Oct 29th 09 Posted by justin in Uncategorized

CCR751 – Weheliye – Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Weheliye, Alexander G.,  Phonographies Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. New York: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

Intro:
Wow, what a theory/lexically heavy piece!  There’s a lot going on in the intro, so I’ll do my best to encapsulate what W. wants to do here.  First, he discusses the “digital divide” that puts white’s engagement with technologies (information technologies) on a high pedestal, while the “sound technologies” of A.A. are not regarded as even being “technological” at all.  To address this digital divide, W. wants to circumvent the divide by examining the “links and relays” between black cultural production in the 20th century and sound technologies like the phonograph and the Walkman.  In doing this intellectual work, W. hopes to demonstrate a “singular mode of (black) modernity” (3).  To achieve this, W. has a couple of different goals:

• a.    Survey the ways that Black engagements with sonic technologies were constructed as antithetical to modern structures
• b.    In the broadest sense, W. wants to “establish the centrality of both sonic blackness and black culture to Western Modernity” (5).
• c.    In tracing his project, W. will demonstrate how the “in/audibility” of blackness is sounded and heard by a wide range of cultural, philosophical, political, social, and economic discourses” (6).
• d.    In defining Afro-sonic Modernity, we get a couple of articulations:
• a.    Not so much a monolith of negritude as a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds I the West. . . . the dub version or remix of blackness precedes and envelops both temporally and conceptually any putative original over the last hundred years or so” (6).
• b.    What does sonic Afro-modernity answer?  “What new modes of thinking, being, listening, and becoming, what Amiri Baraka terms ‘the flow of is,’ are set in motion by all the cultural idioms included here” (10).
• e.    At the core of sonic Afro-modernity, W. establishes a particular tension.  He notes that “this disturbance [between the materiality and ephmerality of music] of the alleged unity between sound and source [should not be understood] as an originary rupture but as a radical reformulation of their already vexed codependency, which retroactively calls attention to the ways in which any sound re/production is technological, whether it emanates from the horn of a phonograph, a musical score, or a human body” (7).  Yet, the singularity of technological presence doesn’t remain the same.  The interplay between the materiality and the ephemerality of audio technologies (music) is the “central, nonsublateable tension at the core of sonic Afro-modernity” (7).  This blending of materiality and ephemerality instantiated through the technological development of the phonograph and other recording and disseminating technologies complicated traditional notions of what it means to be oral, literate, and aural/sonic.
• f.    The goal of W.’s work is also to demonstrate how black cultural producers have (re)mixed the divide between ephemerality and materiality.
• g.    W. mentions his method on 8-9.
• h.    We get a harkening back to Kelley in Freedom Dreams in the intro when W. describes the sonic as not a “sheer image of what is to come” as much as a making of “futurity audible in its circumvention of strictly mimetic technes” (11).  In other words, don’t replicate the theories of the past (he’s indicting Marx here); rather, see beyond and through the mirror into the possible “futurity.”
• i.    On a final note, W. heavily references D&G in the intro when discussing method.  He says he uses “ritournelle.”  For D&G the “ritournelle” is translated as “refrain” and W. defines it as “rhythmic pattern in a field of chaos,” “autopoetic vacillation of the universe,” and “That which acts upon that which is surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projects, or transformations.  The refrain has a catalytic function” (16).

Chapter One:  Hearing Afro-Sonic Modernity

Before I start the notes on this chapter, I want to do a bit of work with terms.  First, I let’s hit some of the essential Derridean terms.  So, Derrida:

• iterability – a nice example of this is the idea that when you get up in the morning you make a pot of coffee.  You have a single cup, then another.  Each cup of coffee is a singular cup, it’s unique; however, each cup is also the same in that it has the qualities of sameness – a trace of belonging to the general form of which that singular thing represents.  In essence, iterability it this repeatable feature.  It’s the idea that every instantiation of a thing is a singular event, but is repeatable; however, the repeated is singular also in its uniqueness.  Another great example is a sunset.  Through repetition, sameness is produced.  For Derrida, this sameness-in-difference is key to the constitution of a thing.  A subject relies on this “iterability” , this repetition-as-difference that constitutes the subject itself.    Because of this repetition-as-difference, the empirical or factual is impossible. .  a myth of sameness as sameness.  Only repetition of the subject-as-difference allows for presence.  There are large ramifications for this argument.  For example, iterability as a concept means that for anything to happen a first time, it must be able to be repeated (even if it’s never repeated empirically).  This means that an object’s “ideality” or ideal state is always tied up in its iterability (the repeatable difference of a same subject).  Hence, there can be NO CENTER from which to replicate sameness without difference.
• spectrality – This is the idea that just because you don’t believe in something it can’t effects you.  For example, a ghost.
• phonocentrism – This is tied up in an idea of the “absolute effacement of the signifier” or, in other words, the complete preference of the spoken over the written because of the interiority of voiced speech as being as close to human thought (and hence truth) as possible.  In other words, the truth can exist in voice without mediation – This is precisely why Plato was so keen on the voice instead of writing.  But phonocentrism and logocentrism are tied up in the bigger question of the speech-writing opposition.  But really this opposition is also a false binary.  Consider that every sign relies on another sign to constitute it’s meaning.  Derrida (a la Saussure) calls this the “arbitrary relationship between the signified and the signifier” in that each thing is arbitrarily defined by the sign assigned to it.  We rely on signs to define signs to define signs (or marks in Derrida’s language).  In this sense, no word, no mark can ever come into presence – EVER.  Instead, signs are embodied by the trace – the residue of the signs that came before it.  The fact is that even though you may write a sign – or even speak its name (think writing or speaking apple), this divide between speech and writing is artificial because both are referring to traces of other signs.  This is referred to as the “trace-structure” of the sign.  The concept completely disrupts the “writing-as-representation” and “speech-as-presence” divide.
• machinic ensemble – D&G – is primary in relation to [the individual elements that comprise it] . . .. The history of technology shows that a tool is nothing outside the variable machinic arrangement which gives it a specific relation of proximity with man, animals and things . . .. The [social] machine makes the tool, and not the reverse. (D 126)  On 36, W. discusses the phonograph as a machinic esnsemble.  For D&G the machinic esnemble is the

There are some central quotes I found useful in this section.  I’ll try to highlight the quote and unpack at each juncture.

• For black music is not merely a byproduct of an already existing modernity, ancillary to and/or belated in its workings, but a chain of singular formations integrally linked to this sphere, particuarly as it collides with information technologies (22-3).  Throughout this first chapter – and we’ll see this in more detail in a moment – W. is pushing the thesis that black cultural products weren’t a result of modernity; rather, they were singularities made possible through their own iterability – and this iterability was essential to the formation of modernity itself.
• The phonograph is central to W.’s discussion of iterability because it is an even  more obvious example of Derrida’s concept.  The phonograph was able to take speech – the so long enshrined disseminator of truth – and make it iterable.  This means that black cultural productions were able to inscribe and reinscribe themselves and future iterations as they were produced and reproduced across space-time.
• The phonograph disrupts a lot of communicative patterns/ways of consuming texts shortly after it’s invention because it disrupts a lot of binaries.  First, the sound/vision relationship was suspended.  Next, the sound/presence binary was also disrupted.  W. describes this tension as one between ephemerality (sound) and materiality (the machine that produced the sound instead of the body).
• In speaking again on iterability, W. mentions on the bottom of 32 that “Here the phonograph emerges as the machinic ensemble that accents the eventness of the (re)production of the source; the source is always (re)produced as an (anti)origin while also appearing as a differently produced occasion in each of its singular figurations.”  W. wants to take, as his program, how the phonograph transcends or overreaches Derridean emphasis on the written-in-the-spoken and work with the sonorous qualities of the human voice and its iterable translations/transformations through the phonograph (and other recording technologies).  To address the “writtenness” of the phonographic, W. wants to develop a theory of “phonography” (36).  This program will blend “perception” (object oriented experience) and “sensation” (perception of perception – i.e., the self-referential experience) and listen to the “variety and intensity” of their intermingling (36).
• The singing voice – “provides a means by which A.A. may exchange an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, recognized self” (37). The signing voice – represents the literacyof the white Enlightenment subject” (37).  In terms of iterability, the singing voice of the A.A. enacts iterablity – it is a stamp of the “spatial, material, dative, or enunciative action of voice.”  It produces and reproduces itself . . . and in the act of reproduction  inscribes future reproductions.  All that being said, W. is interested in what happens when that singing voice is disembodied through the medium of the phonograph.  In keeping with this query, W. asks “In what sense does the de/re/coupling of sound and source shift the central place of orality and music in the production, transmission, and reception of black culture?” (38)
• There is a good bit of work on the gaze in chapter one as well.  The gaze – or what DuBois anticipated in the term “double-consciousness” is what happens when the “white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze” (42).  Through this process, white subjects depend on how “whiteness is just as dependent on blackness in order to appear and function as whiteness” (42).  This is racial discourse rendered iterable.  In other words, visual components of racism that whites impose on blacks  interpellates (the process by which ideology addresses the (abstract) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing him or her as subject proper) or renders them subjects.  By rendering them subjects of the ideology that subjects them, whites not only subject the A.A.s, but also subject themselves by subjection.  Because ideology (in this case racism) never says “I am ideology” the reciprocal process of interpellation renders both whiteness and blackness subjects, but the blackness cannot speak back (but informs the whiteness).  I need help here if anyone has it.
• In closing the chapter, W. lays out his mission.  He notes, “Black cultural production casts a sonic shadow on Western modernity only to return it recolored to its (im)proper place within said galaxy.  Put differently, these discourses are neither erased nor suspended; rather, they are significantly (re)created in their encounter with auditory blackness, which also undergoes substantial shifts in this assemblage.  In this way, niether of these energies can materialize without its spectral doppleganger:  no Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity” (45).  Also, “Phonography. . . circles around the doubleness, the vacillation between phono and graph, human and inhuman, sound and vision – that has been muted in and estranged from many modern discourses for far too long” (45).

