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CIAO DATE: 7/00
Genres of Nationhood: The "Musico-Literary" Aesthetics of Attachment and Resistance 1
Michael J. Shapiro
International Studies Association
41st Annual Convention
Los Angeles, CA
March 14-18, 2000
Introduction: World Music and (Post) National Attachments
Developing its central themes from the lives of those associated with "world music" - a "universal pop aesthetic" 2 influenced by the globalization of western musical idioms - Salman’s Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet begins with the death of a world renowned rock singer, Vina Apsara, who is swallowed up in a Mexican earthquake. Although much of the novel is centered around a love story involving Vina and the composer, Ormus Cama, a relationship modeled in part on the Orpheus myth, it also contains a more decentered story, which is articulated through the narration of Vina’s occasional lover, the photographer Rai (undoubtedly named after a famous Indian photographer, Raghu Rai). 3 Rai, who decides, he says, to "end my connection with a country, my country of origin as we say now, my home country," finds that his move is enabling for his photographic practice. Only those, he insists, who step out of the frame have access to "the whole picture." 4
Disparaging Hindu nationalism in particular and national attachments in general, Rai and other significant characters in Rushdie’s novel value "multiplicity." And, most significantly, that multiplicity, Rai informs the reader, is realized musically, especially in the "earthquake songs" of Ormus Cama, which "are about the collapse of all walls, boundaries, restraints." 5 Rai serves as Rushdie’s alter ego. His post-national perspective, like Rushdie’s, is forged in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay, where through the viewing of foreign films, among other things, he develops the global imaginary that energizes his photographic practice. His photography, like Ormus Cama’s music, deploys creative acts of imagination aimed at provoking a reception that will counter dangerous, exclusionary (especially nationalistic) myths. Similarly, Rushdie, also a permanent exile from his home country, attributes his creativity as a writer to his resistance to the "reason" of any particular nation-state. His critical posture also stems from his existence "outside of the frame," which allows him to resist the tendency of the state, which, he says, "takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it." 6 And, in imagery that provides the governing trope of his novel, Rushdie, speaking of cosmopolitan exilic writers, notes:
We are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. 7
In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie intensifies the imagery of a shifting ground. The earthquake with which the novel opens migrates conceptually into a mode of global, or in the contemporary idiom, "world music," which, because of its "hybridization," the mixing of diverse musical genres within the arena of a musical utterance, encourages (for some) a supra-national affiliation. 8 Implicitly juxtaposing cracks and fissures, which result from arbitrary episodes of encounter among diverse forces and idioms, with national boundaries, Cama’s "quake songs," Rai informs us, show us a different world than that confined within state. It is a world with a different ethical and emotional valence, one both "worthy of our yearning" and productive of selves "worthy of the world." 9
Rushdie’s novel enacts the very multiplicity to which it refers. His commitment to a trans-national world is articulated through his writing style as well as in the utterances of his alter ego, Rai. Expressing the hybridity he prizes, Rushdie’s sentences contain American and British idioms, and Bombay argot, as well as various other idioms from diverse language formations. This Rushdie is stylistically homologous with the music of his Ormus Cama, who admits at one point that his lyrics ("cockeyed words") and "vowel sounds" are simultaneously his, and someone else’s. 10 Like Rushdie’s prose, the world’s musical hybridity is always already present in the pre-musical sounds of many national patrimonies. As the narration notes, Ormus’ incorporation of so-called "western sounds" in his music is not a betrayal of a pre-existing purity:
The music he had in his head during the unsinging childhood years, was not of the West except in the sense that the West was from the beginning, impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs. 11
Rushdie’s novelistic invocation of world music is not an idiosyncratic fantasy. As a term "world music" emerged in the late 1980's, primarily as a marketing expression to refer to popular music produced by other than Anglo-American sources, for example "Rai music" from Algeria (perhaps an additional encouragement for the name of Rushdie’s character). 12 And certainly the Algerian Berber singer, Djur Djura provides an apt model for Rushdie’s Vina Apsara. Having grown up in France, Djura’s bi-cultural identity has given rise to a version of world music that combines genres while, at the same time, aspiring to a universality of appeal. From Djura’s perspective, her music partakes of a "universal language of emotions," 13 This is a notion not unlike that applied to the music of Rushdie’s fictional global pop bands, a few of which, the reader is informed, "reach the rhythm center of the soul." 14
