eshun, Kodwo, 306–07
Gallagher, Cormac, 143
Ette, Ottmar, 262
Gallagher, Shaun, 288, 307
Evans, Gil, 256
Garcia Canclini, Nestor, 258–59, 262
Everist, Mark, 167
Garcia, Matt, 44, 55
Eyerman, Ron, 14, 25
Garcia-Lorca, Federico, 35, 51, 55, 251, 259,
F
Garner, Margaret, 235
Faada Freddy, 244–45
Gáspár, Gyözö, 276–77
Fat Joe, 265
Gatens, Moira, 157–58, 167
Faubus, Orval E., 32–3, 46
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 25–6, 51, 190,
262
Fáy, Miklós, 273, 284
213, 220, 232–33, 254, 261, 301, 307
Fekete Vonat, 274
Gates, Nathaniel E., 284
Feld, Steven, 25, 242, 262, 266, 284
Gaunt, Kyra D., 248, 262
Felderer, Brigitte, 83
Gebesmair, Andreas, 284
Fenton, Stephen, 25–6
Gehring, Petra, 25–6
Ferdinand II of Aragon, 243
Gelpi, Albert, 100
Fido, Elaine Savory, 228, 236, 238
Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 100
Fink, Robert, 153, 167
Genosko, Gary, 167
Fischer, Conan, 68, 80, 84
Geralds, Yolande, 208
Flores, Juan, 246, 250, 258, 262
Gess, Nicola, 26
Flores, Lola, 243
Gibson, James Jerome, 288, 307
Florian, Karl Friedrich, 76
Gillespie, Dizzy, 36
Foster, Hal, 54
Gilroy, Paul, 13, 25–6, 32, 55, 212–13, 237,
Foucault, Michel, 35, 51, 55, 80, 84, 205,
208, 307
Fox, Robert Elliot, 213, 232, 236
316 | Index
246, 262, 30
Gipsy, 273, 275, 282
Glaser, Marlies, 213, 237
Glinka, Michail, 259
Herbert, Trevor, 166
Glissant, Edward 12, 25–6, 213, 231, 237
Herding, Klaus, 80, 84
Glombowski, Friedrich, 81, 84
Heylighen, Francis, 305, 308
Goebbels, Joseph, 62, 65, 81, 82, 84
Higgins, Billy, 52
Goldberg, David Theo, 235, 237
Hill, Donald R., 53–4
Göle, Nilüfer, 26
Hill, Jack, 100
Goodman, Steve, 304
Hilmersdorff, Constans, 82
Göring, Hermann, 76, 79, 83
Himmler, Heinrich, 83
Gordon, Collin, 84
Hitler, Adolf, 63, 65, 72, 80–1, 84
Gorra, Michael, 121, 144
Hobsbawm, Eric, 71, 84, 252, 262
Grandmaster Flash, 254, 260, 264
Hofer, Andreas, 68–9, 82
Grewal, Inderpal, 271, 284
Hoffmann, Heinrich, 81, 84
Grier, Pam, 99
Holcomb, Roscoe, 41, 52–4
Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 207–08
Holiday, Billie, 196
Grossberg, Lawrence, 284
Holloway, Karla F.C., 195–96, 207–08
Grossmann, Stefan, 80
Holquist, Michael, 236
Grosz, Elizabeth, 147, 151–52, 156,
Holzmeister, Clemens, 70
158–60, 162, 164, 167
Homer, 20
Gruber, Malte C., 144
Hope, Donna P., 304, 308
Guattari, Félix, 110, 116, 151–52, 156,
Horkheimer, Max, 20, 26
158–59, 161–62, 167, 253
Horvath, Vlastimil, 275
Guy, Will, 25–6
Hoving, Isabel, 213, 232–33, 235, 237
Gyözike, 277, 282
Hughes, Langston, 198
Hume, David, 111
H
Hung, Chang-Tai, 81, 84
H2O, 246
Hurston, Zora Neal, 233, 236