Chapter Two : I am I be

Again, I need to articulate a couple of core concepts before I can understand a lot of what’s going on in this section.

• deterritorialization and reterritorialization – D&G – From 1000 Plateaus – This is the concept that says that assemblages are composed anti-hierarchically, rhizomatically.  When something becomes deterritorialized, it will eventually become reterritorialized; however, through this process the reterritorialization will change the original assemblage.
• mirror stage – Lacan – An explanation of the formation of the ego.  In the mirror stage, a baby can see it’s reflection, but cannot coordinate it’s body movements to match the reflection.  Hence, the baby sees the mirrored image as a fractured self.  The ego develops to resolve the tension between the reflection in the mirror and the reflected.

I found this chapter, much like the last two, challenging to say the least.  I’ll try to do my best to trace the useful outcomes and cut some of the tangential info.  Again, in bulleted form:

• Nice observations at the beginning of the chapter about how the subject as such begins to be dissolved in post-structuralist theory when the minority subject is just being constituted.  Very nice critique of what happens when Western metaphysics must recognize the Other as more than such.
• In this chapter, W. uses the prologue to Ellison’s Invisible Man to demonstrate why the invisible man listens to 5 separate phonograph’s to simultaneously listen to Armstrong’s Black and Blue.
• I am really, really confused by the discussions of subjectivity that occur in this chapter; however, I’ll try to lay out what I found interesting:
  • W. notes that the “self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imagined not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises, and music’s travel. . . we might designate a subject of sonic Afro-modernity as a channel through which voices, noises, and music’s pass” (51).  This seems to point to the authors desire to create subjectivity through sound in Black cultural production.
  • This subject of sonic Afro-modernity is constituted in “I am I be.” (56).
  • W. notes that “identity (I be) refers to empirical social beings and is often thought in relation to some form of identitarian realpolitik, whereas the subject (I am) remains in the unsullied domain of lofty abstraction.  By yoking identity to the subject, as opposed to having one dialectically supersede the other, Hall asks his readers to contemplate how these seemingly contradictory and contentious terms depend upon one another, and therefore bring each other into being” (65).
  • Subjectivity is generated through sound for black agents.  According to W., “black music, in the form of varying techne-logical structures of sonic Afro-modernity, advances and constructs a singular subject, at once more and less than its attendant minor identity without which it cannot be thought or perceived.  Just as this subject occupies the regions between the sonic and the scopic, it correspondingly dislodges the subject/identity bifurcation in current debates within Anglo-American humanities by refusing to separate I am I be” (71).
  • So, in closing, I’m still not entirely sure what this chapter was about.  I think it says that A.A. identity/subjectivity are inseparable.  It also claims that black subjectivity is a result of the sonic  – and that that sonic has a hand in forming modernity. . . not coming to it later.

Chapter Three:  In the Mix

• Key Terms
• Supplementarity – the idea that the object becomes itself more fully through a supplement to itself.  This means that anything “pure” or composed of “pure beauty” usually relies on a supplement to achieve that “pureness.”  Derrida uses the example of Lucretia by Cranache to demonstrate supplementarity via the paragon – the veil that covers her but enhances her at the same time.
• historicist – the idea that our knowledge of things is wholly or in part determined by their historicity (their position and function in the original historical context in which they were produced and in later developments they went through)
• weak messianic power – Benjamin refers to a ‘weak messianic power’ that relates each of ustoday to those who came and suffered before us. We are the chosen ones, as it were, whose present time was once the promised future of the past, and it is our responsibility to remember and redress the injustices that were suffered by those who made it possible for us to live.  In other words, this is rethinking the present in terms of the future to come based on our inheritance from the past.

In this mix is a chapter about the remix (shocking I know considering the title).  As W. states on 73, “In order to contextualize my argument about the temporalities of sonic Afro-modernity, I return to Ellison’s Invisible Man, where history appears as a groove that indexes both the indentations found on the surface of phonograph records and those somewhat more elusive grooves in the vernacular sense.  In addition, Water Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” will serve as a sounding board for the consideration of the variable temporalities in the “tradition of the oppressed”  Finally, this chapter puts into practice what I call “thinking sound” by interfacing historically seemingly disparate texts in order to excavate their intensities, (which only emerge in the process of juxtaposition and recontextualization), much as DJs treat records in their mixes” (73).  So, let’s see how that works:

• Ellison’s Invisible Man – history appears as groove that indexes the surface of records and the vernacular.
• The weak messianic power that is discussed on 78-80 is a relation of multiple times to Ellison’s own time.  For Benjamin – and later Derrida – the weak messianic time (as defined above) means that every being has a stake in the future of all individuals.  It also means that the “spectrality” of the your present will also be present in the future.  This time – our present – is messianic because it is “shot through” with the past; however, it is also a promise of a future time – hence it’s messianicness.
• W. seems to be double-playing on this sense of messianic time and historical materialism in Chapter three.  In other words, when the invisible man here’s the “electric amplification of a phonograph record and not, to put it briefly, a ‘real’ live singer and/or musician” (80) after Clifton is killed, the “grooves of history”  -  or the production of black history – “transmogrifies from absolute erasure in writing to sounding from the loudspeakers on any given urban corner” (80).  To explain the “groove” W. gives two definitions: 1)  channels on the surface of phonograph record, or any long, narrow depression and 2) the groove of a piece of music (81).
• This second definition of the groove is more associative, more rhizomatic.  It cannot be pinned down and registers in the domain of “sensation” rather than “linguistic signification.”  So, for Ellison’s Invisible Man, after the moment of crisis, the protagonist is able to see how life is an intersection of “monadic cross-currents and discontinuities as opposed to a single and totalizing genus of history” (82).  He is, in other words, able to see how the messianic history chains out as an alternative to the historicist model of history that seems to imply linear relationships between all the world’s events. It provides a space for him to make sense of t he world. *********
• In demonstrating how Dubois’ epigraphs to each chapter in “The Souls of Black Folk” are present in the “groove” or the singularity of historical experience W. notes that “Dubois’s mix is not complete:  it is marked by a failure to represent sound in writing, which, in turn highlights the audiovisual rift set in motion by the technology of the phonograph.  This ‘failure’ or scratching, wherein noise intrudes into the temporal architecture of the linguistic text, allows Souls to be audible and legible as the first literary sound recording (phono-graph) of sonic Afro-modernity” (83).
• In a discussion of Dubois’ work, W. notes that the DJ is always doing two forms of mixing: 1) he’s mixing the records or sonic information, 2) he’s mixing his expectations and practices with the audience.
• W. says that Dubois’s epigraphs began to serve as the monadic cross-currents outside of time – outside of historicist modes of history – that are representative of messianic time – these spirituals serve as “future-past” significations for general Black American engagements with history.  (93).  They do this because they render the spirituals “as grooves in his own mix” (96).  In juxtaposing the “phono-epi-graphs” of the spirituals at the intersection of the poems in Dubois’s work, the “scratches in this textual mix radically alter the significations of the text(s) via their constitutive supplementarity” (97).
• The new groove that Dubois creates is multilayered – composed of: 1)  the spirituals change their format because they are recorded via musical notation and mediated by black and white discourses on the role of folk culture, 2) these transcriptions modified this system of notation itself, 3) the musical bars alter the meanings of the poems from the 19^th century British canon and vice-versa.
• Hauntology – What a lovely word!!!!!  This describes an ontology of the spectral – a remix of the past to represent the present in a formation of the future.  For W. Dubois’ work is a hauntology because it “transacts the confluence of differing and differential grooves that add up to a dub mix, a sonic hauntology of the temporal in which both the past and the future echo in/the present, only to transform its status as presence” (104).
• In summa, this chapter can be condensed into the following:  Ellison and Benjamin offer the tools for conjecturing non-historicist compilations of the temporal, especially apropos the tradition of the oppressed and the sonic; The Souls of Black Folk and DJing enact these principles in their respective media, which ought not involve any sort of deep rift between the theoretical and the performative, as opposed to sundry manifestations of analogous principles vis-à-vis temporality in different modes of discursive materiality” (104).