Despite current tendencies to treat world music as a new genre, analyses of the compositions have shown that it pre-existed its expression. Various past episodes of globalization have created the influences that have made most existing musical forms hybrid. Acknowledging this historical trajectory of globalizing influences, Rushdie’s novel registers contemporary globalization’s impact on musical idiom, primarily by posing some of the same questions about national identities and attachments that have been raised in contemporary, expressly political discourses. For example, suspecting that contemporary globalization poses new challenges to a hospitable international civic order and, like Rushdie, opposed to ethno-nationalism, Jurgen Habermas has attempted to theorize a post—nationalistic version of state sovereignty. Arguing that political subjects ("citizens") receive a "double coding," Habermas notes that the state portion of the nation-state term provides a territorial identity while the nation portion implies a shared cultural community with a historical trajectory. Like Rushdie, however, Habermas is wary of a politics of identity based on shared cultural characteristics. In search of a frame for communal attachment that is not the organic one in which collective solidarity is predicated on the myth of a "prepolitical fact of a quasi-natural people," 15 he advocates a civic as opposed to an ethno-oriented mode of national attachment. Rushdie, who is similarly suspicious of the myths of peoplehood, expresses his wariness of national mythologies with a gloss on the critical reader who manifests a "willing, disbelieving...in the well told tale." 16
Rushdie’s novel as a whole appropriates world music in behalf of a political project that is similar to Habermas’. It reflects a desire to impugn ethno-nationalist myths. But unlike Rushdie’s musical personae, who produce boundary breaking, frontier softening music, Habermas, wants to retain state sovereignties in the face of the dynamics of globalization while promoting a softer, non-ethnic version of the nation.
Yet while resisting the mythologies supportive of ethno-nationalism, Habermas advances a depoliticizing myth in which existing state formations have achieved a national coherence through a benign process of integration. In response to Habermas’s analysis, Timothy Mitchell points out that one cannot isolate imperialism as a phenomenon incidental to state formation: "modern nationalism was not simply a process of integration" but a continuing structure of exclusion perpetuated through state-complicit orders of representation. 17 To elaborate Mitchell’s insight, I want to call attention to diverse non state or indigenous peoples, who are immured within state space. As peoples who constitute an included exclusion - having been transformed from nations into "races," and "minorities" in the discourse of the state - they seek to retain their national and cultural coherence through the articulation of state-resistant discourses and artistic productions. And, most significantly for purposes of this analysis, among their strategies of resistance is the appropriation and reconfiguration of world music.
In the case of its connection with indigenous political initiatives, however, "world music" must be understood in the context of resistance to contemporary neo-imperialism rather than as an ecumenical, border-effacing initiative. Indigenous nations are engaged in a different musical appropriation from the cosmopolitan, supra-nationalistic one that animates Rushdie’s narrative. As one analyst has put it, "popular forms of music have become an effective site of enunciation and people involved in indigenous struggles have mixed traditional elements of music with rock to reach a mass audience through the circulation of world music." 18 The absorption of dominant commercial musical genres into indigenous movements is not, then, simply an extension of the existing structure of global hegemony. The staging of such music within different cultures and moments of reception changes its significance. 19
The indigenous music-nationhood connection and, more specifically, the appropriation of musical genres throughout the history of the Hawaiian nation’s resistance to western colonization, is the ultimate part of my analysis.. However, to provide a context and to pursue my general theme - the music nationhood connection - I turn first to the use of musical genres in the production of national allegiance in Europe in the nineteenth century. Thereafter, I consider two forms of musical production in twentieth century America, the national allegiance-inspiring ethnic songs and theater music, produced primarily by assimilationist Jewish Americans such as Irving Berlin, and the trajectory of resistant forms of African American music from blues, through jazz to hip-hop. 20 As was the case with my treatment of the Rushdie-world music connection, for each phase of the analysis I turn to exemplary forms of writing that parallel the musical enactments: Jewish American novels, which are homologous with the allegiance-seeking of many Jewish American musical forms, African American novels, which enact a blues and/or jazz aesthetic, and finally, in the last phase of the analysis, contemporary Hawaii poetry, which is lyrically homologous with some of the contemporary Hawaiian musical sounds of resistance.