Hall, Stuart, 154, 167, 271, 279, 284
Hurt, Byron, 265–66
Hansen, Mark, 305, 307
Hutcheon, Linda, 165, 167
Hartman, Saidiya, 14, 25–6, 205, 208,
Hutcheon, Michael, 165, 167
217–18, 232, 237
Hayles, N. Katherine, 306–07
I
Haze, 242, 245, 264
Ibn Hisham, 110
Hebdige, Dick, 300, 304, 307
Ibn Sa’d, 110
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51
Ihde, Don, 57, 59, 60, 79, 84
Heidegger, Martin, 106
Imre, Anikó, 23, 261, 265–86, 311
Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian, 18
Infantry, Ahante, 54
Henriques, Fernando, 304, 308
Iordanova, Dina, 272, 284
Henriques, Julian, 23, 83–4, 260, 287–311
Irwin, William, 233, 237
Henry, Denton, 297, 299, 304–06
Isabella I. of Castile, 243
Hentoff, Nat, 256
Ivins, William Mills, 304, 308
Index | 317
J
Kember, Sarah, 295, 307
Jadakiss, 265
Kerényi, György, 275
Jafa, Arthur, 249
Ketama, 245
Jaggar, Alison M., 166
Khadija, 108, 113, 115
Jakobson, Roman, 300, 308
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 103, 108–09, 113,
115–16
James, Rob, 260
Järviluoma, Helmi, 147, 167
King, Martin Luther, 247
Jay, Martin, 84
King, Nel, 54
Jay-Z, 52
Kingsbury, Henry, 164, 167
Joe, Jeongwon, 148, 167
Kittler, Friedrich, 25–6
Johnson, Barbara, 51, 54, 237
Kitwana, Bakari, 257, 262
Johnson, Bruce, 63, 83
Klages, Mary, 234
Johnson, Bunk, 51
Klemfeld, Hermann, 83–4
Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 198
Knabb, Ken, 304, 308
Johnson, Mark, 302, 308
Knauff, Michael, 75–6, 84
Johst, Hanns, 72, 74, 76, 82, 84
Koepnick, Lutz, 73, 80, 83–5
Jones, A. M., 39
Koestenbaum, Wayne, 25–6, 165, 167
Jones, Gayle, 207–08
Kofman, Sarah, 119–20, 134, 144
Jones, Hedley, 304
Kohli, Amor, 91, 100
Jones, John, 297, 299
Kolesch, Doris, 26–7
Jones, LeRoi aka Amiri Baraka, 47, 53,
Kolinski, Mieczyslaw, 40
200–01, 207–08, 260
Kopelowicz, Guy, 51, 54
Jones, Nancy A. 153, 167
Koshar, Rudy, 80, 84
Junior, 242
Kramer, Lawrence, 152–53, 167
Junko ‘Bashment’ Kudo 292
Krämer, Sybille, 26–7
Jurna, Nina, 214, 236
Krauss, Rosalind, 51, 54
Kristeva, Julia, 154, 165, 167
K
Kun, Josh, 54
Kaes, Anton, 80, 84
Kuti, Fela, 48
Kafka, Franz, 110
Kage, Jan, 247, 262
L
Kállai, Ernö, 272–73, 284
L.A. Sunshine, 246, 264
Kaplan, Caren, 271, 284
La Excepción, 242
Karni, Gil, 266
La Familia, 261
Kassabian, Anahid, 148, 167
La Mala Rodriguez, 242–43
Katz, David, 304, 308
Lacan, Jacques, 119–20, 122–23, 131,
Kauffman, Robert, 40
134–39, 142–43, 145, 154–55, 165
Kaufman, Bob, 87–91, 100
Lachmann, Renate, 142, 145
Keil, Charles, 42, 52, 54
Lacoue-Labarthe, 106, 109, 113, 116,
Keizer, Arlene, 232, 237
318 | Index
181–3, 191
Laitmon, Steven, 208
M
Lakoff, George 302, 308
