Russell A. Potter

English Department
Colby College
rapotter@colby.edu

 

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan UP/ UP of New England)

 

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard UP)

 

The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in the development of the cluster of intellectual and political movements that move variously under the banners of Postmodernism, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and American Studies. In one sense, they have been almost too successful in gaining academic currency–some academics, it seems, have embraced them before they even quite knew what they were, happily tacking these new rubrics over the departmental doorframe in hopes that they would work the magic of keeping up with the theoretical Joneses. And yet, at the same moment, these new fields have been attacked with unusual virulence by such veterans of the academy-bashing circuit as Roger Kimball and Shelby Steele. Black Studies, both in the U.K. and the U.S., has in particular felt this crisis, continuing to serve as a favorite target for the self-declared traditionalists even while it comes under pressure from newer “Studies” competing for the same academic niches. Earlier debates, such as those over the questions of canon and curriculum, are now overshadowed by far deeper and more ominous rumblings, as internal divisions have erupted in an academic left that was perhaps never as unified as its conservative critics liked to believe. And, just to turn up the flame a little higher, college and university budgets have begun to shrink, forcing many of the new generation of academic mavericks and activists into arguments over who will get how big a slice of the dwindling pie–or who will get no slice at all. The distant laughter of the conservative critics of the academy adds a sense of lurking despair to this morose game of musical chairs.

 

Meanwhile, back in the “cultures” that these fields ostensibly study, the wheel of new subcultural formations and their commodified doppelgangers has been spinning with increasing speed. While this acceleration has been marked in rapid changes in video, film, multimedia, and hypertext, one of the most visible sites of change has been music; yesterday’s rhythms of revolution are today’s pricey national concert tours, and tomorrow’s instant retrocompilation CD’s. Under such circumstances, academics who cast their hats into the ring of “popular culture” or “cultural studies” had best be prepared for a fast-forward free-for-all; if they emerge with something more than a handful of someone else’s hair, they probably ought to get some sort of medal. The battered academic Volvo suddenly finds itself caught between sound-system-loaded Jeeps blaring Ice Cube on the one side and air-conditioned Lexuses with the radio tuned to Rush Limbaugh on the other. It’s culture wars with a vengeance, and yet it’s also a time when there is an opportunity, however fleeting, for voices from within the academy to perform potent acts of cultural translation, acts which, even if they can’t resolve the cacophony, can at least articulate what’s at stake, and perhaps finally break through the strained dichotomies between “intellectual” and “popular” culture, and perhaps even take account of the interpenetration of such categories. That, after all, was supposed to be one of the benefits of the post-structuralist critiques that pried open this door in the first place; it seems strange that, a generation after Barthes, people should still be discovering the mythologics of culture as though this were something never heard of before.

 

A large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very discourses post-structuralism has deployed to describe itself. As bell hooks put it back in the first issue of Postmodern Culture:

 

The contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.¹

 

Hooks’s rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of postmodern critiques to ignore or tokenize black expressive artforms, but also the long-standing–and oftentimes justified–suspicion on the part of black writers and philosophers over what (if anything) postmodernism could possibly offer for the kinds of critical histories they were engaged with constructing. As recently as 1989, it was possible for Cornel West to allow, in his essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” that “the current ‘postmodernism’ debate is first and foremost a product of significant First World reflections upon the decentering of Europe.”² West, as one of the leading black philosophers of our time, saw both the parochial and ludic elements of postmodernism as signs of its insufficient engagement with black culture, even as he gestured toward “a potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism.”³ Yet in the light of critiques and analyses by scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric Lott, and Paul Gilroy, it has become increasingly evident that what had earlier been articulated primarily as the subcultural resistance of black artforms has in fact had a long and intimate relation with the founding dialectics of “Western” modernism, and consequently of “postmodernism” as well. Now, at last, it seems possible to begin to acknowledge the manifold ways in which black studies, and the histories and arts that it has engaged, have been and continue to be absolutely central to the questions raised by contemporary theory, and consequently to the numerous appropriations and figurations of blackness that have (in)formed modernist and postmodernist thought (as well as of the black artists and writers who have claimed and reclaimed a place in the genealogy of avant gardes).