Music and Nationhood: The Production of Allegiance
At the beginning of his influential Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali asserts that "all music, any organization of sounds is...a tool for the creation and consolidation of a community." 21 Attali may be correct when he notes, for example, that Bach and Mozart’s music "reflect the bourgeoisie’s dream of harmony better than and prior to the whole of nineteenth century political theory," but his primary emphasis on the implication of music in the production of consensuality - e.g. his suggestion that "the entire history of tonal music" involves "an attempt to make people believe in a consensual representation of the world" - is belied both by the development in musical (and accompanying literary) forms in the nineteenth century and by the controversies and adjustments in even those forms of music dominated by state institutions. Rather than always regarding "national music as the homogenising imposition of a nation-building elite," it is more sensible, as Peter Wade puts it, to attain an "appreciation of the diversity contained within the nationalist music or discourse about music." 22
Certainly there are diverse venues that provide historical validation for Attali’s position. Grieg’s music served Norwegian nationalism, Sibelius’s was instrumental in the production of a Finnish national identity, a diverse group of Slavic and Hungarian composers created musics that aided and abetted national attachments in Middle European states, and in Columbia in the nineteenth century, bambuco, a culturally hybrid, melodic music, that "counts all Columbians among its authors," was "integrated into the discourses about national identity." 23 But it is doubtless the French case that most profoundly influences Attali’s perspective. After the French revolution, he points out, there were vigorous attempts by the state to "nationalize" music and musicians in order both to insulate musical production from solely commercial forces and to promote the statist ideology of a centralized, unitary national culture. 24
Although Attali comments on the subversive as well as the allegiance-inspiring aspects of music, 25 his analysis is highly abstract, and his brief sketch of the genealogy of musical space fails to register the specific historical instances of musical resistance to French national consolidation. The history of French national opera provides an antidote for Attali’s unfocused gloss and, at the same time, speaks to the music-nationhood relationship he seeks to illuminate. In nineteenth century Europe, generally, musical productions often treated the theme of finding the people’s authentic voice. As a result, a politicized national musical idiom developed, and, in particular, operatic narratives were enlisted to help articulate national identity. 26
This insight is applied in Jane Fulcher’s comprehensive historical treatment of nineteenth century musical theater in Paris. She indicates how French Grand Opera "was a subtly used tool of state." 27 Much of Fulcher’s treatment plays into Attali’s hands inasmuch as a changing structure of legitimation, attending the shift from a monarchical to a republican form of representation, was implicated in the contestations that developed over operatic libretti. Pressures were mounting to make the opera complicit with an emphasis on a new locus of sovereignty, "the voice of the ‘people’." 28 Yet it was also the case that, functioning at the intersection between political and aesthetic impulses, French opera manifested an on-going struggle in the first half of the nineteenth century between the demand that it assimilate a commitment to a national political culture and that it register protests against such a commitment. 29 Continual contention over the proprieties of the way libretti treated the trajectory of French pre-revolutionary history, especially the roles of the monarchy and the Church, and struggles over opera’s role in assimilating a proletarian constituency into the audience of national arts, shaped the alternatively legitimating and subversive nature of French musical theater.
In addition to an almost continuous governmental intervention into the shaping of French opera, journalists were major players in the struggle. In the1840's, for example, when the new Opera National was created, with the aim of integrating French workers into forms of cultural attendance that would produce a national culture by helping to evince passions associated with collective goals, journals enlisted themselves in the project. They urged workers to take advantage of the cultural forms and their readers to support the new opera, noting, for example, "the theater’s function of linking the real nation with the French state by revealing the glorious facts of our history." 30
Nevertheless, despite the high level of contention associated with the development of nineteenth century musical theater in France, the bulk of nationally produced operas, framed and reinforced by literary forms, especially journalism, served national legitimation rather than subversion. However, when one looks at other nineteenth century musical and literary developments, the picture becomes less clear. In particular, I want to call attention to the co-emergence of symbolist poetry and music in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century. David Michael Hertz has pointed convincingly to a parallel between Mallarme’s poetry, in which he obfuscates the "syntactic hierarchy of a poetic line" 31 (in contrast with Baudelaire for whom the "period," the same quadratic form, which organizes orthodox music, structures his poetry), and the "fracturing of the musical period in Wagner" 32 which was influential in the subsequent departures from orthodoxy of the musical compositions of French symbolists such as Debussy.