Macaco, 242
Landry, Donna, 117
Mackenzie, Adrian, 305, 308
Laplanche, Jean, 208
Mackey, Nathaniel, 25–6, 35, 50, 54, 213
Laqueur, Thomas, 140, 145
MacLean, Gerald, 117
Last Poets, The, 246, 260
Madonna, 165
Latour, Bruno, 304, 308
Mahler, Gustav, 181–3
LeBon, Gustave, 63, 84
Mahmood, Saba, 25–6
Lee, Vernon, 144
Mailer, Norman, 257
Lefebvre, Henri, 60, 84, 294, 308
Manalo, Armando, 190
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 115
Manuel, Peter, 294, 308
Leitch, Vincent B., 236
Marciniak, Kataryna, 271, 285
Leitner, Bernhard, 16, 26
Marina, 244–45
Leonardi, Susan J., 153, 165, 167
Marley, Bob, 247
Levin, David Michael, 299, 308
Marshall, Wayne, 294, 308
Levin, Simon A., 308
Marx, Karl, 109
Levinas, Emmanuel, 22, 103, 105–06, 109,
Marx, Wilhelm, 70, 82
115–16
Lewin, Olive, 304, 308
Lewis, David, 115–16
Massignon, Louis, 107–09, 112, 115–16
Massumi, Brian, 157, 160, 164, 167, 260,
262
Lewy, Guenther, 15, 26
Máte, Péter, 275
Liauzu, Claude, 243, 258, 262
May, Robert M., 308
Lindenberger, Thomas, 62, 84
May, Stephen, 25–26
Lionnet, Françoise, 228, 237
Mazzio, Carla, 304, 308
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 49, 54–5
MC Protious Indegenious, 261, 264
Liszt, Franz, 259
McCann, Eugene J., 64, 84
LL Junior, 274–75, 277–78, 282
McClary, Susan, 152, 154, 167
Löbbermann, Dorothea, 261–62
McCoy, Joseph, 206
Locke, John, 306
McLeod, Cynthia, 129, 232
Lole y Manuel, 245
McLuhan, Marshall, 60, 80, 216, 293,
Lomax, Alan, 52, 54
308
Lomelï, Francisco, 55
McNeal, Horace, 297, 299, 304
Loomba, Ania, 235, 237
McPherson, Eve, 15, 26
Lord Invader, aka Rupert Westmore
Meghelly, Samir, 249, 253
Grant 21, 31–2, 42, 46–7, 49–51,
Melle Mel, 246, 254, 264
53–5
Menchaca, Martha, 43–4, 53, 55
Ludditák, 280–81
Mensah, E.T., 48
Ludin, Hanns, 80
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 80, 85, 289, 302, 308
Lury, Celia, 295, 307
Meyer, Michael, 67, 85
Lyotard, Jean-François, 105, 116
Middleton, Richard, 166
Index | 319
Mieszkowski, Sylvia, 22, 119–46, 232,
236–37, 311
Naylor, Gloria, 207
Nel, Philip, 122, 145
Miller, Jacques Alain, 142, 145
Nelson, Cary, 284
Milon, André, 248, 263
Nemo, Philippe, 115
Mingus, Charles, 21, 31–41, 43–4, 46–51,
Neptune, Harvey, 38, 45–6, 53, 56
53–5
Mingus, Sue Graham, 33–5, 37, 55
Nettl, Bruno, 164, 168
Neus-van der Putten, Hilde, 214–15, 232,
235, 237
Mitchell, Joni, 41, 51
Mitchell, Tony, 246, 263
Nicosia, Gerald, 100
Mitnick, Josuah, 268, 285
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 100
Mittig, Hans-Ernst, 80, 84
Nieto, Oscar, 245, 263
Mohammed B., 269
Nolan, Mary, 80, 85
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 271, 285