 

Still, both Gilroy and Rose, though for somewhat different reasons, tend to eschew the term “postmodern”: Gilroy prefers “anti-modern” or “counterculture of modernity”; Rose uses the more materialist-inflected “post-industrial.” Gilroy has a healthy suspicion of the simplistic relativism of some avatars of postmodernism, and prefers to see these black cultural formations as oppositional modernities, rather than postmodernities. Interested primarily in reclaiming the territory of the modern as a movement instigated by the historical experiences and philosophical implications of black slavery and diaspora, he looks dimly on the kind of glib postmodernism of writers such as Jameson, whose academic “we” never feels the need to account for its own racial, sexual, and gender presuppositions. Rose, for her part, never directly addresses the implications of postmodern theory, though she makes ready use of many of its strands. Her commitment to a thoroughly materialist account of the roots of black expressivities makes her suspicious of some of these strands, but she confines her critique to one or two writers who exemplify its worst qualities. Both Gilroy and Rose are right, I think, to be wary, but at the same time their work raises questions which are absolutely fundamental to postmodernist theory and practice, and indeed draw forcefully on some of the same decentering discourses as some of the more political postmoderist texts.

 

I will discuss Rose’s book first since, despite the fact that it does not explicitly engage with the questions of (post)modernity, it works within a certain characteristic bind of one genre of academic postmodernism. For, both with “high” cultural formations (such as the writings of Derrida or the post-Haraway theorists of cyberspace) and with so-called “popular” formations (hip-hop, grunge, rock videos), the most common tone taken up by public intellectuals is that of the “bluffer’s guide.” What should we know about hypertext? What’s the latest word on street culture? To audiences for whom such questions elicit a potent mixture of curiosity and anxiety, there is an endless hunger for articles or books that will give them a ready grip on the latest cultural movement. Academic writers, especially those who like to work as activist public intellectuals, implicitly address this broader audience, and yet in their desire to fulfill its wishes for a synoptic overview of a critical issue, they often serve reductive ends. This is partly the doing of reviewers and readers, who are looking for ready-made rhetorical handles, but it is also part of academic writers’ desire to enjoy a spotlight broader than the private accolades of students or colleagues.

 

The crucial question is that posed by Michel de Certeau in Heterologies: “From what position do the historians of popular culture speak? And what object do they constitute as a result of that position?”⁴ For it is rarely in the interests of “insurrectionary knowledges” (such as hip-hop) that the historians or chroniclers of “culture,” as constituted by the knowledges of semiotics, anthropology, or literary theory, have spoken. Those on the right, informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of “the decline and fall” from a Norman Rockwell past into a Piss Christ present, explicitly oppose all insurrectionary arts; intellectuals on the left, unfortunately, have seemed more interested in making academic capital of the popular than in articulating to a broader audience just what the value of such insurrections might be. When it comes to books whose explicit subject matter, rap music, is among the chief targets of the moral panicists of the right, as well as a phenomenon frequently held up by those on the left as a sign that artistic political resistance is alive and well, the exemplary questions of the public intellectuals of the left and right go toe-to-toe, each trying to claim hip-hop as a centerpiece of their social agenda. It’s a fight to the finish, as one critic’s nihilistic gat-toting hoodlum is another’s organic intellectual. As rappers say, “It’s on.”

 

And Tricia Rose, for one, is ready for the battle. Black Noise is the kind of book you would like to send in a plain brown wrapper to everyone who dismisses rap music as a long-lived fad, mindless posturing, or minstrelsy for the ’90s. She provides ample evidence for skeptics of the development of rap music, its place within hip-hop culture and black American culture in general, and its efflourescence in the face of all kinds of direct and indirect attacks. Her opening chapter, “Voices from the Margins,” effectively summarizes rap music’s cultural imbrication at the level both of its production (she uses rap video as an example here) and of its consumption, with the associated questions of performance, audience, and technology. This segues nicely into the second chapter, “All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York,” where she provides a detailed social history of the South Bronx as the primary site of the emergence of hip-hop culture. The history is crucial, and ought to be required reading for critics such as David Samuels or C. Delores Tucker, clarion-callers of the “rap is a white plot” conspiracy theory. And, while writers such as David Toop or Stephen Hagar have given more detailed accounts of the musical developments in the years leading up to hip-hop’s ascendancy, Rose offers an account that clearly demonstrates the links of all the musical and artistic dimensions of hip-hop culture to the material situation of young black and Latino Americans in New York City in the late 1970’s and early ’80’s.

