Book Review--Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
By Alexander G. Weheliye
Duke University Press (2005), 304 pages

Reviewed by Matthew Somoroff

“No Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity” (45)—in a nutshell, this is the big idea in Alexander Weheliye’s new book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Crucial to his project are a wide definition of “the sonic” within black cultural production and a belief in the centrality of aurality (and/or orality) to twentieth-century black culture. Weheliye’s engagement with the sounds of black cultural production (sonic Afro-modernity) owes a significant debt to Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003), in which Moten privileges the sonic and aural within black performance and propounds a theory of black culture as inherently performative and black performance as inherently radical.

Weheliye departs from Moten in his meditation on the intrinsically technological nature of sonic Afro-Modernity. In the exciting introduction to this volume, Weheliye notes how the sound technologies and listening practices associated with black music have not received enough critical attention. My interest was piqued when I read that Weheliye proposes to “establish a dialogue between literary texts and current popular culture to conjecture how sonic technologies and black cultural production have fruitfully contaminated each other” (8). This is a book about the agency of black cultural producers as practitioners and innovators of Western modernity.

This is also a book about the nonlinguistic power of sound, about the ability of sound to act as both “writing” (in the sense that it signifies in an abstract and systematic way) and something beyond “writing”—something more embodied and sensual. In his first chapter, Weheliye posits the phonograph as a site where the ostensibly separate categories and writing and sounding were collapsed, thus challenging the prevailing Western discursive bias towards the visual and the written.

Weheliye approaches his subject matter from the perspective of a literary or cultural critic; that is, his ideas and theoretical stances mostly build off of his close readings of cultural texts. A benefit of this volume is Weheliye’s refreshingly eclectic choice of texts and their juxtapositions. Weheliye not only positions readings of texts by canonical authors such as Du Bois and Ralph Ellison beside the practices of DJs and a recent Hollywood film, respectively, but he also structures his arguments to highlight the merits of reading these pieces of black cultural production in tandem.

Weheliye juxtaposes Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk with the artistic practices of DJs in Chapter Three. Just as DJs create rupture by fragmenting musical materials while forming new musical wholes through the juxtaposition and/or combination of erstwhile separate recordings, Du Bois’ text can be seen as one of the first “mixes” in twentieth-century black culture in its use of contrasting literary forms and modes, and its inclusion of fragments of spirituals in musical notation. Reading this chapter, I detected Weheliye’s satisfaction with his own feat of DJing in his “mixing” of Du Bois with contemporary DJing practices. The conception of Du Bois as proto-DJ and of contemporary DJs as Du Boisian sound-smiths struck me as one of Weheliye’s more successful expositions of how sonic Afro-modernity is “a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds in the West” (8), or put differently, an aurally centered cultural mode traversing the boundaries of supposedly discrete historical periods.

Yet for all Weheliye’s talk about exploring “sonic Afro-Modernity,” I found a strange dearth of sound in the book, or at least a dearth of close engagement with the kind of materiality of sound he seems to celebrate. Weheliye analyzes the recordings of the Haitian/American rap group the Fugees, the Afro-/Italian-German rap group Advanced Chemistry, and the black UK musician Tricky to show how all three articulate what Weheliye terms “diasporic citizenship” with the aid of sound technologies (see Chapter 5). When he thinks about the Fugees, he thinks more about their lyrics and the visual content of their music videos than the sound of their music (though he observes certain notable musical features: the use of acoustic guitar, the combination of rapped and sung lyrics). When he discusses Ralph Ellison’s essay “Living with Music” (Chapter 3) and Darnell Martin’s film I Like It Like That, Weheliye shows the reader how an important African-American writer and the first African-American woman to direct a Hollywood film both conceive of sound recordings in the construction of urban spaces (Ellison plays his LPs louder to drown out annoying singing from a next-door neighbor; Lisette, the protagonist of I Like It, uses technologies such as the Walkman to create a sonic space of privacy).

These analyses show how sound technologies either facilitate the dissemination of black music (in the case of the Fugees) or appear within the daily lives of musical black people (in the case of Ellison and I Like It). However, they do not really seem to theorize exactly how sound technologies figure in the experiencing of black music (at least not the way the book’s opening rumination on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” suggests Weheliye is capable), or explain how “these [sound] technologies have been significantly shaped by black music” (20).