Norfleet, Dawn Michelle, 246, 263
Molnár, Ferenc aka Caramel, 275–76, 282
Novák, Erik, 281
Monson, Ingrid, 52, 54
Nuñez, Gerardo, 245
Montag, Walter, 116
Moraga, Cherie, 43
O
Morley, David, 304
O’Meally, Robert, 91
Morris, Adalaide, 230, 237
Ochoa, Ana Maria, 242, 263
Morrison, Toni, 206–08, 235, 261
Ojos de Brujo, 242–44, 249, 258–59,
264
Morton, Jelly Roll, 35, 51, 55
Mos Def, 266
Oláh, Ibolya, 275–76
Mosse, George, 79, 82, 85
Ombre, Ellen, 23, 211, 213, 219–22,
228–32, 235, 237
Moten, Fred, 21, 25–6, 31–56, 190, 196,
199–200, 207–08, 212–13, 237, 312
Ong, Walter, 212, 219, 232–33, 237
Moynagh, Maureen, 237
Onians, Richard Broxton, 302, 308
Mozart, W.A., 160
Orbán, Viktor, 283
Muhammad, 103–04, 107–08, 113
Ortiz, Fernando, 244, 263
Mulroy, Kevin, 44, 53, 55
Mulvey, Laura, 143, 145
P
Munchow, Michael, 117
Pabst, G.W., 82
Mundy, John, 148, 168
Padillo, Genaro, 44, 53, 56
Murray, Albert, 14
Papapavlou, Maria, 257, 263–64
Muse, John, 190
Parham, Marisa, 22, 87–100, 312
Mutman, Mahmut, 22, 25, 103–18, 234,
Parker, Charlie, 180, 185
237, 312
Patton, Paul, 117
N
Paul, Gerhard, 64, 66, 81, 85
Naficy, Hamid, 284
Paulin, Tom, 124, 145
Nair, Supriya, 226, 235, 237
Pausch, Marion, 213, 237
Napoleon, 68
Paust, Otto, 67, 69, 81
320 | Index
Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 44, 53, 56
Ray, Sangeeta, 237
Perkins, Kathy, 198, 207–08
Razaf, Andy, 172, 174
Petrus, Martin, 263
Reckin, Anne, 219, 221, 231, 236–37
Pichler, Cathrin, 16, 26
Redmond, Eugene B., 54
Picicci, Annibale, 142, 145
Redmond, Patricia, 54
Picker, John M., 20, 25–6
Reed, Ishmael, 233, 238
Pickthal, M.M., 115
Régulier, Catherine, 293, 308
Pihel, Eric, 246, 263
Reid-Pharr, Robert, 35, 51, 56
Pinch, Trevor, 15, 25–6
Reinhardt, Mark, 235, 238
Pisters, Patricia, 148, 168
Rich, Adrienne, 88, 100
Plato, 113
Richmond, Dannie, 36–7
Plonitsky, Arkady, 116
Rimski-Korsakov, Nikolai A., 259
Poizat, Michel, 154, 168
Rincón, Reyes, 242, 245, 263
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 208
Rivera, Raquel, 246, 249–50, 256, 263
Pope, Rebecca A., 154, 165, 167
Roach, Max, 33
Potter, John, 165, 168
Robinson, Cedric, 44, 52, 55
Powell, Winston ‘Weepow’, 304
Rohlehr, Gordon, 38, 42, 52, 56
Pratt, Mary Louise, 255
Rollins, Sonny, 50
Pratt, Ray, 285
Romantic, 276
Priestly, Brian, 36–8, 55
Romanyshyn, Robert D., 304, 308
Probyn, Elspeth, 168
Roots, The, 22, 91
Protevi, John, 117
Rose, Theresa, 167
Public Enemy, 245, 247, 256, 264
Rose, Tricia 13, 25, 27, 246–47, 249, 253,
255–57, 260, 263
Puello, Ariana, 242
Rosenberg, Albert, 82
Q
Quayson, Ato, 12, 26, 213, 221, 233, 237