 

The latter part of this chapter extends Rose’s arguments, attempting to link certain productive hip-hop tropes, such as “flow” and “breaking,” to the cultural histories she details. Here, however, she seems to founder a bit, as she comes up against the age-old musicologist’s conundrum of how to link form and content in a structure that is, to a large extent, not representational (or, on the verbal level, never simply representational). And, as attractive as it is to categorize rap music’s formal features, unless such accounts explicitly address the material histories at stake, they quickly dissipate into hazy generalities (just what is “flow,” anyway?). Rose seems to sense this, as she quickly moves into a discussion of hip-hop culture’s holy trinity of writing, breaking, and rapping, for each of which she offers succinct and suggestive accounting. As in other parts of the book, one has the sense that Rose is more at home supplying cultural contexts than she is in producing close analyses of particular rap lyrics or hip-hop creations.

 

Rose’s next chapter, “Soul Sonic Forces,” takes a second drive by the same territory, and is considerably more successful. Rose performs a difficult balancing act between those who would link hip-hop to pre-modern African-American or African traditions, and others who would rather see it as a wholly new innovation dependent on technology. For the most part, she is able to delineate the ways in which rap music partakes of both orality and technology, without being limited by the paradigms of either. Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, she tends to see those who read rap as a “postmodern” artform as necessarily moving away from the materialist grounding of black studies, and does not allow for the possibility of a materialist postmodernism. Nonetheless, she acutely cuts down to size those who disembody hip-hop, taking it as a postmodern machine without a driver, and thus forgetting the actual black communities who have produced and consume it.

 

At the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop’s aesthetic with the questions of originality, production, and commodification that have long been points of contention among critics of African-American music. At least since Adorno’s attempt to trash jazz as mindless musical repetition–up there with religion as an opiate of the masses–critics have argued over the social implications of music and other artforms “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Rose neatly sidesteps Adorno, quite accurately observing that he assumes that “mass production sets the terms for repetition and that any other cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems of mass production, are subsumed by the larger logic of industrialization” (72). On the contrary, Rose asserts, repetition, precisely because it antedates and post-dates industrial capitalism, is an ideal mode of resistance, both because it can re-appropriate and hijack technological machinery, and because it in fact makes a very potent agent for denaturalizing dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes art.

 

This offers Rose another smooth segue into the question of sampling, which she quite accurately identifies as central to hip-hop’s technological practices and aesthetic values. I wish that she would have taken up the critical ways in which, as she richly suggests, sampling challenges notions about originality and intellectual property, but she chooses instead to focus on the specific techniques which some of rap’s best-known producers–such as Eric “Vietnam” Sadler–use to “bring the noise.” Her interview with and analysis of Sadler is fascinating, but at the end the theoretical issues raised by such practices are only touched on in passing. Rose does, however, offer a salient critique of some of the past scholarship on sampling, again moving to complicate the all-too-easy dichotomies of technology versus community, or fragmented versus whole, that tend to underpin many analyses.

 

The central chapter, “Prophets of Rage: Rap Music and the Politics of Black Cultural Expression,” finally enables Rose to free herself from the work–necessary, but to some extent deadening–of sketching in the sociological and musical contexts of hip-hop; having made her points about the material situation of the music, she is free to assess its larger cultural engagements. And, at the beginning, she is forceful in articulating the intense, inevitably contradictory power of rap music in society. She offers a model–of “public” and “private” transcripts–which suggests the doubleness, the coded nature of rap lyrics. And as far as this analysis goes, she’s right on the money. Yet it’s odd, given the substantial work done on the black tradition of Signifying, that Rose seems to eschew this model, choosing instead a rather generalized model that does not resonate as strongly as it might with other critical work in the larger field of Black Studies. Nonetheless, the point is substantially the same, which is that rap lyrics play with what its listeners know (or don’t), drawing them in even as it shape-shifts through tropological sequences that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to ‘hook’ its listeners like an angler snagging a trout.

 

Rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop lyrics–Paris’s “The Devil Made Me Do It,” KRS-One’s “Who Protects Us from You?,” L.L. Cool J.’s “Illegal Search,” and Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” Her readings, while uneven in places, certainly demonstrate the potency of these lyrics, as well as their rhetorical fluidity. Yet just at this point, where there is the greatest opportunity to analyze how rap lyrics work on the tropological level, Rose instead reads all four lyrics in a basically narrative sense, comparing them with anecdotes from her own life, hypothetical reflections on the class dimensions of L.L. Cool J.’s status as a wealthy entertainer, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the video for PE’s “Baseheads.” There are salient social points in every reading, but only scattered observations on exactly how these raps managed to bum rush the mass-media stage, or on the promised “politics” of black expression. There is also, for the most part, no close reading of the tropological moves that structure these raps: it’s rather like reading an account of a boxing match that talks only about strategy without offering any blow-by-blow details.