Chapter Four:  Consuming Sonic Technologies

This chapter was about how sonic technologies construct spatial relations.  Instead of discussing temporalities or subjectivities, in this chapter W. discusses how recorded sound technologies – a la  phonographs, Walkman, etc. – construct the spaces that we inhabit of subjects.  In considering the level of the “sounding technologies” (how loud is it?), this chapter looks to urban dwellers in learning how sound structures environments.  In W.s words, “Focusing on how electronically mediated music plays an integral part in constituting private and public spaces, I analyze consumption of recorded music and its role in protecting listeners from urban noise, which is not deemed a part of the private space of the subjects in the two texts (Ellison’s and I Like It Like That)” (107).  Not a lot here as in other chapters – especially in the way of high-theory.  Anyhow, a bulleted list of the big takeaways in quoted form:

• The conclusion of the chapter, as W. states is, follows: “the music and the technologies the music is transmitted through provide the means for both Ellison and Martin’s protagonists to create and recreate space through sound as it is articulated at the interstices of the private and the social.  Just as with my previous ruminations on the temporality of “sonic Afro-modernity,” here space appears as a series of competing and sometimes conflicting spheres that cohere at certain junctures only to fall apart or, at other points, vehemently oppose one another” (108).
• Sound, in the urban milieu, is used as a shield from the aural onslaught of the modern (noise) through the form of music.
• In his analysis of I Like It Like That, W. basically says that sounding or the sonic structures Lisette’s subjectivity – through the bathroom, through her position as a record exec assistant, through the Walkman – she constantly uses sound (or frames her subjectivity through sound) to constitute her self.  In this way, sound is not only constitutive of social spaces and the boundaries between public and private, but it is also a way to constitute the self in terms of spatial environs.  This self is ever changing based on context/interaction; however, the realities of sound and its effects on space remain (142-4).

Chapter Five – Sounding Diasporic Citizenship

Some key terms for the chapter:

• Erasure – From Heidegger, this is the idea that there is presence and absence in meaning in language.  As such, the process of erasure is the crossing out of a word, but leaving the word crossed out visible.  For Derrida, erasure is tied up in an impossibility of presence altogether.  Words are never present in toto because of the inability of signifiers to ever contain all of their meaning.  This means, for Derridean deconstruction, that the entire process of signification is always under erasure.

This chapter deals with three instances of “diasporic citizenship” in contemporary (or fairly recent) black music.  The bullets continue:

• Instead of getting wrapped up in the two definitions of citizenship in the current era (the nation-state surpassed by the supranational entity or the nation-state as central to the formation of supra-national entities), W. hopes to demonstrate how “transnational movements work through the conduit of the nation-state and vice versa” (147).
• To do this, W. turns to non-white voices in hip-hop to demonstrate the shifting meanings of blackness as well as “other forms of social and political identification” (146).  By looking at “diasporic citizenship” W. wants to demonstrate how the “abjected” are often engaged in the process of recasting the boundaries of tha nation/s that make them invisible or “abjected” in the first place.  Instead of relying on “race” or “color” to do this, W. wants to demonstrate the federation on the principle of “identity of passions.”  This idea is that there is a “shared hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire and we are bound by common suffering more than by our “pigmentation” (148).
• Because of this qualification in definition, W. diaspora is “inessential” in that it is a “communication of singularities” that maintains its solidarity because of suffering, not any essentialist categories (148).  W. calls this shared diasporic inessentialism “cosmopolitical.”
• The “spaces” that the author discusses in this section are representative of the three broad sections that he lays out at the beginning of the book.  In a sentence, this chapter will investigate the “spaces” (not physical) and temporalities (not linear) that compose the subjectivities of black diasporic citizenship.  The legwork in the previous chapters seems to be in anticipation of carrying it forward and out in this section.
• Group One: The Fugees
  • The Fugees – through their music and the visual representations they include in album covers, etc., disrupt the typical image of the “refugee,” complicating the distinction between economic and political asylum seekers.  They also radically alter the nation-state citizenry by encouraging them to see themselves as refugees.  In other words, they complicate the regular image of refugee and refigure it to include the citizen introspectively.
  • Use their position on the border to complicate things.
  • Group Two:  Adavanced Chemistry
    • AC claimed their “Germanity” without giving up their racial embodiment.  This process challenged hegemonic Germans conception of their own national identity and encouraged an embrace of “particularity” in the composition of the citizen.
    • They achieved this identity through identification with hip-hop outside of Germany.
    • Use their position “squarely inside the border” in order to fight German public disourse (182)
    • Group Three: Tricky
      • According to W., Tricky does this:  counterposes “a racialized bio-politics of fucking” with an aestethics of “fucked-upness” that grows out of representation of black diasporic subjects incapable of and/or unwilling to submit their psyches and bodies to the rigors of late capitalism, suggesting a different way of imagining and performing the black body politic, one that doesn not rest on the hubris of its discreteness or integrity.  Rather, Tricky and Martina’s conception of embodiment highlights its own deterritorialization and erodes any and all residual phantasms of completeness” (184).
      • In this sense, Tricky and Martina are an exercise in “fuckedupedness” or at least the postmodern subject.  Instead of reifying either racist ideas of the black subject or the traditional black subject as envisioned by the black subject whole, T&M “suggest a maniacal black subjectivity.  In other words, they emphasize the pain and negativity of negotiating between different poles of identification instead of concealing them. . . . T&M not only fuck with diasporic identification as it relates to questions of blackness and the nation-state in the West but also explode both the individuated person and couple as subject from within these structures, thus underscoring the messiness of these categories, which cannot be subsumed by either celebratory incantations or hybridity or determinist notions of oppression” (197).

Outro:  Thinking Sound/Sound Thinking (Slipping into the Breaks Remix)

This outro is a nice justification of W.s method and his mission.  W. claims that he did not want to read artifacts as extensions of previous artifacts. So, using this logic, W. claims that his chapter on Dubois and DJs aren’t reading one onto the other – or in W.’s words, “not because there exists some nebulous and predetermined correlation between them, either historical or scholarly” rather, he wants to demonstrate how “the act of thinking them together establishes both the logic and reasoning for doing so. . . Hence, the fusion attains an originary status within the confines of this particular argument, shifting the emphasis to the manner in which Du Bois’s texts and DJing infiltrate each other, using Du Bois as a way into the practice of DJing and rethinking Souls as a form of textual mixing” (202-3).  Yet, I don’t necessarily see how he doesn’t do what he claims he’s not doing.  Anyhow, other interesting points of note in this outro:

• W. infuses his method with techniques of close textual reading and historical contextualization.
• W. claims that he has rethought technology.  Instead of conceiving of technology as 1) material limit cases frozen in time and space or 2) discursive constructs always already waiting to be appropriated (204), he claims to have demonstrated how “technology used against its intended function” is a central aim of technological tracing.  But how is this different from #2?
• He wants to challenge the notions of histories of technology that are 1) productivist [machines are approached from the position of captains of industry- Ford] or 2) appropriated [takes in what is done with these gadgets by users.  Rather, he wants to demonstrate how each of these technological machines has an AGENCY.  W. describes this thusly:  “the interplay between the materiality of the apparatus and its discursive dimensions ceases to transact the binary drama it has hitherto enacted and splinters into a series of relational singularities that refuse to signify any ontological consistency before and beyond” (205).  In other words, technologies aren’t simply appropriated and used toward ends, rather, technologies often appropriate the user and use them to conduct the formation of the future of both.  This is directly and intimately tied to Derrida’s “iterability” from far earlier in the book.
• By conceiving of history as series of singularities instead of particularities, historians of minority studies can get beyond “particularlian logic and identitarian thought” to produce histories where minority relations are key to the formation of the history itself . . . instead of merely relational to that history (207).

Oct 16th 09 Posted by justin in CCR751

CCR751 – Dinerstein – Swinging The Machine

Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine:  Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: UMASS Press, 2003.

Introduction:  Bodies and Machines

Dinerstein provides a framework for understanding his work in this first section.  He notes that he is interested in exploring an “aesthetics of acceleration” – or a demonstration of the way that A.A. cultural forms constitute any American claim of being an “accelerated” culture.  But what is accelerated?  D. says it is comprised of the “sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace” (7).  Later, he claims that the term “machine aesthetics” is key to understanding the human experience between the world wars.  Next, D. offers a definition of technology.  He states that,
“Technological” here refers not only to industrial innovations and mechanical rhythms, but also to the ongoing changes in human perception brought on by the experience of modernity.  The social function of nearly all A.A. musical practice before 1945 was to create a public forum that  provided the following:  social bonding through music and dance, an opportunity to create an individual style within a collective form, and a dense rhythmic wave that imparts ‘participatory consciousnesses to the audience. (8).

Dinerstein’s main thesis throughout the rest of the chapter seems to posit that machine aesthetics, embodied by the manufacturing/technofuturist craze of Italian futurists and mavens of industry during the 1920s and 1930s were countered by the embodied machine aesthetics of jazz and swing dancing.  This human machine aesthetic was necessitated by a need for taking one’s body back from the machine.  Central to this concern was the role of rhythm.  In order to fight the machine aesthetic, American’s adopted West African-derived cultural aesthetics that embodied the rhythm of the machine.  In understanding the role of rhythm, D. traces the evolution of two main narratives in the introduction: 1) the story of the industrial revolution and technological innovation and 2) the cultural influence of black migration.  The cultural and material productions of the era were rooted in one of two technologies – 1) technology (the industrial technology created by European-descent Americans) and 2) survival technologies (the “public rituals of music, dance, storytelling, and sermonizing that create a forum for existential affirmation through physicality, spirituality, joy and sexuality – “somebodieness” as some A.A. preachers call it – against the dominant’s society’s attempts to eviscerate one’s individuality and cultural heritage” – the eviscerator here being “machine aesthetics” of the Modernist era.  The rest of the intro discusses how this “survival technology” is embodied in swing music and dance of the era between the two world wars and how this music and expressive technology were embodied and created in the A.A. experience.