Queen Latifah, 275
Ross, Diana, 247
Rothmund, Paul, 82
Rouget, Gilbert, 292, 308
Roughgarden, Jonathan, 305, 308
Rucker, Ursula, 22, 87–8, 91–100
R
Rudder, David, 42, 49, 53
Radek, Karl, 80
Rühle, Günther, 82, 85
Radio Tarifa, 244
Rushdy, Ashraf, 197, 205, 207–08
Raimundi-Ortiz, Wanda, 255, 264
Rutherford, Jonathan, 284
Ramet, Sabrina Petra, 285
Ryle, Gilbert, 207
Rand, Nicholas T., 143–44
Ryman, Cheryl, 288, 304, 308
Randall, Kay, 258
Ranger, Terence, 252
S
Raspa, Anthony, 53
Said, Edward, 104, 115, 117
Ravel, Maurice, 259
Saldaña-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 43, 53, 56
Index | 321
Salewicz, Chris, 304, 309
Smith, Patricia Juliana, 161, 166
Samuels, Glenworth aka DJ Squeeze, 300,
Smith, S.J., 25, 27
306
Smudits, Alfred, 284
Sárosi, Bálint, 272, 285
Snead, James, 190, 217, 232, 309
Schafer, Murray R., 15, 25, 27
Sokol, Monika, 253, 263
Schäfer, Wilhelm, 82
Solie, Ruth A., 152, 166, 168
Schäfers, Stefanie, 82, 85
Sólo los Solo, 242
Schlageter, Albert Leo, 57–61, 64, 67–72,
Souaiaia, Ahmed E., 15, 27
74–83, 85
Spady, James, 249, 253, 263
Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 80, 85
Spears, Britney, 284
Scholl, Inge, 82
Spencer-Brown, George, 309
Schreiner, Florian, 26
Spicer, Edward, 43, 53, 56
Schubert, Franz, 76
Spillers, Hortense, 197, 207–08
Schubert, Gusztáv, 283, 285
Spinoza, Baruch, 107
Schulz, Manuela K., 26
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 108–12, 117,
Schumann, Richard, 259
271, 285
Schwarz, David, 154, 168
Stace, 32
Schwarz, Henry, 237
Stam, Robert, 285
Scott, Jonathan, 257, 263
Stanley-Niaah, Sonjah, 304, 309
Sean Paul, 288
Stein, Gertrude, 123
Seidler, Vic, 18–9, 25, 27
Steingress, Gert, 252, 263
Serres, Michel, 142, 145
Stelarc, 149
Shadow aka Yoav Eliasi, 268
Stemmler, Susanne, 23, 241–264, 267, 283,
Shakespeare, William, 25, 277
312
Shakir, M.H., 115, 117
Stephen of Hungary, 276
Shamdasani, Sonu, 117
Sterne, Jonathan, 16, 27, 80, 85, 123, 145,
Sharpe, Jenny, 232, 235, 238
299, 309
Shimoni, Kobi, 268–69, 282
Stewart, Garrett, 142, 145, 230, 238
Shohat, Ella, 285
Stolzoff, Norman C., 304, 309
Siirala, Meri, 168
Störl, Kerstin, 252, 263
Sillitoe, Alan, 89–90, 100
Stolze, Ted, 116
Silverman, Kaja, 119, 120, 135–37, 143,
Stolzoff, Norman C., 304, 309
145, 148, 168, 202–05, 207–08
Strachey, James, 143–44, 208
Simondon, Gilbert, 305, 309
Strauss, Emil, 82
Sizzla, 291
Strobl, Gerwin, 72, 85
Skrandies, Timo, 263
Strohmayer, Ulf, 65, 85
Smart, Mary Ann, 154, 168
Sümegi, Noémi, 283
Smith, Bruce R., 25, 27
Sutcliffe, Anthony, 82, 85
Smith, Joy, 23, 211–38, 312
Swiboda, Marcel, 253, 264
Smith, Mark M., 25, 27