 

Again, de Certeau’s question comes to mind: in presenting analyses of larger cultural movements, what is at stake? However much academic writers would like to eschew the role of talking heads, their commentary spliced in between footage of current or past events, is there another, more fully engaged role open to them? Rose is clearly struggling with these questions, as anyone who writes such a book must, and expectations perhaps run too high. Hip-hop is too vast to lend itself to ready analysis in any one book, as Rose herself notes frankly in her preface, and however detailed or full her readings, they can’t stand in for hip-hop culture as a whole. Still, the modality of object and analysis, of the critic as commentator, suffuses much of this book, and gives it at times a frustrating distance from what it tries to bring most closely into view. Rose is at times, it seems, uncertain just where to set the dial between the rhetorical distance of conventional criticism and the ready familiarity and engagement of a fan of the artform. Having to explain every reference at every point can be deadening, and yet dropping allusions left and right risks leaving many readers scratching their heads.

 

Rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is at her best when she can use specific material histories or social trends. Her analysis of the politics of the decline in large-arena rap venues, which makes up the balance of her “Prophets of Rage” chapter, is compelling, and brings together numerous sources to make evident the repressive but often behind-the-scenes politics of large concert venues. Yet this analysis, as acute as it is, does not quite fulfill the chapter’s promise of an accounting of the politics of black musical expression, since it does not address studio recordings, magazine and newspaper attacks on rap, show-trials such as those of Biz Markie or 2 Live Crew, or the problem with rap’s lack of radio exposure, all of which are at least as significant as the politics of live concerts–perhaps more, given that rap music today is primarily produced and consumed via recordings, despite its reliance on dialogic structures which remain fundamentally linked to acts of reception, call-and-response, and interlocution.

 

Rose’s final chapter, “Bad Sistas,” is in fact her strongest, bringing together as it does her ability to read social structures–such as sexism and homophobia–not simply alongside but within the discourses of rap lyrics and media hype. She rightly rejects the sort of identity politics that thinks it solely the job of women rappers to answer male rappers’ misogyny, or for that matter assumes that a woman rapper is necessarily a feminist rapper. She denounces the implicit heterosexism of many champions of hip-hop (in particular Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Nelson George). Yet she does more than simply call such bias out on the carpet, but goes further, situating critical discourses over rap in relationship to the uneasy alliances between bourgeois, predominantly white feminism and black women whose struggles, while allied in a general sense with those of this feminism, have had to be contested within very different social and economic structures. She moves astutely from this analysis to a series of examples drawn from the raps and videos of artists such as Salt-n-Pepa, Roxanne Shante, and MC Lyte, demonstrating the ongoing and complex verbal play via which women rappers dramatize their own multiple and at times contradictory positions in relation to their lovers, their rivals, and their homegirls. Finally, she offers a refreshingly candid account of the ways in which black women’s sexuality manages to be both openly expressive and resistant to objectification, a kind of feminism that, though reluctant to name itself as such, clearly has a potent and complex contribution to make to feminist theory and practice. Ultimately, Rose implies, the vernacular ethos of black women struggling against sexism and racism is the root and ground which feminism–particularly academic feminist theory–tends to overlook, even as it continually invokes its name. There are valuable grounds here for analysis of the larger relations between academic discourses and vernacular artforms and social structures: though there is no space in the book to develop them, I hope that Rose (and others) will continue to do so.

 

Black Noise, despite its shortcomings–and some are inevitable in any book that tries to tackle a vibrantly living and changing artform–is without question the best book on rap music and hip-hop culture yet to appear. Even though much of its time is spent detailing the backgrounds of the music, such backgrounding is an inescapable necessity when writing about a cultural formation so often attacked, distorted, and hyped within both the academic and the popular press, and about which there is so much misinformation and sheer ignorance. Rose, admirably, does not try to over-simplify her topic, and at its best her book offers a snapshot of hip-hop with all its urgent and yet at times contradictory messages and tactics intact. With the appearance of Rose’s book, it is to be hoped that hip-hop critics inside and outside the academy will be able to move on toward a more detailed engagement with the numerous political, social, and aesthetic issues it raises, without having at every turn to stop and explain the basic issues and histories at stake.