Chapter One:  The Tempo of Life is Out of Control. . . and Then Righted

Chapter One discusses how the white, liberal attitude of folks in the interwar period were fundamentally afraid of the acceleration occurring in the daily life of most Americans.  Because of rapid industrialization, many social theorists and philosophers bemoaned the mechanicazation or machination of the human condition.  This is most obvious in Marx’s discussion of the machine.  In response to these fears, swing music and incorporated this acceleration into its discourse.  Instead of seeing the roar of industrial urbanities – like Rebecca Harding Davis’ bleak Life in the Iron Mills – the “New American Tempo” incorporated the accelerated noise into music.  Dance, in turn, also used tap and other forms to weave acceleration into new cultural forms.  The symphony orchestra, with its lack of real improvisation, provided an accelerated musical analog to the factory of the early 20^th century.

Chapter Two:  The Jazz Train and American Musical Modernity

Chapter two investigates the “locomotive onomatopoeia” embodied in train song and dance.  The train, as the central metaphor for progress (for white Americans) and freedom (for Black Americans) became the defining locomotive symbol in the Modern era.  As such, the train found its way into jazz, blues, and symphony orchestras.  It also found its way into dance through tap.  As D. notes, “By putting the train into music, musicians enabled listeners and dancers to ‘wear’ their cultural identity through an embrace of technology, optimism, speed, and power in the form of big-band swing” (73).  The train becomes incorporated into popular culture through the figures of “train” men like Superman (more powerful than a locomotive) and the Steel Man on the Prairie.  In a final take away from the chapter, D. notes that, “three elements are intertwined in big-band swing culture:  A.A. musical practices integrate locomotive onomatopoeia; the machine aesthetics of music and dance help fuel the nation’s imagination; and social (and caste) stratification reify the exclusion of blacks in the nation’s songs and movies” (102).

Chapter Three:  A.A. Modernism and the Techno-Dialogic:  From John Henry to Duke Ellington

Chapter three begins by describing an interesting space that many early 20^th century social critics found themselves:  if the prevailing view of Blacks is that of a slower, lazy race, how in the world could they produce music like jazz?  In answering this question, D. explores two key aspects of A.A. music:  the call-and-response nature of the compositions and the dialogic relationship between the music and technology of the era.  The call-and-response model of West African oral composition finds many analogs in jazz.  This identification creates a social musical product – something to be explored, danced, felt, physicaled rather than something to passively consume (classical/Victorian).  In addition to call-and-response, the techno-dialogic functioned prominently in A.A. music during the interwar period.  The techno-dialogic is “an artistic bridge between self-expression and the technological soundscape” (116) or “my term for revealing how the presence (or ‘voice’) of machinery became integral to the cultural production of A.A. storytellers, dancers, blues singers, and jazz musicians” (126).  In other words, the techno-dialogic is the integration of technology into the expressive traditions of the people – in this case jazz.  So, as technological discourses permeated early 20^th century lives and experiences, the music took up those discourses and included them in the compositions of A.A.’s.

Chapter Four:  Swinging the Machines:  Big Bands and Streamliner Trains

Chapter Four traces how big band swing and streamliner trains represented two sides of the technodialogic coin.  Whereas the horse and buggy had served as the “natural” rhythm of folks in the 19^th century, the locomotive created the natural rhythm of many in the 20^th.  Because of a loss of faith in the machine throughout the Depression era, many Americans were wary of machinized life.  Soon, corporations realized the problem wasn’t the creation of materials for folks that they didn’t want, but poorly marketed existing materials.  In other words, an image problem.  Through some smart marketing, streamliner trains became symbols of the nation’s industrial past retooled for the future, gleaming new physical body blending human and machine attributes.  The big band was itself an icon of humanized machine aesthetics:  it generated waves of musical energy that served to rejuvenate human agency and a sense of renewed physicality in the face of human obsolescence (140-1).  These two creations were technodialogic melds that assured many Americans against the threat of over mechanization.

Observations:

1. Music, for the author, serves as a response to the material conditions of reality.
2. A.A. created a motorized form of music that met the demands of a motorized (read mechanized in both accounts) world.  This is why the music of A.A. during the interwar period (and ever since) has effectively represented an ever-technologizing society.
3. Trains meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people in this time period.  For Black men, it meant a way to escape to freedom.  For Black women, it represented abandonment.  For most folks, the train was an embodiment of the mechanized future.  This was cyborged when the train went from locomotive to Streamliner.
4. The techno-dialogic, as traced from John Henry forward, is a central component to A.A. cultural production.  This is seen in jazz, blues, and numerous dance forms.  Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman and others stole this techno-dialogic and used it to produce wildly popular films/productions for white America.  These productions set American’s at ease with post-Depression technologies and primed them for the tech race that was to occur after WWII.
5. A.A. cultural productions of the period are liberatory.  Even though the A.A. musical experience of the interwar period represented an integration of the machine into the rhythm and tempo of the song, the music at the same time allowed human beings to incorporate those rhythms and tempos into physically embodied technologies of dance – notably tap.
6. The European American cultural productions of the era – those that occur in chapter 5 – reflect the completely soulless, non-embodied machinations of a Modernist-fascinated population . . . a swing without any humanness.

Oct 12th 09 Posted by justin in Uncategorized

CCR751 – Sinclair – Technology and the A.A. Experience

Sinclair, Bruce. Technology and the African-American Experience:  Needs and Opportunities for Study. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Introduction:  Integrating the Histories of Race and Technology

List format today in the interest of brevity.

1. Perceptions about inventiveness and natural aptitude have played a huge role in pushing the A.A. technological experience to the borders of accepted thought.  This is why A.A. are largely absent from the technological conversation.  In keeping with this theme, the work of slavery (brute force) was tied to mental capacity; hence, whites were able to tell themselves it was OK to continue slavery because A.A.’s were incapable of learning/thinking anyway.
2. White identity has long been tied to technological capability.  This is inherent not only in the Yankee ingenuity, but also in concepts of manifest destiny.  Because of the success of the democratic project in the US, whites conceived of technological aptitude and progress as a natural element of their masculinity (which means that technology was also gendered in addition to being raced).
3. “All down these long decade, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans made technology and the capacity for its skillful management central both to the task of nation-building and to the way they represented themselves.  Just as plainly, they contrasted themselves to people of color, whom they judged incapable of such things” (5).
4. Sinclair has a list of things he thinks historians and scholars should concentrate on to improve the historical explication of the intersection of race and technology.  These include:
   1. Search out all black inventors
   2. Look at the world of labor
   3. Look at the world of consumption – in other words, how have Black consumption practices played a role in the development of new technologies?
   4. How is race represented in the media?  How is it represented in different kinds of technological media?
   5. A study of black scientific and technical institutions
   6. A more complex exploration of A.A. participation in technical and industrial expositions.
   7. The author notes that deciding what to write about when reclaiming A.A. experience with technology “rests on what we imagine it is possible to write about” (13).
   8. The author makes a great point that technological advances are created out of choices, not abstract neutral technological logic or neutral process; hence, the social process that informed those choice embody the interests, positions, and attitudes of the ones that created them.  SO, the takeaway is that technology is NOT neutral.

Chapter One:  Landscapes of Technology Transfer:  Rice Cultivation and African Continuities

Judith Carney

In this article, Carney advances the argument that West African slaves were the real reason why much rice cultivation shifted from inland river based rice cultivation to eventual tidal cultivation.  Though historians have long contended that this was because of Dutch influence, the likely reality was that Africans and Europeans (in unequal power relations with one another) combined their knowledges to further develop the rice cultivation along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.  In reclaiming this history, Carney contends that Eurocentric views have contributed to the glossing over of Africans contribution to this agrarian economy.

Chapter Two:  “To Collect Proof of Colored Talent and Ingenuity”:  African-American Invention and Innovation

Portia James

In this chapter James presents a catalogue of A.A. technological innovations from the period between 1619-1930.  Here are some highlights:

1. In the early colonial period, A.A., white wage workers and slave owners tended to work together to come up with technological innovations to common problems; however, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the black-white line became more pronounced, this cooperation ended abruptly.
2. Until the passage of the 13^th and 14^th amendments, it was virtually impossible for slaves or A.A. freedmen to apply for and receive a patent.  Though the patent office was in New York, and hence, the Union, blacks were rarely granted patents.
3. Before heavy industrialization in the late 19^th century, much A.A. technological innovation was concentrated in skilled knowledge of everyday processes (butter churns, etc.) and agrarian technologies.
4. Before said industrialization, Blacks were:
   1. Interested in improving their lot through technology just like whites
   2. Those A.A.’s who were particularly skilled for invention tended to gravitate to urban areas and where, hence, well situated for the technological advances of the late 19^th century industrial re-revolution.
   3. The railroad was the most powerful and significant developing technology for Black inventors.
   4. A.A.’s saw technological development and invention as a means to gain access to participation and inclusion in the Great America of the pre WWI period.
   5. A.A. during the early 20^th century had to develop marketing and manufacturing savvy to become industrialists instead of just inventors.
   6. Besides racial prejudice, $ was the chief limiters for A.A. inventors to gain access to manufacture.
   7. The two most important take aways from the study are:
      1. A.A. men and women have been active participants in the history of American technology from the very beginning (66).
      2. A.A. stories disrupt the lie that A.A.’s were naturally mentally inferior human beings.