Szalai, Anett, 283
322 | Index
T
Vattimo, Gianni, 115
Tabari, 110
Venn, Couze, 304
Tarantino, Quentin, 93, 100
Vermeersh, Peter, 25, 27
Tarnas, Richard, 306, 309
Vernallis, Carol, 148, 168
Tasso, Torquato, 130
von Blomberg, Werner, 82
Tate, Greg, 248–49, 264
von Hornbostel, Erich, 39
Tatu, 283
von Schillings, Max, 82
Taylor, Cecil, 33
Taylor, Christine, 269, 283
W
Taylor, Robert R., 70, 85
Wadud, Amina, 25, 27
Thomas, Helen, 168
Wagner, Frank, 83
Thompson, E.P., 81, 85
Wagner, Richard, 75
Thompson, Emily, 16, 27
Wagstaff, Gregg, 147, 167
Thöne, Albrecht W., 80, 85
Wall, Cheryl, 200, 207–08
Tiainen, Milla, 22, 147–68, 312
Wall, Jeff, 171, 187, 190
Till, Emmet Louis, 194, 199–201, 205–06
Waller, Fats, 36, 171, 174
Till-Bradley, Maime, 205
Warner, Daniel, 300, 307–08
Till-Mobley, Maime, 208
Washabaugh, William, 244, 250–51, 254,
Tobin, Elizabeth H., 80, 85
264
Todorov, Tzvetan, 142, 145
Watkins, Craig, 258
Toomer, Jean, 198, 207–08
Watkins, Glenn E., 67, 85
Torok, Maria, 108, 116, 144, 207
Weate, Jeremy, 304
Totton, Robin, 251, 253, 256, 264
Weheliye, Alexander 12, 27, 186, 191, 195,
Treacherous Three, 246
207–08, 217, 219–20, 233, 238, 309
Treichler, Paula A., 284
Weidenhaupt, Hugo, 82, 85
Trommler, Frank, 76, 85
Weigel, Sigrid, 25, 27
Truax, Barry, 25, 27
Wessel, Horst, 81
Tsou, Judy, S., 152, 166
Westbrook, Alonzo, 260–61, 264
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 64, 85
Westmore Grant, Rupert, see Lord Invader
Turetzky, Philip, 293–94, 309
Wheelock, Gretchen A., 165, 168
Turner, Victor, 294, 309
White, Eric Charles, 302, 309
White, Garth, 304, 309
V
Wiener, Norbert, 305, 309
Vahrenkamp, Richard, 74, 85
Wilden, Anthony, 300–01, 306, 309
Välimäki, Susanna, 154, 164–65, 168
Willard, Michael Nevin, 262
van Bellingen, Wouter, 16
Williams, D. Carleton, 292–93, 309
van Gogh, Theo, 296
Williams, Tony, 100
van Kempen, Michiel, 232–33, 237
Williams, William Carlos, 41, 52–3, 56
Van Leeuwen, Theo, 255, 264
Willis, Andre, 253
Varela, Francisco J., 305, 309
Wilson, August, 207
Index | 323
Wilson, Olly, 40–2, 51, 56
Z
Wilson, Rob, 284
Zabel, Gary, 305, 309
Winchester, Rakel, 243
Zakhut, Samekh, 266–67, 282
Wolters, Rudolf, 82
Zern, Brook, 256, 264
Woweries, F.H., 66, 81
Zielinski, Siegfried, 62, 85
Wu Tang Latino, 261
Zimmermann, Michael, 15, 27
Zimra, Clarisse, 238
Y
Yalim, Burcu, 115
Žižek, Slavoj, 115, 117, 119–20, 135–36,
143, 145
Yannatou, Savina, 259, 264
Zumthor, 252, 254, 264
Young, Iris Marion, 166
Zur, 243
Young, Robert J.C., 235, 238
Younge, Gary, 304
324 | Index

Sonic Interventions

Transcription

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