 

One aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate hip-hop within the larger histories of black expressive arts, and still more broadly, within the critical debates over culture, identity, and (post)modernity that have helped define the terms for the social and intellectual struggles of the ’90’s. Rose, concerned primarily with defending hip-hop as a cultural movement, only gestures toward these broader issues, and while identifying hip-hop as a “postindustrial art,” she does not address exactly what that might mean from the point of the historical development of black arts. Here the work of Paul Gilroy offers an apposite yet wholly supportive counterpoint; working with what seems at the outset an impossibly broad brush, Gilroy sets out to demarcate the histories of what he calls “the black Atlantic,” in the process sketching out the fundamentals of a new, trans-national, yet non-reductive model of the interrelations between black diasporic cultures. And, while it is hard to compete with the dust-jacket accolades showered upon Gilroy’s book by critics such as Anthony Appiah or Hazel Carby, it is impossible to overstate the importance of his work to black studies, or to cultural studies as a whole. A radical scholar who nonetheless has a passion for carefully balanced observations, Gilroy’s book is forty theses on the door of cultural studies, and if the folks inside neglect to read them, they do so at their peril. Few writers–maybe none–can combine as Gilroy does a series of potent, historically articulated textual epiphanies with the broad yet meticulous brush of synthesis. Precisely because the book is so thoroughly grounded in the particularities of black histories and artforms, there is no way to review it without attending to each of Gilroy’s specific investigations in turn–and yet to do this is to be reminded (as I suspect Gilroy would want us to be) of the complexity as well as the continuity of black diasporic artforms.

 

Central to Gilroy’s thesis is the claim that modernism(s) cannot be conceived of as European, that in fact the genealogy of modernism is from the outset bound up with black histories, cultural forms, and the historical experience of slavery. Gilroy bases this claim not on a sweeping monumental survey, but on an incisive tropological tour through the tutor-texts of modernism, among which he includes not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, but Douglass, DuBois, and C.L.R. James. But before making these specific cases, Gilroy wants first to sketch in the problematics of contemporary cultural studies, within which blackness and modernity orbit in circles both of contest and exchange. Gilroy’s chronotope here is that of a ship, undertaking multiple transatlantic crossings, carrying slaves through the immeasurable horror of the Middle Passage, and in later times carrying the speech, song, and spirit of what Gilroy sees as a fundamentally transnational black Atlantic culture. As a sort of shot over the bow, Gilroy fires the first of many broadsides at those whom he calls black “particularists” and “exceptionalists,” and, rebel without a pause, directs an equal volley at the ostensibly allied fleet of the anti-essentialist position. Black culture, he argues, need not answer the call to (mis)represent itself as wholly unified and ethnically absolute, nor need it disperse to the four winds of assimilation, appropriation, commodification, and reification. It can, in fact, very well claim for itself both roots and routes (Gilroy’s favorite trope, and one that resonates throughout this book)

 

Yet in order to make such claims, Gilroy must first do what very few in his position have done, and that is to critique the very field of cultural studies within which he stands. For, while in the U.S. black studies came up through the academy within a fairly consistent humanistic paradigm, in the U.K., black studies has been shaped by a long alliance with left intellectuals in the field of cultural studies. Now that cultural studies itself has become such a popular U.K. export, Gilroy has something to say about the nature of its cargo. He notes the conspicuous absence in the histories narrated by British Marxists of the anti-colonial struggles of previous centuries, which plays into the pernicious and yet rarely explicit assumption that to be “British” was (and is) to be “white.” As Gilroy tells it, it’s striking how the ostensibly revolutionary sentiments of British cultural studies at times partake as intensely of a kind of nostalgic nationalism as the far more reactionary ideologies of the most stodgy conservatives. This same nationalism underpins the logic of “American Studies” in the U.S., and Black Studies as well; African-American culture is held forth as the paradigm and fons sacrae of blackness, against which what Gilroy calls “U.K. Blak” or the polymorphous Black cultures of the Caribbean are all too often marginalized. Like Marxists before them, critics within cultural studies seem blind to their own reliance on precisely the sort of nationalistic frames which erode their claims to larger mass formations. In the case of black diasporic cultures, this tunnel vision is particularly costly, as Gilroy demonstrates forcefully in the chapters that follow.

 

Much of the balance of the first chapter–“The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”–are devoted to an analysis of the writings of Martin Delany which, while valuable, seems peripheral to Gilroy’s project. Gilroy’s analysis of Delany as a foundational force in the linkage of black masculinity and patriarchy to black national identity is forceful, but represents only one aspect of the ethos Gilroy seeks to define. His threefold model of black consciousness is only sketched here, but it is highly pertinent: black modernisms have been edged on either side by a kind of longing for the “anti-modern” past and an anticipatory yearning for a postmodern yet-to-come” (37). Delany works well as an exemplary thinker of the “past” element in this triad, but to lay out the other end of the spectrum Gilroy turns to black music. For as he pointedly observes, music both forces an accounting with the extra-textual world and takes account of the performative vernacular dimensions of black culture, for which heavily literary accounts of black culture have so often failed to account, and yet which are so central. Music, furthermore, serves as a force of continuum, reaching back to draw from African melodic and rhythmic roots, even as it is shaped by its own transatlantic routes of transmission, as when American R&B traveled to Jamaica and was reborn as Ska, which in turn gave rise to rock steady, Reggae, and dancehall (each of which in turn has traveled both to and from the UK and US). Whatever the textual and literary arguments Gilroy makes–and they are compelling in and of themselves–music is his trump card, as it offers the clearest framework within which his thesis of the black Atlantic as the “counterculture of modernity” can be materially demonstrated.