In his chapter on sonically constructed “Afro-modern” spaces, Weheliye mentions the paucity of “studies that analyze how sound articulates space” (108). While he cites the work of Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past) in his discussion of the early years of the phonograph (Chapter 1), Weheliye’s thoughts on sonically constructed spaces could have been informed by Sterne’s 1997 article “Sounds Like the Mall of America.” This article explores how “Muzak” is used to structure of the spaces of a large US shopping mall; different styles of music delineate boundaries between various stores and hallways, much in the same way Ellison and Lisette create bounded spaces for themselves with music of their choosing.

Weheliye’s vision of “sonic Afro-modernity” is an idea, a frame in which to think about black cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond, that is full of potential because of its recognition of the importance of technology in the aurality of black culture. His call to consider “(sonic) blackness” and modernity in symbiotic proximity deserves our attention. If Phonographies only lays out the groundwork for Weheliye’s ambitious conceptualization of black modernity, it has still served a valuable purpose. Hopefully future work (by Weheliye or others) will extend these theories into new practices for the study of the African diaspora.

***

Matthew Somoroff is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Music Department at Duke University

“Truth Chappelle Style” -- Stephane Dunn on Dave Chapelle

“Truth Chappelle Style” by Stephane Dunn

The truth is permanent; everything else’ll fall by the wayside.

Twenty years from now when young black comedians speak of their comedic models and pay tribute to the legends who came before, Dave Chappelle will probably be one of them. Chappelle’s famous walk away from his reported fifty million dollar show on Comedy Central cast him into the glare of superstar celebrity, but it is his public comedic dialogue since his return from finding rest and peace in Africa that may define his place in comedy history.

Chappelle has gone from becoming the latest black comedian to rise to public stardom to stepping into an unlikely role-comedic seer of his generation. From the beginning Chappelle’s show positioned race, class, and the social conventions that they defined at the center of his satirically sharp sketches. Most assuredly, characters like Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, the blind black racist who doesn’t know he’s black, highlight the comedian’s no holds barred approach to comedy. Some viewers and critics believed he went too far and a great many of the mixed audience that made it one of the most successful variety shows ever simply loved it. Yet, at the height of the show’s success, Dave Chappelle began to question the politics of stardom and Hollywood. He also questioned the power and responsibility that went along with his talent for highlighting and making people laugh at the often hidden racial taboos that underline cultural differences.

He “bounced” in his words to Africa where he escaped the machinery that came with newly found American stardom. Since his return, Chappelle’s first public dialogues about why he left with Oprah Winfrey and then on Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, showcase a man whose thinking seriously about the art of his comedy and how to negotiate being true to himself while avoiding becoming another tragic star who falls just as he’s risen to the top. The radical aspect of these dialogues is the way that Chappelle’s appearances on the shows transformed those platforms into spaces where we get to witness perhaps the most revealing and certainly funniest discussion about race than we’ve seen in a long time. Chappelle emphasized that despite media stories to the contrary he was never crazy and fame wasn’t too much for him to handle. It was all the superficial stuff that accompanies mega success. As he told his student listeners and Lipton, “You can become famous but you can’t become unfamous. You can become infamous but not unfamous.”

On the Oprah Show, Chappelle’s profound simplicity and vulnerability brought out the protective big sister who knows the challenges of fame in Winfrey. He struggled to articulate his experience trying to navigate Hollywood celebrityhood. With all of its many intensive dialogues with actors, Chappelle’s gritty conversation on Inside the Actor’s Studio was historical in of itself. The always formal and distinguished Lipton actually got up and danced a little ballet to Chappelle and the audience’s delight. Several times Lipton attempted to speak in the vernacular, his enunciation of words like “honky” adding to the most intense yet hilarious Inside the Actor’s Studio discussion thus far. Chappelle sat chain smoking and working hard at remaining himself and honest at all times. He volleyed back and forth playfully with Lipton, who carefully described Chappelle’s comedy as a medium that revealed black people to whites in ways they missed. Every black American is bilingual Chappelle informed him.

Chappelle says he’s waiting to see how Dave Chappelle is going to turn out. So are a lot of us given the public way his professional and personal life has played out so far. It may be that the torch has been passed to him as his model the legendary Richard Pryor said. In the meantime, Chappelle is interjecting a significant critical dialogue into the public sphere. He admits that he doesn’t know if he’s right or wrong or when his comedic wit goes too far. Yet, he’s making us laugh and think while daring to make mistakes and care about being on the right side of history. The comedian with the very educated parents who didn’t like school says that he might’ve liked to be a teacher. Ironically, he gave the listening students a lesson or two Chappelle style: It’s important to cross the lines. You don’t know if you’ve gone too far until you cross the line.