Chapter Four:  New South, New North:  Region, Ideology, and Access in Industrial Education

Nina Lerman

This chapter explored the differences between “Industrial Education” models in the South and North during the Reconstruction period.  According to the author, her article,
“suggests that the paradoxes of industrial education spring from – and must be explained in terms of – contradictions between the various perceived potentials of the A.A. labor force in New South industrial development; the tradition of large-scale production through hand cultivation in Southern agriculture; the steady technological marginalization of the A.A. community in the urban North; and Northern Philanthropy’s funding of educational programs in ongoing conversation with Southern leaders” (80).

So, let’s break this apart:

1. New South industrial development – Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute presented themselves as a place for A.A. men to get a Christian education while learning some skills of industrial trades.  In fact, Tuskegee was THE Southern industrial training facility during the Reconstruction period.  What is odd about this is that Washington used Northern Philanthropic $ to train these A.A. men.  Presumably, Northern industrialists wanted to eventually use the South as an industrial home without the union presence of the North.  In training for industry, Washington was teaching his students to be obedient to the whim of industry. .. .. and NOT get involved in labor.
2. Northern trade schools – such as ICY – started out in the industrial model; however, after matriarchs and other influential community organizers died out or left the education scene in Northern cities, schools such as ICY usually changed their mission from one of industrial trade’s education to Christian moral-influenced teaching schools.  In fact, ICY – citing Tuskegee as an example – created an out of the city campus for its students.  They then trained their students to be teachers that would eventually work in the South educating in trades and domestic duties.

This seems to be the contradiction that the author points out at the beginning of her article.  The takeaway here is that “Industrial Education” as the counterpart to “Black Colleges” cannot be conceived of in a national sense; rather, they must be taken on their own, local terms to understand exactly what motivations/desires were at work.

Chapter Six:  Raising Fish with a Song:  Technology, Chanteys, and African Americans in the Atlantic Menhaden Fishery

Barbara Garrity-Blake

Blake analyzes the expressive practices of A.A. Menhaden fisherman in this piece.  Essentially, she contends that A.A.’s used singing as a technological device for a couple of reasons:

1. The work song as technology not only functioned as a tool to get the job done, it signified:  the words expressed resistance to white authority, freedom to seek new wage-labor employment, and the desire to be home with loved ones (114).
2. The author characterizes this as a “invisible technology”

Chapter Eight:  “The Open Road”:  Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years

Kathleen Franz

This article investigates the use of the automobile by Black American’s in the period between the end of WWI and the end of WWII.  Some points of interest:

1. This essay investigates the automobile as an instrument of cultural power that offered black middle-class drivers access to both personal mobility and technological expertise. (132)
2. Cultural histories of technology that focus on material culture, users, and consumption suggest two ways to expand the scope of A.A. history
   1. Because consumption is a highly political form of technological use, studies of consumption can reveal a lot about the condition of a group.
   2. Studies of how the black community appropriated technological artifacts can highlight the importance of technological skill and knowledge within larger arguments about racial progress – in this case, the historian will use the A.A. experience with automobility to demonstrate how A.A. found their ways into discourses of economic prosperity, leisured mobility, and technological know-how. (132-3)
   3. Discourses of economic prosperity
      1. i.      A.A. used the automobile to take part in the growing middle class identity in the US in the postwar years.
      2. Leisured moibility – to participate in the middle-class ideal, A.A. used the automobile to gain access to the “Open Road” – even though the road wasn’t so open at all.
      3. Technological knowhow – A.A.’s used the automobile to challenge the discourses surrounding Black mental inferiority.

Chapter Nine:  The Matter of Race in Histories of American Technology

Rebecca Herzig

Herzig makes the argument that race, much like gender, is tied to technological development.  After demonstrating the gendered nature of the Ford Probe at the beginning of the article, Herzig notes that technology does a couple of things:

1. Narratives of technology provide a means by which individuals establish separate alternative racial identities.
2. Technologies also offer a key to resolving character’s “true” racial identity in moments of crisis.
3. Social constructions of race often ignore the materiality of race.
4. Thinking of race and technology and their relationships to one another provides better history and allow us to ask new questions about the past.
5. Thinking about the relations between race and technology grounds discussions about both in the realm of politics, not historiography.

Sep 16th 09 Posted by justin in CCR751

CCR751 – Katie’s Cannon

Cannon, Katie Geneva. Katie’s Canon Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum International Group, 1997. Print.

Katie Geneva Cannon

Prelude / Chapter One : Surviving the Blight

There is a lot of information in this section.  I’ll start with a couple of key terms.  Jungle Stance: the posture of knowing you’re in danger without having to be taught.  Cannon claims this stance is natural in young A.A. children because of the pressures of racist society.  She also discusses “epistemological privileges of the oppressed” in this section.  This is having a deep connection to histories of ancestral oppression that guides your decisions in the social sphere – sometimes this even means away from rationality.

Cannon notes that she will concentrate on a three part elucidation of Black female positions in society.  This explanation will use race, sex, and class as it’s sites of inquiry.  Later Cannon notes that her meditations will all challenge systems of domination.

In Chapter One, Cannon frames the institution of slavery in terms of “chattel” or property.  This allows a view of the slave as properly – not human.  In so doing, oppression is absolved of a lot of biblical responsibility.  To cope with the realities of chattel, Blacks developed a couple of different coded/insider discourses: 1) folklore, 2) spirituals, and 3) communal prayer.

Chapter Two: Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation

In chapter two, Cannon outlines how three different Christian doctrines allowed chattel slavery to operate in the United States.  First, she discusses how the biblical story of Ham predestined all Blacks to a life of servitude because of their status as the outcast, bestial, cannibalistic, heathen.  Next, in “remythologizing divine will” Cannon posits that White Christians didn’t prohibit Black enslavement because it wasn’t explicitly prohibited in the bible. .. which presumably made it ok.  So, since it wasn’t prohibited in the bible, the subservience of the Black people must have been the “natural order of things” and hence, God’s will.  Finally, Cannon notes in “mythologizing the enslavement” that White Christians believed (or at least accepted the belief) that slave ships and slavers were sent to Africa to save the Africans from the “ignorance, superstition, and corruption” of the continent as a whole.

Chapter Three:  The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness

In this chapter, Cannon sets out to “track down the central and formative facts in the Black woman’s social world, [thereby] identifying the determinant and determining structures of oppression that have shaped the context in which Black women discriminately and critically interpret Scripture, in order to apprehend the divine Word from the perspective of their own situation” (47).  After sketching how Black women were both torn asunder from meaningful relationships with Black men and were also at the sexual whim of white slave masters, plantation owners, etc., Cannon notes that Black women’s position didn’t change much during the Reconstruction period or even until the first large waves of immigration north during the period after WWI (1915-1930).  It was only after the economic realities of a dwindling white labor force during WWII that Black women were given even the smallest bit of representation.  During the entire experience of Black women after the Emancipation, the church served as a central citadel of hope as it was the only institution that Blacks could use without restraint.  As the church framed the Black woman experience from before the Emancipation when slaves weren’t allowed to practice to the present, Black women looked to Jesus and the church as a way to satisfy needs of human dignity and to secure the soul’s liberation.  In so doing, Cannon notes that Black women “serve as contemporary prophets, calling other women forth so that they can break away from the oppressive ideologies and belief systems that presume to define their reality” (56).

Chapter Four:  Moral Wisdom in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition

In this chapter, Cannon first interrogates mainstream, dominant Protestant ethics to challenge their view that self-reliance, frugality, and industry will, invariably, lead to economic success.  Because of their position as an oppressed people living under oligarchic, white patriarchal economic relations, Black experience must develop other mechanisms to achieve a “standard of living that is congruent with the American ideal.  In challenging this protestant ethic, Cannon’s goal is “to show how Black women live out a moral wisdom in their real-lived context that does not appeal to the fixed rules or absolute principles of White-oriented, male-structured society” (60).  To understand this new ethic, Cannon turns to Black women’s literary tradition to discover what ethical values Black women have developed to participate in this society (61).  She comes up with the following conclusions:

a.  Black Women’s literary tradition parallels Black history

b.  Black Women’s literary tradition uses the oral narrative devices of the Black community

c.  Black Women’s literary tradition capsulizes the insularity of the Black community

In discovering these conclusions, Cannon notes that Black women’s literary traditions can be seen as a seriously reliable mirror of the experiences of Black reality.