 

Gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden (and at first, rather obscure) movement back to a discussion of Hegel, and the central role of the master-slave dialectic in his philosophy and those of his peers and followers. It’s a different tack (to maintain the nautical tropology), and yet a strategic one. All too often, the deep-seated racialism of Hegel and those who wrote in his wake is glossed over, or (perhaps worse) admitted as though it were an incidental blot on an otherwise unblemished cloth. On the contrary, as Gilroy insists, it is fundamental to the philosophical turns which led directly to modernism. Slavery, he notes, was for a great period of time considered as a problem internal to the European “West”: it was only after the moral campaign against it that it was jettisoned as if it were some sort of awful accident. The relation of slave and master changes and fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of slave and master–on this, both slavery’s defenders and the first generation of its critics could agree: if it became at times an abstraction, its material presence was never far away. Gilroy embodies this potent material corollary in stunning readings both of the narrative and life of Frederick Douglass and the case of Margaret Garner (which Toni Morrison used as the basis for Beloved); the experience of escape–failed or successful–from the psychological bonds of slavery emerges as a kind of limit-experience which tests the very foundations of subjectivity. And more: Douglass, for one, emerges as a signal modernist figure, not simply a self-made man, but a self made via a particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist smithies of the soul.

 

Gilroy’s next chapter finally addresses the central question of black music, and in many ways it’s the most free-ranging and compelling reading in the whole book. It’s refreshing to read a critic who knows the music thoroughly, whether he’s writing about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Miles Davis, or Eric B. and Rakim. There is none of the usual critical hand-wringing over 2 Live Crew et. al.–Gilroy knows enough to know that’s not where it’s at–nor is there the kind of list-of-names vertigo of a critic who’s trying to link everything with everything. Gilroy treats musicians as artists on their own terms, and finds linkages in their thought and performance that are the mortar of his larger claims. The Fisk Jubilee Singers form one trope, with their extensive European tours making a signal moment for the European dimensions of black arts, even as they return later in the book to represent blackness to a young and still very northeasterly W.E.B. DuBois. Their modern counterparts have far more compact means of transportation, as the chronotope of the turntable replaces that of the ship, and the triangulation between UK Blak, US soul and R&B, and Caribbean musics is traced with attention to the ways in which it refutes any simplistic notion of Africa (or the U.S., or anyplace) as the point of origin, even as it structures and propagates truly synthetic and recognizable black styles. By examining instances of transatlantic fusion such as those of Soul II Soul, Ronnie Laws, and Apache Indian, Gilroy articulates what he sees as a cultural formation that is both “constructed” and yet has (a) “soul,” an essence if you will, a musical spectrum both whole and heteroglot, connected and fragmented.

 

It’s a shame that Gilroy doesn’t develop this particular thesis further, and it is a potent corrective to the kind of reductive musical nationalism practiced by many black critics, even as it squarely claims for black music a “counterculture of modernity” which must be met on its own terms. Still, while music is vital to his argument–forming, as he notes, a crucial mode beyond textuality and simple representation–Gilroy has far broader ambitions, specifically the (re)clamation of black Atlantic formations in literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. To this project, his re-examinations of DuBois and Wright are of the utmost importance, and not simply because of their travels and exiles (DuBois to Germany as a young man, and to Africa as “The Old Man,” and Wright’s move to France), but because they enable Gilroy to rewrite the genealogy of blackness itself.

