Over the past few weeks we have explored the relationship of race and performance to notions of the post-racial body/politic. Scholars
such as Alexander Weheliye stress the importance of the sonic and aural within black performance to suggest a theory of black culture
as historically performative and radical. Tavia Nyong'o moves to trace notions of a "post-racial" present to a
contested history of a "mongrel" past that reflects the persistence of racial governmentality often ignored in our present day obsessions with notions
of hybridity. Challenging seemingly utopic answers to race/racisms that are connected to liberal notions of "hybridity,"how might Weheliye and Nyongo's insights in this
this module help us make connections between the amalgamation of the sonic and the silence allow us to reevaluate black and white relationships
with Zizek's notion of the national Thing? What performative acts constitute the borders of racial crossings past and present?
What does it mean to be “postracial”? At the beginning of this class, I might have boldly laid claim to such a title, although looking back I’m not sure exactly what that title implies: does race not “matter” (to borrow a pun from Butler) anymore? If I have learned anything from our readings as a whole, it is that race certainly matters; what might matter more is the methods through which race is read and understood. I continue to return to the high of the black-white binary, and I’m not entirely sure we’ve been able to cross over it – the American racial imaginary landscape seems still clearly divided.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping Tavia Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz might offer a way in which that binary could be overcome by reading racial hybridity as a post-racial concept; Nyong’o’s project, however, was more to point out the role hybridity has always played in the American racial imaginary: far from Obama’s election being a postracial moment, this “postracial” “moment” has deep signification in American history. While Nyong’o seems most interested in the hybridity of black/white, I wonder what other possibilities there are for locating moments of hybridity in American (constructed) society.
Can Obama’s speech A More Perfect Union be read as hybridity at play? The history of how the black community came to Christianity (with a nod back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is dripping with colonialism and the circum-Atlantic journey. The concept of an African/American man who identifies as a Christian (while simultaneously being read by many in this country as a secret Muslim) marries together race, politics, and religion: on how many different levels can hybridity be read? On how many levels is it productively read?
Nyong’o’s project demonstrates that hybridity is not a postracial concept; it is inherently racial. And so I return to my original question: what does it mean to be “postracial”? My original (lack of a) definition defeated, I believe it is vital to define this difficult and contentious term.
To quote Alexandre Dumas, “All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.” This module’s exploration of sounds and visuals demonstrates how generalizing loses crucial complexities when it comes to race, culture, and history. Through Weheliye’s discussion of The Fugees, Advanced Chemistry, and Tricky the generalization of how hip-hop is often perceived “turns to [the] global context and scrutinizes the complexities set in motion by the presence of non-U.S. voices in hip-hop” (146). We hear a hip-hop that tells the stories of Haitian refugees, black Germans who “identify with..but they do not identify as African American,” (Weheliye 169) and ideas of “suffocation, death, nightmares, and drug psychosis” (183) that refuse to fit into the mainstream. By expanding generalizations about hip-hop these groups recount black experiences that go beyond American glamourized consumption.
ReplyDeleteNyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz uses many images, predominantly historical, to “unpack the relation between the hybrid future and the mongrel past” (7). From Paul Revere’s The Bloody Massacre where Crispus Attucks appears white, suggesting “how presumptively whiteness operates,” (Nyong’o 41) to Fred Wilson’s assortment of visual displays in “Mining the Museum” that discomfortingly “pose[s] blackness as exception,” (147) Nyong’o depicts race as a past we can not transcend simply by hybridity. Shonibare’s art intelligently remixes racial history by pairing Victorian styled dresses with African prints in his 2001 “The Three Graces.” Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” echoes similar sentiments, reminding the public that race is still and has always been an issue in America and even his ascension into power does not alter that history or future. If these artists and writers continue to confront race and we watch and listen, it is unlikely we will be able to answer questions about a post-racial, hybrid future, but we may instead be able to ask better questions about our ‘dangerous’ racial generalizations today.
Weheliye opens chapter one of Phonographies by saying, “The invention of the phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century offered a different way to split sounds from the sources that (re)produced them, thus generating a new technological orality and musicality in twentieth-century black culture” (19). He goes on to describe how this process opened up opportunities for black individuals that did not exist before. This idea caused me to wonder if the internet has created similar opportunities. On one hand I don’t see how it is any more groundbreaking than books or the phonograph, but it is hard to believe such a life-changing technology did not create some new opportunities. Whether someone is playing an online game, listening to the radio, or chatting online, it is seldom clear what race the source is. This subject may be addressed somewhere that I am not aware of, but if it hasn’t, I believe it should be.
ReplyDeleteNyong’o’s book explored the opportunities afforded to mixed race individuals. She says, “Obama promised to turn a page by making blackness secondary to Americanness” (1). Zizek’s “National Thing” concept forces one to consider what is considered American or black or any number of “things” one guards closely. It reminds me of our frequent class discussions regarding authenticity. Who can lay claim to blackness in America? Nyong’o demonstrates how whites wanted to accept Obama as authentically black but many black individuals felt his hybridity exempted him from this category. I believe this can also relate to Weheliye’s ideas regarding hip-hop. Hybrid forms of hip-hop are often not considered authentic. But, I ask, by whom? The hybrid individual is fighting to gain privileges for a race that may not even claim him. I agree with Nyong’o’s statement, “The impossibly burdened figure of the biracial child cannot conceivably do the work of utopia that we repeatedly impose upon her” (175).