Chapter Five:  Womanist Perspectival Discourse and Cannon Formation

Cannon notes that her work as a womanist theological ethicist concentrates on four areas:

a.  The creation of womanist pedagogical styles

b.  The emergence of distinctive investigative methodologies

c.  Reconsideration of the established theories, doctrines, and debates of Eurocentric, male-normative ethics.

d.  The adjudicative function of womanist scholars

Next, she sets out to “identify some of the generative themes in the texts of A.A. women writers that womanist ethicists need to address” (70).  The first theme she wants addressed is colorism (71).  In the same vein, she id’s the value system of “pigmentocracy” (72).  Third, she discusses the notion that accepting Black women as women means “moving beyond a single vision of vaginas” and finally recommends the reading of “Black women’s bodies as texts” (74).  As Cannon notes, “Flesh houses memories – the color of flesh, the reproductive character of flesh, and the manifold ways that the flesh of African women is the text on which androcentric patriarchy is written” (75).

Chapter Six:  Resources for a Constructive Ethic – The Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston

In this chapter Cannon recommends using Hurston as a model for constructive ethics because “unlike most of the other writers in her time, Hurston emphasized the unique cultural heritage and wholeness of Black life” (78).  Hurston achieved this through the employ of folklore, folk sayings, and her own lived experience.  In so doing, she offers the reader a really good example of the Black woman as a moral agent.  In fact, Hurston “grasped an understanding of the moral quality of life being fulfilled, not as an ideal, but as a balance of complexities in such a way that suffering did not overwhelm and endurance with integrity was possible” (83).  This sound a lot like West’s concept of “tragicomic hope.”

Chapter Seven:  Unctuousness as Virtue

There are definitely a lot of analogs between Cannon’s treatment of Hurston and West’s notion of tragicomic hope in this chapter.  Cannon grounds the importance of Hurston early in the chapter by noting, “Hurston offers a concrete frame of reference for the understanding the Black woman as a moral agent” (91).  This moral agency /good is equated with tragicomic hope when Cannon states that moral good “is that which allows Black people to maintain a feistiness about life that nobody can wipe out, no matter how hard they try” (ibid.).  In defining “unctuousness” Cannon states that Hurston’s “quality of steadfastness, akin to fortitude, in the face of formidable oppression serves as the most conspicuous feature in the construction of Black women’s ethics” (92).  In the pages that follow, Cannon describes how the ridicule and criticism that Hurston received internally (while grappling with the contradictions of having a white financier) and externally (through the brutal criticism of Black male writers, known as the “Godfathers of the Harlem Renaissance”) didn’t deter her from demonstrating unctuousness and moral good in all of her strivings to accurately represent the A.A. condition.

Chapter 8:  “The Wounds of Jesus”: Justification of Goodness in the Face of Manifold Evil
This chapter takes up a central theological problem that hampers not only Black Xianity, but also Xianity as a whole.  Namely, “Can God create a rock that God can’t pick up?”  Or, in other words, would God create evil if he is an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent?  Or in Cannon’s words this is the fundamental query that “deals with traditional theological problem concerning transgressions that proceed directly from human sin – structures of domination, subordination, and constraints that reinforce and reproduce hierarchies based on race, sex, class, and sexual orientation” (101).  In the Black church, Cannon claims that this problem of moral evil is inflicted by human agency.  In this chapter, she intends to do the following:
a.    Examine theodicy as it is presented in the ecclesiastical texts embedded as distinctive rhetorical units in Hurston’s work.
b.    To critique Hurston’s sermon “The Wounds of Jesus” as a sketch of the problem of evil in Afro-Christian rhetoric.
c.    To construct, even in the bare outline, my own composite womanist matrix for the corpus of sermons in the A.A. women’s literary tradition (102).
According to Cannon, Hurston’s treatment of ecclesiastical texts reflects the Black church communities understanding of God’s redeeming love.  As such, these texts are seen as ways to assuage the problem of human agency in repressive forms.  In her critique of Hurston’s sermon, she articulates that the problem of evil is a) an essential element in the completion of human history, b) relatable to the Black community through metaphorical adornment and c) a representation of the Black Xian tenant of revelation in God in Jesus Christ.  In this sense, the image of Jesus as Redeemer exists a priori to any consideration of evil in the world.
In attempting to find the most fruitful site for the expression of seminal evil practices in Black life, one need only turn to Black women novelists due to their position in broader society and their triple oppression.  In closing, Cannon notes that, “The point of much A.A. women’s spirituality as expressed in the literature is that it does not begin with questions about the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God and then move to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil.  Rather womanist protagonists contend that God’s sustaining presence is known in the resistance to evil” (111).  In other words, the problem of evil is not addressed, as it exists; hence, the womanist position is to confront evil with God’s sustaining presence as resistance tactic par excellance.

Chapter 9:  Womanist Interpretation and Preaching in the Black Church
In this chapter, Cannon attempts to outline a program for Womanist action in Black churches to more fully realize the contributions of women and to exercise their image as evil from the good book.  In performing this task, she relies on the texts of feminist liberationist Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Black homiletician Isaac R. Clark, Sr.
By adopting the methodology of Fiorenza, Cannon hopes to demonstrate how sermonic texts “participate in creating or sustaining oppressive or liberating theoethical values and sociopolitical practices” (114).  In critiquing existing Black Sermonic oppression of women, the feminist liberationist interpretation also provides for a space to use womanist methodology at the “constructive stage of sermon preparation and delivery” (115).
In the analysis of preaching in the Black church, Cannon identifies a couple of useful analytical categories:
a.    Divine activity – The fact that the Black preacher occupies a space between God and the congregation.
b.    Word of God – This is the idea that the “God-Self” is present in the content of the preached word.
c.    Proclaiming or announcing – The preacher’s indicative mode for declaring the biblical ideas, beliefs, and systems of though in the vernacular of the hearers.
d.    Contemporary Issues – This is how the preacher grounds biblical exegesis in lived experience of the congregation.
e.    Ultimate Response to God – This is the preacher’s call to the congregation make a decision “for or against emancipatory praxis” (118).
After finishing her discussion of Black sermons, Cannon launches into an EXTREMLY dense and loaded discussion of “Womanist Queries” where womanist can seek to change the traditional Black church model that oppresses women in multiple ways.  This discussion continues into the next chapter.  To put it quickly, Cannon notes that her program is one of “unmasking those detailed and numerous androcentric injunctions” in so doing “womanist hermeneutics attempts to expose the impact of ‘phallocentric’ concepts that are present within Black sacred rhetoric” (119).
In womanist hermeneutics, the preacher should aim to:
a.    Trace out the logic of liberation that can transform patriarchal oppression
b.    Urge congregationists to make interventions, no matter how slight, in the dominant religious discourse of the time

Chapter 10:  Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick:  The Womanist Dilemma in the Development of a Black Liberation Ethic
After framing the tension that exists in Cannon’s own identity as both a Christian social ethicist and a womanist liberation ethicist, she launches into a programmatic discussion of how to change things.  I’m going to be brief here as there is SO MUCH.

If acting like a Canonical Boy, the Black woman must:
a.    Discount the particularities of her lived experiences and instead focus on the validity of generlizable external analytical data
In so doing, this position ignores the positionality of Black women, and therefore presents them no place to enact their own agency.  In challenging this position, Cannon wants to decenter the White male ethicist position to compensate for the more than analytical – the daily lived experience of Black oppression.

To challenge this position, Cannon recommends:
a.    New research questions must be developed so that Black women’s moral wisdom can provide answers
b.    Practice moral acts that demystify large and obscure ideological relations, social theories, and indeed, the heinous sociopolitical reality or tridimensional oppression
c.    Use frameworks of wisdom to compare and contrast Black female moral agency with the agency of those in society who have the freedom to maximize choice and personal autonomy.
d.    Focus on particular questions of women in order to reveal the subtle and deep effects of male bias on recording religious history
e.    Examine Black women’s contributions in all major fields of theological studies – Bible, history, ethics, mission, worship, theology, preaching and pastoral care.
f.    Move from the position of direct object to active subject in the Black Church.
g.    Move toward a fundamental reconceptualization of all ethics with the experience of Black women at center stage
h.    Recognize and condemn the extent to which sex differences prevail in the institutional church, in our theological writings, and in the Black Church’s practices

Chapter Eleven:  Appropriation and Reciprocity in the Doing of Womanist Ethics
I loved this chapter.  In this section, Cannon raises some really interesting questions about how to “do” womanist ethics.  I’ll list in bullet form:
a.    Are they traditions of white feminists and womanists mutually exclusive? (Her answer is a definitive NO – pg. 131).
b.    What challenges arise in the process of appropriation?
c.    Do I have to choose between my racial identity and my womanhood?
d.    How do we remain both beholden to our inherited religious culture materials as well as responsible in favoring the extension of oral texts for posterity?  In other words, what are trade-offs in our movement from orality to textuality?
To close Cannon states,
“The origin of the idea dictates the claims of accountability.  Whether we begin with paradigms created by mentors of European and Euro-American ancestry or with theoretical constructs emerging from the oral traditions of the African Diaspora or with a dialectical, syncretistic interplay between the two, we must answer the inescapable questions of appropriation and reciprocity.  To decline the ethical labor of wrestling with the questions . . .. is to play the game of androcentric heteropatriarchical academese without understanding it” (135).

Chapter Twelve:  Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea
In this section, Cannon outlines a womanist pedagogy.  To carry out this task, she recommends a three-wheel program.
a.    The first wheel is the intellectual predisposition of traditional male thinkers whose very language of objective universality masks our existence, forces us to persist in binary oppositions, and looks at Black women as superfluous
b.    The second wheel is the specificity of Afro-Christian culture, systematic accounts of the history and achievements, perspectives and experiences of members of the Black church community.
c.    The third wheel is the experiential dimension of women’s texts and interpretations.
She gives a really lovely definition of liberation ethics on the bottom of 138.  She concludes the chapter by noting that liberation ethics is something we “do.”  Womanist epistemology is the process by which we bring this kind of knowing about A.A. women into relation with justice to arrive at new understandings of our doing, knowing and being (paraphrase 141).

Sep 9th 09 Posted by justin in CCR751

CCR751 – Week Two

And We Are Not Saved : The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice

Derrick Bell

This is a really interesting piece.  I like how we get two views in the text on racial justice and black interpretations/plans for addressing said injustice.  The fact that these are filtered through a somewhat gendered lens is also interesting/problematic.

Structure:

a.  Chapter I – Chronicle of the Constitutional Contradiction – In this chronicle the heroine of sorts visits the Constitutional Convention to examine the original contradiction in the Constitution.

b.  Chapter II – Chronicle of the Celestial Curia – This chronicle details the pragmatic questions of whether law and litigation can address social justice or if revolution or violent reaction is necessary.

c.  Chapter III – Chronicle of the Ultimate Voting Rights Act – This section address the limitations on the voting rights of blacks and asks whether and ideal “ultimate” voting rights act would not only survive constitutional challenge but be effective as well (8).

d.  Chapter IV – Chronicle of the Sacrificed Black Schoolchildren – This chronicle focuses “speculates about the policies that might have more effectively improved the quality of education for black children, but weren’t tried because of the civil rights community’s commitment to achieving school segregation through racial balance (8).

e.  Chapter V – Chronicle of the Black Reparations Foundation – “The question whether the cost of a black reparations program is the main basis for white society’s opposition to improving the economic status of blacks . . . This question leads to a discussion of the reverse discrimination” (8).

f.  Chapter VI – Chronicle of the DeVine Gift – This section considers affirmative action

g.  Chapter VII – Chronicle of the Amber Cloud – This chapter posits that a national crisis might get us past race politics.

h.  Chapter VIII – Chronicle of the Twenty-Seventh-Year Syndrome – This focuses on black male sexism and white racism and how these two ism’s have harmed the Black community.

i.  Chapter IX – Chronicle of the Slave Scrolls – This chronicle discusses self-help and if it’s even possible.

j.  Chronicle X – Chronicle of the Black Crime Cure – Geneva’s ultimate strategy for racial justice – asks for “new ways of seeing and using old civil rights strategies in situations where a positive outcome, while not assured, can still be hoped for (10).

Prologue:

In this section, the narrator constructs an interesting picture of an intellectual that isn’t necessarily invested in the goals of a race convention because he is frustrated with the inevitable progress toward confrontational identity politics instead of coalition building.  He identifies the main two strands at the conference – the nationalists/emigrationists and the assimilationists – and hopes for a 3rd stream politics of coalition building that “were advancing more flexible and realistic alternatives to either all-out integration or black nationalism” (17).  The N. also mentions that “In the end, we seek and sincerely want consensus, the need to sacrifice the hard-gained independence of personal action proves too high a price to pay. Not recognizing either inner conflict or its unconscious resolution, each of us has a person investment in our strategy.  Thus is agreement rendered impossible and conflict inevitable” (18).

Geneva eventually makes the claim that “We have made progress in everything yet nothing has changed.  Our people’s faith has altered the law of the land, yet their lives are deprived and stunted” (22).  This gets at the heart of Geneva’s problem – how has litigation in the way of civil rights legislation actually improved the plight of the A.A. community?  If it hasn’t, what alternative do we have?

Chapter I : The Chronicle of Constitutional Contradiction

There are a couple of arguments advanced in the actual Chronicle.  They are:

a.  The founding fathers supposedly valued human rights above all others in the Constitution; however, it would appear that they gave “priority to property over human rights” (29) in denying franchisement for A.A. citizens. (31)

b.  The purpose of the gov’t. is to protect private property and is supported by that property in the form of taxes.

c.  Argues that humanity should be the doctrine to be protected

d.  Received counter arguments from the delegates that the “means justify the ends” in that “Slavery has provided the wealth that made independence possible” (34).

e.  The position that sacrificing the rights of some (slaves) is acceptable to secure the rights of others and the liberty for all  -  huge contradictions in this position.

f.  The exposition of the economic justification for slavery in class relations.  What I mean is that the ruling elite demonized and villianized slaves in order to solidify an otherwise restive poor white population.  This was orchestrated through racist discourse.  In effect, the elites white aristocracy was deflecting the realities of poor whites by projecting problems/fears onto slave populations who were incapable to rebel because of issues of access to technology.

In response we get some interesting discussions.  Huge amounts of data are presented in this section to demonstrate that the gains in litigation by A.A. has not actually improved their economic plight.  This economic inequality between white and black is rooted in the framing document of the US.  Geneva reflects at the end of the chapter that:

They would not, or could not, take seriously themselves or their ideals.  The men who drafted the Constitution, however gifted or remembered as great, were politicians, not so different from the politicians of our own time and, like them, had to resolve by compromise conflicting interests in order to preserve both their fortunes and their new nation.  What they saw as the requirements of that nation prevented them from substantiating their rhetoric about freedom and rights with constitutional provisions – and thus they infringed on the rights and freedom not only of the slaves, who were 1/5 of the population, but, ultimately, all Americans.

Chapter Two: The Chronicle of the Celestial Curia

This was a really great chapter.  The goal of the Curia sisters, though framed often in terms of race, is fleshed out on pg. 52.  They “immediately launched into a concerned discussion about the delay in a much-needed transformation of an industrial nation’s social structure that, as presently organized, espouses liberty for the individual but prospers through the systematic exploitation of the lower classes, particuarly those who are not white” (52).  In responding to this goal, the sisters diverge in how to fix it.  One sister, on the left, urged “disruptive protest and strident resistance to the multiple injustices” and her sister on the right “advocated a massive exodus by the nation’s colored peoples and a new beginning in some more receptive land” (53).

In redressing this situation, the Curia sisters have asked Geneva to become their Conservative Crusader.  So, here’s how that looks.  The C.C. will make her way to the nation’s highest court.  From this position of power, she will make extremely conservative decisions that punish the poor and reduce the subsidies/welfare, etc. they currently get to nothing.  By taking such a conservative position, the poor will be incited to actual action instead of relying on small gestures by the aristocratic elite that sustain but don’t actually improve A.A. positions.  There are some really great pieces in this section that speak in revolutionary voice (53-56).  Eventually, Geneva must repeat the following (abbreviated) mantra:

1.  Equality cannot be obtained by enacting laws or winning court cases.

2.  Equality will not come through an array of social programs that provide minimum relief but also make the poor support the status quo.

3.  True reform movements are motivated by adversity not by the beneficence of do-gooders who themselves are profiting from the misfortunes of those they claim they wish to help up.

Questions and Answers between N. And G. in this section:

a. G: Why do civil rights people place such faith in courts?

N:  Because groups with little real economic or political power feel they must rely on courts to arbitrate social justice.

b.  Why the courts?

N:  Because legislation is much slower and requires such a larger amount of agreement.

The Hidden Truth About Desegregation:  Also in this section, N. and G. discuss how the courting 3rd world countries during the cold war was the real reason why desegregation had to move forward.  As spheres of influence became codified in the geopolitical world order, the US had a difficult time justifying themselves as the land of the free while still oppressing a people based on race – this is a problem the communists didn’t have (well, it was less visible anyway).

Chapter 3 : The Chronicle of the Ultimate Voting Rights Act

In this chapter, G. recounts a dream where she ends up rescuing a racist white senator from the south.  Though the experience is supposedly only happenstance (on G. end), mysticism plays a big role here.  Anyhow, the senator, in return, proposes an ultimate voting rights act that has two parts:

a.  People will be paid $100 to vote.  This will come from campaign funds of the politicians running (which shouldn’t be that odd as many routinely spend far more than that to get votes).  This will combat lower-class folk’s inability to give up a day of work to register and a day of work to vote.

b.  Part II stipulates that a proportionate amount of A.A. elected officials will represent the population.  So if there are 23% Black folks in your community, 23% of the elected positions must be filled by those people.

There are a lot of problems in this argument.  The N. raises the following:

a.  You can’t use religious or racial lines to draw voting districts because this is contradictory of the democratic project / polis (the Lincoln tradition).  As such, geography is the least limiting district mechanism and must be used in the place of things like class, religion, or race.  G. parries by noting that this is absolutely not the truth.

b.  This policy could backfire.  This is especially true if there are 33% or so A.A. folks in a community.  If the elected officials align on race, instead of politics (which of course are informed by race), then the 33% black vote will never prevail.

c.  Finally, as N. notes, “proportioning political representation gives power to small splinter groups able to supply marginally essential votes far out of proportion to their numbers.  It offers representation to lunatic fringe and hate groups. . .” (97).

Chapter IV : The Chronicle of the Sacrificed Black Schoolchildren

In this chronicle, all of the black children who were about to attend their first day of school in a newly integrated school district suddenly disappear.  After this happens, the motivations for integration for the benefit of whites becomes more apparent.

a.  How Blacks were hurt by the integration:  Black teachers lost their jobs and the one black school that did a really wonderful job was forced to abandon its mission.

b.  How Whites were helped by integration:  teachers’ salaries were to be increased to help the strain of incorporating black students, school buses and new hires of drivers and mechanics were a boon to local economies, new school construction infused lots of $ to local economies all the while providing an excuse to close Black schools, federal funds would have been used to help integration efforts, local funds would have done the same, tax rates were increased to fund the desegregation process, the town annexed unincorporated areas to increase white enrollment, the city school system paid millions to local lawyers to fight for integration.

The overall argument in this section is that desegregation of schools wasn’t really a huge help to the Black community as much as it was an economic boon to whites.  In a perfect world, the courts would have ordered representation on the administrative end of school boards so that Black would have control over proportionate amounts of school funding.  In the N.’s  words, “courts would have given priority not to desegregating student but the money and the control (113).  Further, an economic imperative follows later in the discussion between N. and G. when they note, “Are you suggesting that the attainment of ‘equal educational opportunity’ must await a time when we are at least moving in the direction of ‘equal economic opportunity?’”  G. “In a country where individual rights were created to protect wealth, we simply must find a means to prime the economic pump for black people, particularly those of us living at the poverty level” (121).

Chapter V : The Chronicle of the Black Reparations Foundation

In this chronicle a Jewish philanthropist addresses the poverty and inequality of the A.A. condition by pledging 25 billion dollars in reparations.  In his scheme, A.A. will not simply be gifted the money; rather, their pay will be supplemented to compensate for the inequity in compensation and to make up for the years of exploitation experienced at the hands of government sanctioned oppression.

Fundamentally, this is another argument in wealth redistribution from a private source – so like a philanthropist Marxist of sorts. . . The challenges raised to this format included: 1)the payment was discriminatory, 2)interstate commerce clause enacted to stop discrimination in 1964 was used in the reverse to address this discriminatory process (138).

Chapter VI : The Chronicle of the Divine Gift

In this chronicle, G. is given a “Devine” gift by a wealthy businessman.  She uses his clout and stature to raise the amount of minority representation on the faculty at the law school where she works.  After raising the minority faculty count from one to six, the dean informs her that she will not be allowed to hire another minority.  In response, G. threatens litigation, then resigns her position.

This chapter is a discussion of affirmative action.  In response to the challenge of discrimination litigation, the N. poses a defense: the law school was representing its image.  As an already diverse faculty, the inclusion of another minority – thereby changing the racial makeup to proportion of minorities greater than the general or student population – would not be protected by discrimination statutes.  Hence, suing on the basis of discrimination would not be a possibility.  Ultimately, the N. sums up the reality:

The influx of qualified minority candidates threatened, at some deep level, the white faculty members’ sense of ideological hegemony and caused them to reject the 7th Candidate.  Even the first black or second or the third no doubt threatens the white faculty to some extent.  But it is only when we reach the 7th, or 10th, that we are truly able to see the fear for what it is” (158).

Chapter VII : The Chronicle of the Amber Cloud

In this chronicle, G. describes something of a plague – like the one in Exodus that kills the Egyptian first born – descends on the first born of the nations white, upper class families.  This distemper – characterized by amber skin color, lethargy, suspiciousness, withdrawnness, and insecurity – is suspiciously like the affliction that effects children in poverty stricken situations.  After huge sums of money and time are invested, a cure is developed at the shocking cost of $100,000 per treatment.  Congress quickly cuts the defense budget and funds the treatment for victims of the Amber Cloud, but not for the poverty-ridden subjects that are also afflicted with the same condition.  The question here is:  Is this legal?

In essence, this challenge to the concept that national crisis will generate racial harmony hits the N. hard.  Eventually, after much court case review, the realities of the US in the cold war era would certainly force the government to offer treatment.

Prologue to Part II :

In this section, the N. encounters Delia – one of the Curia sisters.  After rescuing her from a racist police officer by tapping into white systems of power (friends), D. describes in detail her plan for A.A. emigration.  With much respect for Marcus Garvey, D. outlines her plan for N. before getting out of the car.  After returning the next morning, G. deduces that N. actually had an encounter with one of the Curia sisters and is a bit irritated.

Chapter VIII : The Chronicle of the 27th Year Syndrome

This is definitely the most contentious portion of the entire narrative as it centers around the issue of Black masculinity, patriarchy and the double oppression of Black women.  In this story, notably told by the N., black women of a higher socioeconomic class and educational attainment and unmarried are struck by a kind of sleep.  After waking, they are struck with a sort of amnesia about their professional/educational training.  In response, the government, not willing to fund research into finding a cure, recommended that black women register if they fit into the afflicted demographic.  In response, Black men did not automatically go out and propose to Black women because they saw this action as yet another symptom of the oppression and suffering Black women have endured.

In the conversation that follows, a long explication of gender roles and social norms in A.A. communities is laid out.  In explaining why Black men often marry white women, the N. claims that their similar semi-oppression at the hands of the white man draw them into an economic attraction because of a lack of “access to opportunities for higher status” (207).  G., characteristically, has problems with the chronicle because it “ignores all the black males with problems like yours, and elevates to the level of indisputable truth the sexist ideal of men as the natural protectors of women” (210).  In response, N. notes that the Black male experience has also been one of loss and addressing this loss is inherent in the role of male as protector.  There is a lot more in this section that I didn’t hash out.

Chapter IX : The Chronicle of the Slave Scrolls

In this chronicle, G. recounts how as a Black minister, she finds some scrolls composed by slaves on a slave ship while she was visiting Ghana.  After discovering them, she brings them back to the US and uses them to facilitate “healing” sessions.  These sessions manage to heal all Black folks of their “deficiencies.”  I found the paragraph on the bottom of 218 an example of this.  Yet, it also seems like an airing of white grievances.  Anyhow, the Black folks fall in line with what White folks expected they should do as a population.  This of course causes problems for white folks because the A.A. population became so incredible successful.  In fact, they threatened the established economic order through prosperity in enterprise.  This began to upset the overall control of poor white populations by white aristocratic elites.  As a response, the government banned the slave scrolls and violently reacted against the movement.  The scrolls were burned and the movement was banned.

G. draws an analog between the events in this Chronicle and the history of Black Americans after the civil war during the Reconstruction period.  As A.A. began to prosper in this period, they threatened white hegemony.  As G. notes, “The Chronicle is not suggesting that black people need to be taught how to succeed, but reminds us that they have learned very early that too much success in competition with whites for things that really matter like money and power threatens black survival” (223).  Later, G. notes another Marxist interpretation, “the ideology of consumerism, fundamental religion, and, in recent years, a form of media-packaged nationality that integrates patriotism with religion have served to mask the fact that domestic policy has increased the gap between rich and poor for whites as well as for Blacks” (232).  In response to G. criticisms of the slave scrolls, the N. responds that he thinks that “self-help” is their only chance.

Part III

After noting the science-fiction nature of his trip, the N. returns the focus of the story to the convention.  After reading the chronicles, most delegates deduce that the real message was stark: “white society would never grant blacks a fair share of the nation’s benefits and would continue . . . to identify blacks as ‘them’ and set us apart as separate – and less worthy – category of beings” (241).  Yet, as G. breaks onto the scene and recounts the “Chronicle of the Black Crime Cure” things get interesting.

In this chronicle, Blacks take a piece of rock candy and become cured of what White society sees as their primary problem: a natural tendency to commit crime.  In response to the lack of crime by Black folks, the onus of authority and policing shifts to white-collar, white-dominated crimes.  As this is certainly not an acceptable site of investigation, authorities blow up the site where the crime cure comes from and Blacks eventually return to their original plight.

In light of such a pessimistic story, G. wonders what in the world is actually the goal of the Chronicles.  The Curia Sisters give her the wisdom of the “Ultimate Civil Rights Strategy.”

In fighting for this strategy, it is first necessary to recognize that it is wrong to fight for the same rights of white folks because “you would, if achieved, simply make them (A.A) the exploiting rich rather than the exploited poor, the politically powerful rather than the pitifully powerless, the influential and prestigious rather than the ignored and the forgotten” (250).  Next they urge G. to, using the function of the Bible as a precedent, to invert the social order and strive for a new consciousness.  G.’s moment of self-realization: “I see then, sisters, that you view the Chronicles as parables of our efforts to achieve what whites possess rather than what we, and they, might become” (253).  In fighting for the 3rd way, G. must 1) require that we seek justice for all through a systematic campaign attacking poverty as well as racial discrimination and 2) utilize traditional civil rights strategies.  In doing this, “future campaigns, while seeking relief in traditional forms, should emphasize the chasm between the existing social order and the nation’s ideals” (255).  Luckily for G. “the structure of your country’s government, as well as the interpretation of the basic law of the Constitution. . . is in constant flux – a fluidity you must take advantage of to make the laws reflect the needs of both blacks and whites” (255).  The final solution, in this case, is a leveling of the socioeconomic differences that make racism in the US possible.