***

Stephane Dunn is the author of the forthcoming Baad ‘Bitches’ and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press)

Homophobia and The Civil Rights Movement? MLK Jr's Legacy is Up for Grabs

In the backdrop of Coretta Scott King's funeralization is a battle for Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as a humanitarian. Though Mrs. King vociferously denounced homophobia in her latter years, her daughter Bernice and Bishop Eddie Long (whose church served as the literal site of Mrs. King's funeral) have been equally vocal their concerns that same-sex relations are damaging to the black family. What would Martin Luther King Jr.'s position have been on the subject of same-sex relations in the black community? Guest essayist Erica Edwards offers some insight.

***

The Aesthetics of Charisma in the New ‘King’dom;
Or, Tomb-Raiding and the Legacy of Civil Rights
by Erica Edwards

On December 11, 2004, an estimated 25,000 people participated in a march called “Reigniting the Legacy,” a procession from Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change to the city’s Turner Field in support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The story of this march, led by Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of a mega-church outside of Atlanta, and Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and an elder in the church, illustrates how the charismatic political aesthetic is put to use to police African American sexuality, to align black religious groups with the ‘family’ or ‘moral values’ agenda of the right, and to keep ideas of manhood tied to or tangled up with a model of religious and political leadership that relies on unyielding categories of sexuality and gender.

Charisma, most clearly defined by the sociologist Max Weber, refers to “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which [a leader] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” In the political context, it is a mixture of sacred and secular impulses—it is a structure of group relationship centering around one exceptional man (usually) perceived to be gifted with a privileged connection to God. This individual’s right to rule is always held to be the function of divine ordination. For Weber, charisma represents a revolutionary force that opposes old, sedimented forms of rule. Notwithstanding the potential of charisma to ‘do a new thing,’ I want to question this identification of charisma with the new and examine its implementation of a revolutionary conservatism, a radical return to an older, putatively stable order. What I’m calling the charismatic aesthetic here is the assemblage of performative and symbolic elements that produce the charismatic scene, things like spectacular oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, and the positioning of the leader in front of or above his followers.

For black Americans, charisma as a form of political authority has become an organizing myth for ideas of political mobilization. While social historians have distanced their scholarship from “Great Man” theories of history, the history of black social movements as the byproduct of charismatic leadership continue to circulate widely in popular culture. Clayborne Carson’s essay on Martin Luther King’s charisma suggests that in popular civil rights history, “a Great Man is seen as the decisive factor in the process of social change, and the unique qualities of a leader are used to explain major historical events” (Carson 448). The leader is history’s indispensable protagonist: without him, history (what is believed to have happened) and historical narrative (what is said to have happened) are impossible. Carson goes on to suggest that King has functioned as the necessary protagonist in the public narrative of civil rights and is seen as the exemplary political spokesperson and miraculous history-maker. He embodies, for post-civil rights black culture, the quintessential charismatic leader and Great Man—the king, as it were, of black history and black politics.

King’s role as charismatic exemplar was at the center of the “Reigniting the Legacy” march’s claim to social authority. The use of the King Memorial as the starting place at which the leader lit a torch from the memorial’s eternal flame, the circulation of King’s rhetoric in quotes included in publicity and speeches, and the location of the march in King’s childhood home, Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, all exemplify the organizers’ deliberate alignment with the cultural memory of King. The march made a bold investment in the political capital associated with King’s idealized status in the nation’s imagination.

The march’s goal was reportedly to “get back into the conversation of the nation,” to introduce black Christians as vocal participants in the national discourse on marriage and sexuality. Quoting King’s warning against the “appalling silence of good people,” the march’s publicity describes its goal as the “protection of marriage,” including “strategic policy direction for a constitutional amendment to fully protect marriage between one man and one woman.” The march being framed, ironically enough, as a coming out story, participants in news photographs wear shirts reading “Stop the Silence” and the event is touted in news stories as an opportunity to speak in “one voice,” to articulate “a unified vision of righteousness and justice.” In a moment less than a month after voters in 11 U.S. states, including Georgia, approved of state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and in a state that had passed a Defense of Marriage Act nine years prior to the march, the march’s leader, ostensibly alarmed by the suppression of anti-homosexual sentiment, told reporters, “This is our coming out day. We are here to stay and will be heard.” Passing a counter-demonstration of 50 gay rights activists, the march proceeded from the King Center to Turner field, where a recorded speech by Bishop Long played over the loudspeakers to greet the marchers entering the stadium. In her introduction to Long, Bernice King said, “I believe this day will go down in the history books as the greatest showing of Christ and his kingdom in this century” and designated Long “the prophet appointed by God to speak the mind, heart, and gospel of God.”