If hybridity is a performative act, then it is often imposed upon the so-called hybrid subject or used in a strategic manner for political, social, or economic gain. As Tavia Nyong’o’s book demonstrates through such examples as, Attucks, Ruggles, Sewally, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Obama the performance of hybridity is racial. Nyong’o utilizes a particular view of hybridity that reads Homi Bhabha’s term (hybridity) against Walter Benjamin’s notion of “homogenous empty time” (Nyong’o, 11-13). This allows Nyong’o to view hybridity as disruptive of temporality. Hybridity might be understood as a performative act that unsettles the linear narrative of “race [as] a theory of history” (11). Nyong’o’s suggestion to historicize hybridity through an examination of the doings of hybridity’s performance is well taken, but how hybridity in and of itself disrupts the narrativazation of race is far less clear.
ReplyDeleteIf hybridity disrupts the linear narrative of race by simply existing, then why do both fantastical dystopian and utopian visions of the future come out of such hybrid notions? Why can the performance of amalgamation by Ruggles’ fellow rider as a “scare crow” and Ruggles’ transgression into assumed whiteness in the “night’s eye” produce such different effects. Both, in my opinion, are performances of hybridity to some degree or another, but I’m not sure I can argue that either disrupts racialized history. If the “hybrid future” and the “mongrel past” are supposed to exist within each incident of hybridity as some sort of disjunctive temporality, then I am lost as to how this serves an understanding of race. Perhaps this is why the book ends with a call to abandon hybridity as a solution to or problem of race: “Who can separate us? Who can bring us together? Let’s leave the ‘fruits of amalgamation’ out of our answers to these questions” (179).
In The Amalgamation Waltz, Tavia Nyong’o challenges the related notions that increasing hybridity will lead to a new, postracial future and that this utopian vision of hybridity is a recent construction. The utopian view of hybridity demonstrates the national Thing’s attempts to appropriate hybridity, thereby reducing its subversive potential but also reducing all hybrid discourses and identities to a single “American” mixed essence. This view bases the postracial on the hybrid’s potential to identify as various racial groups, while denying the specificity of each hybrid identity and claiming that the hybrid will not choose to claim any particular racial identity. I contrast this essentializing hybridity with Alexander Weheliye’s concept of diasporic citizenship, established in Phonographies. Weheliye calls for new ideas of citizenship “that allow for multiple spheres of belonging” (146) – national, transnational, racial, cultural, political – since “diaspora always already implies belonging to at least two populations,” as does hybridity (147). This can clearly be seen in his analysis of German group Advanced Chemistry: “the group claimed German citizenship without renouncing their racial embodiment, thereby obliterating traditional notions of citizenship, which require the transcendence of particularity as a prerequisite for national membership” (165). Weheliye thus provides an alternate model for the diasporic subject that can be extended to the hybrid subject, in which essentialist notions of racial and national identity are discarded in favor multiple specific ideas of personal identity. The hybrid subject would thereby be allowed to identify simultaneously as, for example, black, Indian, and American, thus challenging the normative whiteness associated with the last term and denying the supposed incompatibility of non-white racialized identity and patriotism. A true recognition of hybridity, uncorrupted by the essentializing influence of the national Thing, could therefore have the potential to challenge the continued power of racism without denying the existence of racial identity.
ReplyDelete“A critical approach to race should encompass both the history of racial ideas and the forms of historicity and temporality embedded in those ideas and practices,” Tavia Nyong’o writes in The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory(11). In Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Alexandder Weheliye goes even further—his text takes these notions of embedded ideas and practice and argues that this transcends our common oversimplifications of these ideas under the umbrella of historicity. Sonic manifestations of cultural practice transcend temporal notions of the past and present, but are just as important for understanding how race is performed.
ReplyDeleteI think of pieces like Duke Ellington’s suite “A Drum is a Woman” or Charles Mingus’ “Meditations on Integration” (which I used with Gilroy). These sounds, no matter when they are played, are the sonic manifestation of a performed tradition. Weheliye’s “social histories of sound[…]cut across twentieth-century black cultural production in order to suggest that the interface of these two discourses provides a singular mode of (black) modernity”(3).
In one of the first courses I ever took on jazz, I learned about how jazz, like the blues, was not simply music written and performed, started and stopped, by a group of players. Jazz started long before the first sounds emanated from the musicians’ instruments. Whether it knew it or not, it drew inspiration from and signified and troped upon hundreds of years of practice. Ring shouts and other practices are so inextricably tied to performance practice in America; Nyong’o writes, “Performance is crucial to any accounting for the antinomies of race and slavery in American heritage, of the ironies and complicities of mixtures ethnoracial and otherwise”(13). These performances will always be accompanied by the music of what Robert O’Meally rightly called the “jazz cadence of American culture.”