 

Gilroy’s analysis of DuBois takes a twofold focus: a detailed re-examination of The Souls of Black Folk, and a reading of some of DuBois’s long-neglected polemical novels (which, though fascinating, there is not room to discuss here). In the background of both, Gilroy posits a surprising–even scandalous–connection: the thought that DuBois’s nationalism owed something to the German nationalism he encountered while studying in Germany. Yet at the same time as the power of national identity impressed itself on DuBois, he could not fully follow the kind of black particularism espoused by precursors such as Martin Delany or Alexander Crummel, for the simple reason that he was particularly aware of the ways in which national and racial identities were formed and informed by a complex and often conflicting set of historical urges. Gilroy sorts these out into three stages, which he associates with the three sections of The Souls of Black Folk: the struggle against the institution of slavery, the struggle to win bourgeois rights and liberties, and the pursuit of spaces of black community and autonomy. He notes that the battle against racism is necessarily different in each of these phases, and also that the ways in which these stages overlapped each other led to the coexistence and conflict of what were, on a tactical level, very different struggles. The falling out between DuBois and Washington, for instance, is newly intelligible in this light, as education had a radically different role to play in the first two of these phases. The third stage–with all its attendant anxieties of assimilation and particularism–is, Gilroy argues, the moment for the emergence of oppositional black modernisms:

 

The third stage characteristically involves a deliberate and self-conscious move beyond language in ways that are informed by the social memory of the earlier experiences of enforced separation from the world of written communication. A countercultural sense of the inability of mere words to convey certain truths inaugurates a special indictment of modernity's enforced separation of art and life as well as a distinct aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) standpoint. Music is the best way of examining this final aspect. (123-124).

 

The special significance of black spiritual songs for DuBois, as well as the ongoing refiguration of black musics as the representative cultural productions of the black Atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and suggests a still more potent claim. Perhaps it is not, in fact, at the level of intellectual vanguards that the final phase of black struggle needs to take place, but precisely at the vernacular level. Gilroy, however, leaves this possibility hanging as he offers a strong reading of The Souls of Black Folk: while there is no space to reiterate his argument in the detail it deserves in the scope of this brief review, suffice it to say that it reveals strong and all-too-often neglected undercurrents, which militate toward a skeptical rejection of the broadconcept of “progress” or “progressivism” with which DuBois is conventionally associated. The DuBois who emerges in these readings has a richer and more complicated engagement with all three phases of black struggle, and his model of “double consciousness” marks not a flaw but a prophetic pointer toward a different kind of vision, a “second sight” which looks far beyond the fuzzy humanism of most modernist thinkers and toward the postmodern possibility of seeing split subjectivity as a critical asset.

 

Gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling look at Wright’s career, focusing on his years in France. Wright was faulted by many for his move to European turf, and to this day the books he wrote in France have been disparaged and neglected for failing to represent the kind of realist, experiential models of race that were central to the positive reception accorded his earlier novels. Again, Gilroy discovers an unexpected Wright, a person engaged with European modernity not via the margin, but from the very questions that formed its center. Wright’s interest in Nietzschean affirmation via negation (as one example of which Wright offered the “Dozens,” the verbal ancestor of today’s hip-hop disses), his engagement with existentialism, and his deliberate refusal of the simplistic representational terms which critics and publishers held forth as the condition for their renewed interest in his work, all become newly meaningful in Gilroy’s reading. For Wright, to claim modernism as his own was a serious task, and grew as strongly and deeply from the same experiences as earlier had led him to write Native Son. In a compelling passage, Gilroy quotes Wright’s comments on the subject, which might well be addressed to all of the detractors of his later work. Wright claimed, in fact, that double consciousness–which he called “split subjectivity”–gave him a particular and potent slant on the crisis of modernity:

 

I've tried to lead you back to the angle of my vision slowly . . . My point of view is a Western one, but a Western one that conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the West. Am I ahead of or behind the West? My personal judgment is that I'm ahead. And I do not say this boastfully; such a judgment is implied by the very nature of those Western values I hold dear. (qtd. 172)

 

It’s a shame that Wright’s angle of vision has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves, and Gilroy offers a number of compelling readings of Wright’s later work which will, hopefully, renew interest in his later writings.

 

The final chapter, “Not a Story to Pass On: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime,” offers a fitting culmination of the book’s syntheses, though Gilroy is quite clear that his book only sketches the barest outline of black Atlantic roots ‘n’ routes. The title epigraph, drawn from Morrison’s Beloved, underlines the double valence of tradition in black cultures; it is the bearer both of “jewels brought from bondage” and of the unspeakable imprint of slavery. The bitter intertwining of pain and pleasure, so graphically evoked by Morrison in the scene where Paul D traces out the “chokecherry tree” of scar tissue of Sethe’s back, is brought into critical focus as Gilroy traces the debates between fragmented and whole racial selves, between constructivist and essentialist polarities, and again brings forth a new possibility. Gilroy shuns the “spurious security” of melaninism, and is critical of some of the more historically oversimplified versions of Afrocentricity. And yet, nonetheless, he historically situates the appeal of these discourses, and in fact demonstrates compellingly the role of the yearning for such stability in the production of the heteroglot yet synaptically linked expressions of black diasporic experiences. The “catastrophic rupture” of the middle passage finds its compensation in acts of creation from materials at hand, from vernacular syntheses of speech and music, and in the deliberate engagement of these discourses with the European modernities whose ideology and aesthetics make for unexpected points of resonance. Music, in particular, has the capacity both to “tell the history” (as Jamaican DJ Prince Buster puts it) and to bear the unbearable, extra-linguistic dimensions of what Gilroy comes to call the “slave sublime.” Music, furthermore, is a profoundly temporal art, and in its rhythmic unfolding builds a time for community. The trope of time, as instanced in the Nation of Islam’s question “What Time Is It?,” and its multiple diasporic answers (Sun Ra: “It’s after the end of the world”; The Last Poets: “Time is running out”; Flavor-Flav’s gargantuan timepieces), both embody and transcend historical time by, as Gilroy puts it, “asserting the irreducible priority of the present” (202). Because of this ability, music is capable of bearing the historical pain that is the legacy of black diasporic cultures, and Gilroy offers a suggestive reading of Percy Mayfield (“Hit the Road, Jack”; “Please Send Me Someone to Love”) as a synecdoche of this transvaluative engagement with melancholia and pain.

 

This gives Gilroy the segue for his final and bold movement, an accounting of the historical borrowings and transformations that have linked black cultures in all corners of the Atlantic to Jewish beliefs, traditions, and intellectual syntheses. The most obvious vernacular link is of course the landscape of black Spirituals, whose talk of bondage in “Pharaoh’s Land” and dreams of “Crossin’ the River of Jordan” draw from the Old Testament histories which slaves encountered in the Caribbean and the Americas. Their previous systems of belief fragmented and eroded by the violence of the middle passage and the experience of slavery, black slaves’ appropriation and use of the Jewish experiences of slavery constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most profound “transvaluations of all value” ever accomplished. This early legacy formed the ground for later returns to Jewish religious and political thought, in the process of which aspects of Jewish nationalism, and the idea of black culture as “diasporic,” grew readily. Black Atlantic religious practices such as those loosely coalescing about Rastifarian religion are a testament to the vernacular potency of these connections; all the mythology of a return to Ethiopia, the figure of Sellasie as Messiah, the myth of the Black Star Liners which would carry Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” back to the Promised Land, can be traced to this potent conjunction. Gilroy gives a succinct and suggestive account of one person, Edward Wilmot Blyden, an influential black Caribbean writer and historian, and one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. Yet despite some of the patriarchal and parochial qualities of his work, Blyden’s engagement with Jewish thought was, as Gilroy shows, full and complex: Blyden learned Hebrew and studied Jewish history with David Cardoze, a rabbi on the island of St. Thomas. It was Blyden who made the historical connections between Jewish and black experiences of slavery and dispersal, which were revived with the start of the Negritude movement in France in the 1930’s.

 

All this, of course, brings Gilroy face to face with the claims of both black and Jewish particularists, each of whom asserts that their collective experience is untranslatable, and that (for some) even to compare the two does violence to the sanctity and integrity of memory. Gilroy does not offer a detailed critique of these claims, but makes a passionate and very compelling argument for renewed and continuing dialogue, a dialogue which might begin to theorize more fully the “redemptive power produced through suffering” as it works in a variety of very different historical circumstances. Finally, Gilroy, reflecting once more on Morrison’s Beloved, looks outward and onward to the ethical and artistic power of history recovered and told via a process of “imaginative appropriation.” It is at this level, indeed, that the questions Gilroy raises become especially pertinent, since he clearly values some appropriations more than others. Having voluntarily deprived himself of both the cudgel of anti-essentialism and the mystic unifying power of black particularism, Gilroy cannot offer any ultimate criterion by which we might know which appropriations we ought to value. In any case, as he readily acknowledges, the complex hybridities and recurrent transits of the black Atlantic render any such judgments temporary at best; what counts is an engagement with the questions they raise, and a refusal to trade the richness of uncertainty and heterogeneity for what Gilroy sees as the poverty of dogmatic certainties. It’s a difficult struggle, but one to which Gilroy’s own work makes an immeasurable contribution. Cultural studies, it is to be hoped, will never be the same in the wake of the passage of Gilroy’s revolutionary work.

 

Notes

 

1.bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1.1

 

2.Cornel West, “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989): 87-98.

 

3.West, 96.

 

4.Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 129