The march’s primary message was a call to crystallize rigid categories of sexual and gender identity, to buttress conservative family values in the name of historical ‘legacy’ and civil rights. As a literary critic, I’m as concerned with the form of the march—its architecture—as I am with its content or message. I’d like to draw our attention to the aesthetics of this religious, political event, that is, to the various symbolic ingredients that produce the performance of charismatic authority. To raise the question of the aesthetic is to ask: What makes a thing good, true and beautiful; what makes it appeal to the senses? Charismatic authority is, at its heart, is a question of aesthetic value: Ann Ruth Willner’s extensive research on the subject suggests that “it is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship” (Willner 15). Charisma is constituted by a cycle or dynamic of perception and performance, a relay of symbols between leaders, followers, and observers.

As far as I can gauge by journalists’ reports, The “Reigniting the Legacy” march made use of at least four powerful symbols in its production of the charismatic scene. First, the site of departure, King’s burial site, indexed a primal source of mourning for African American leadership. The march tapped into what Willner calls “postmortem charismatic authority,” authorizing its social claims by making the memory of King do necessary political work in the present. Indeed the march can be read as a tomb-raiding mission that dug up the remains of King’s authority for its own use, hence Keith Boykin’s assessment that the march “hijacked” King’s dream. The fact that the march was a raising of the dead dressed up as a ritual of mourning was shored up by the all-black attire of the majority of the marchers.

Next, Bishop Long’s own physical presence added to the symbolic tying of charismatic authority to the male body. The domain of charismatic authority, particularly in the civil rights tradition, is most often a masculinist sphere of influence—Steve Estes suggests as much in his recent book on manhood and civil rights when he argues that the masculinist rhetoric of political speakers “rallies supporters by urging them to be manly or to support traditional ideas of manhood” (Estes 12). In this instance, charismatic performance—the acting out of a privileged connection to the divine—plays out as a bourgeois, heteronormative family romance: Bernice King gestures to Long as her deceased father’s substitute and successor, and in the drama, Bishop Long plays father not only to her but to all. As much at is purported to “reignite” the legacy of civil rights, the march represented an Oedipal performance that demanded the slaying of King’s dream of egalitarian social life and the coronation of Bishop Long as father figure or new king for the race. The public family drama fortified the march’s homophobic appeal to the union between one man and one woman as the prime marker of “righteousness” and “justice.”

Finally, the torch and the march forward, like the tomb and the bishop’s physical positioning, functioned symbolically to attach charismatic leadership to a rigid, masculinist, heterosexist conception of black Christian identity. The torch is a common emblem of enlightenment and tradition that signifies the transferability of power—the Olympic torch, for example, is carried along from one location to the next to signify the passing on of unquestioned eternal values (like unity and tolerance). In this scene, King’s power is kept alive eternally in the memorial flame; Long accesses it in order to possess King’s authority. The march, in the end, ignited the bishop’s own power, his position as new spokesperson for the ‘good people.’ Further, the historical function of the march for blacks in America, Eddie Glaude has suggested, is to perform or “to continuously retell the story of bondage, the march toward liberation, and the discipline necessary to remain free.” The torch confers the power to free and to discipline, to liberate and to police the criteria for living freedom out.

A strange mixture of funeral procession, soldier march, Olympic opening ceremony, worship service and political rally, the “Reigniting the Legacy” march placed charismatic authority on center stage. It showed how charismatic leadership, often masking itself as a ‘natural’ expression of black religiosity and political consciousness, actually produces itself through self-conscious performances of authority that are tied to a narrow, patriarchal and homophobic conception of manhood. The question, perhaps, for those of us interested in engaging the church in a radical critique of heteronormative masculinity is: is charismatic authority an acceptable means or the only basis for the creation of an egalitarian religious body? If Kelly Brown Douglas is correct that “the change in attitude toward sexuality within the Black church and wider community must begin not at the top with Black church leadership…but at the bottom with the people who sit in the pews,” it also seems right to call into question of the church’s social architecture and what appears to be a patriarchal investment in the metaphysical distinction between leaders and followers.

***

Professor Edwards specializes in African American literature, gender studies, and black political culture. She is currently at work on a book project under the working title Contesting Charisma: Fictions of Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture (forthcoming in 2011 on the University of Minnesota Press). Her work, published in Women & Performance, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Transforming Anthropology, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements.