Soul Music and the Making of Anti-Anti-Essentialism

Published in 1995, Paul Gilroy’s classic, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, is a bold and brilliant rethinking of the political geography of race that is still relevant today. Upon hearing that Gilroy won the prestigious Holberg Prize, we asked WT Lhamon, Jr., author of Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture to select an excerpt from the book that spoke to him. When he selected the section, Lhamon said: “These pages seem to me to epitomize Paul’s complex contribution to cultural discourse and influenced/ratified my own instincts. He summarizes, appreciates, contextualizes, and keeps in play the disagreeing positions through the centuries on what is black. What influenced me was the specific dissection of in/authenticity as all we have.”

As I argued in the opening chapter, critical dialogue and debate on these questions of identity and culture currently stage a confrontation between two loosely organised perspectives which, in opposing each other, have become locked in an entirely fruitless relationship of mutual interdependency. Both positions are represented in contemporary discussions of black music, and both contribute to staging a conversation between those who see the music as the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness and those who would dispute the existence of any such unifying, organic phenomenon. Wherever the confrontation between these views is staged, it takes the basic form of con­flict between a tendency focused by some variety of exceptionalist claim (usually though not always of a nationalist nature) and another more avow­edly pluralistic stance which is decidedly sceptical of the desire to totalise black culture, let alone to make the social dynamics of cultural integration synonymous with the practice of nation building and the project of racial emancipation in Africa and elsewhere.

The first option typically identifies music with tradition and cultural continuity. Its conservatism is sometimes disguised by the radical nature of its affirmative political rhetoric and by its laudable concern with the relation­ ship between music and the memory of the past. It currently announces its interpretive intentions with the popular slogan “It’s a Black thing you wouldn’t understand.” But it appears to have no great enthusiasm for the forbidding, racially prescriptive musical genres and styles that could make this bold assertion plausible. There has been no contemporary equivalent to the provocative, hermetic power of dub which supported the radical Ethiopianism of the seventies or of the anti-assimilationist unintelligibility of bebop in the forties. The usually mystical “Africentrism” which animates this position perceives no problem in the internal differentiation of black cultures. Any fragmentation in the cultural output of Africans at home and abroad is only apparent rather than real and cannot therefore forestall the power of the underlying racial aesthetic and its political correlates.

This exceptionalist position shares elitism and contempt for black popu­lar culture with the would-be postmodern pragmatism which routinely and inadequately opposes it. Something of the spirit of the second “anti­ essentialist” perspective is captured in the earlier but equally historic black vernacular phrase “Different strokes for different folks.” This notional pluralism is misleading. Its distaste for uncomfortable questions of class and power makes political calculation hazardous if not impossible. This second position refers pejoratively to the first as racial essentialism. It moves to­ wards a casual and arrogant deconstruction of blackness while ignoring the appeal of the first position’s powerful, populist affirmation of black culture. The brand of elitism which would, for example, advance the white noise of Washington, D.C.’s Rasta thrash punk band the Bad Brains as the last word in black cultural expression is clearly itching to abandon the ground of the black vernacular entirely. This abdication can only leave that space open to racial conservationists who veer between a volkish, protofascist sensibility and the misty-eyed sentimentality of those who would shroud themselves in the supposed moral superiority that goes with victim status. It is tantamount to ignoring the undiminished power of racism itself and forsaking the mass of black people who continue to comprehend their lived particularity through what it does to them. Needless to say, the lingering effects of racism institutionalised in the political field are overlooked just as its inscription in the cultural industries which provide the major vehicle for this exclusively aesthetic radicalism passes unremarked upon.

It is ironic, given the importance accorded to music in the habitus of diaspora blacks, that neither pole in this tense conversation takes the music very seriously. The narcissism which unites both standpoints is revealed by the way that they both forsake discussion of music and its attendant drama­turgy, performance, ritual, and gesture in favour of an obsessive fascination with the bodies of the performers themselves. For the unashamed essen­tialists, Nelson George denounces black musicians who have had facial sur­gery and wear blue or green contact lenses, while in the opposite camp, Kobena Mercer steadily reduces Michael Jackson’s voice first to his body, then to his hair, and eventually to his emphatically disembodied image. I want to emphasise that even though it may have once been an important factor in shaping the intellectual terrain on which politically engaged anal­ysis of black culture takes place, the opposition between these rigid per­spectives has become an obstacle to critical theorising.

The syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures alone supplies pow­erful reasons for resisting the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms, working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of absolute identity. Following the lead established long ago by Leroi Jones, I believe it is possible to approach the music as a changing rather than an unchanging same. Today, this involves the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the desta­bilising flux of the post-contemporary world. New traditions have been invented in the jaws of modern experience and new conceptions of moder­nity produced in the long shadow of our enduring traditions-the African ones and the ones forged from the slave experience which the black vernac­ular so powerfully and actively remembers. This labour also necessitates far closer attention to the rituals of performance that provide prima facie evidence of linkage between black cultures.

Because the self-identity, political culture, and grounded aesthetics that distinguish black communities have often been constructed through their music and the broader cultural and philosophical meanings that flow from its production, circulation, and consumption, music is especially important in breaking the inertia which arises in the unhappy polar opposition be­ tween a squeamish, nationalist essentialism and a sceptical, saturnalian plu­ralism which makes the impure world of politics literally unthinkable. The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of the Atlantic diaspora is itself an important element in their essential connectedness. But the histories of borrowing, displacement, transformation, and continual reinscription that the musical culture encloses are a living legacy that should not be reified in the primary symbol of the diaspora and then employed as an alternative to the recurrent appeal of fixity and rootedness. Music and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction to be reinvented by the will and whim of aesthetes, sym­bolists, and language gamers. Black identity is not simply a social and polit­ical category to be used or abandoned according to the extent to which the rhetoric that supports and legitimises it is persuasive or institutionally powerful. Whatever the radical constructionists may say, it is lived as a co­herent ( if not always stable) experiential sense of self. Though it is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires. We can use Fou­cault’s insightful comments to illuminate this necessarily political relation­ ship. They point towards an anti-anti-essentialism that sees racialised sub­jectivity as the product of the social practices that supposedly derive from it: “Rather than seeing [the modern soul] as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technol­ogy of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power that is exercised.”

These significations can be condensed in the process of musical perfor­mance though it does not, of course, monopolise them. In the black Atlan­tic context, they produce the imaginary effect of an internal racial core or essence by acting on the body through the specific mechanisms of identi­fication and recognition that are produced in the intimate interaction of performer and crowd. This reciprocal relationship can serve as an ideal communicative situation even when the original makers of the music and its eventual consumers are separated in space and time or divided by the technologies of sound reproduction and the commodity form which their art has sought to resist. I have explored elsewhere how the struggle against the commodity form has been taken over into the very configurations that black mass cultural creation assumes. Negotiations with that status are re­vealed openly and have become a cornerstone in the anti-aesthetic which governs those forms. The aridity of those three crucial terms-production, circulation, and consumption does scant justice to the convoluted outer­ national processes to which they now refer. Each of them, in contrasting ways, hosts a politics of race and power which is hard to grasp, let alone fully appreciate, through the sometimes crude categories that political economy and European cultural criticism deploy in their tentative analyses of ethnicity and culture. The term “consumption” has associations that are particularly problematic, and needs to be carefully unpacked. It accentu­ates the passivity of its agents and plays down the value of their creativity as well as the micro-political significance of their actions in understanding the forms of anti-discipline and resistance conducted in everyday life. Mi­chel de Certeau has made this point at a general level:

Like law [one of its models], culture articulates conflicts and alter­nately legitimises, displaces or controls the superior force. It develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which it pro­vides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.”