Referring to Roland Barthes’ argument about the origin and positioning of modern writing such as Malarme’s - that it lies "in the cracks between the orderly progression of the classical text, in the exploitation of ambiguity in the act of signification" 33 - Hertz provides the same imagery for convention-breaking meaning systems as Rushdie. The crack or fissure, which is characteristic of the boundary breaking, world music of the fictional Ormus Cama, is also a figure for the convention breaking of the symbolist movement in nineteenth century French poetry and music. However, in the case of Rushdie’s supra-national cosmopolitanism, the innovative novelistic and musical texts are almost literally deterritorializing; Rushdie’s writing and Ormus Cama’s music are signifying assaults on state borders. Nineteenth century French musical developments function within a state, challenging the rhythms and tonalities that support ethno-nationalisms and the dominant, French, territorial imaginary.
To appreciate the deterritorializing aspects of what Hertz calls "the musico-literary poetics of the symbolist movement," we need to construct "deterritorialization," as a concept that sits ambiguously between the political frames of territorial dominance and the normative systems of intelligibility from which they draw their legitimacy. For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to deterritorialize the proprietary forces through which space is coded - as sacred space, nation-state space or otherwise - is to replace, recontextualize or ambiguate the "order-words" of the meaning systems through which those proprieties are legitimated. 34 Deleuze and Guattari turn frequently to music to exemplify deterritorialization, noting, for example how innovative compositions contain "sound blocks" with no clear point of origin; a deterritorizing musical composition, they argue, reformulates musical punctuation and produces musical utterances that break free from spatial structuring of familiar modes of musical organization. 35
Hertz does not articulate his reading of nineteenth century symbolist musico-literary poetics in a political idiom, but his analysis accords well with the insights of Deleuze and Guattari. Influenced by the Wagnerian disruption of the musical period, Malarme’s poetry and Debussy’s music disrupt familiar meaning conventions. Specifically, Mallarme’s poetry disrupts syntactic expectations - for example substituting a chain of nouns in places where the reader expects adjectives, 36 or inserting "the silence of the ‘blank space’" instead of producing an elaborate symbolism. 37 In effect, Mallarme’s aesthetic ambiguities, which violate poetical conventions, also disrupt the orders of meaning. By creating disjunctures between the "flow of semantic movement" and "the standard code of cultural references," 38 he negates the allegiance- affirming aspects of language.
Debussy’s music has a similar negating effect. Just as "Mallarme’s imagery is not contingent upon a rigid narrative structure...Debussy’s melodic ideas are not contingent upon a rigid tonal scheme." 39 In ignoring the norms of musical periodicity, Debussy’s music resists expectations of closure. Rejecting the authority of conventional tonality, his scales have no conventional points of beginning and ending. For example his scales often have whole-note intervals, a practice that violates the tonality conventions through which musical spacing and narrative is commonly understood. 40 Instead of developing themes, Debussy creates musical fragments, a multiplicity or non-linear set of musical associations that resist instead of moving toward a stable narrative or set of references.
Thus like Mallarme’s poetry, Debussy’s music continually blocks rather than fulfills expectations. 41 The result is a disruption of conventional musical intelligibility and, by implication, the production of a system of counter-intelligibility to those musical genres to which Attali refers when he attributes to them an encouragement of collective allegiance. Indeed, Debussy’s challenges to conventional musical intelligibility distressed French nationalists. Alfred Bruneau, for example, the Inspecteur General des Beaux-Arts and a spokesperson for a republican musical aesthetic, was disturbed by having, on the one hand, an undeniably talented composer, and, on the other, a music that could not be unambiguously appropriated to an espousal of genuinely French republican traits. Because "he could construe Debussy’s innovations only within the narrow framework of his own aesthetic-political discourse," he, like other spokespersons for the Republic, was upset by the resistance of the compositions to an nationalist cultural politics. 42
This lyricism of ambiguity and resistance to closure contained in the musical and poetic texts of the nineteenth century French symbolists provide a frame for considering the resistance to American national allegiance in African American music. One can, for example, draw a parallel between the symbol resistant blank spaces in Mallarme’s poetry and the pauses in Thelonious Monk’s jazz compositions and between Debussy’s disruptions of tonality and production of fragments with different musical associations and John Coltrane’s jazz compositions, which similarly develop fragments of musical association, e.g. his multiple riffs on "My Favorite Things" (discussed below). Edified by the musical disruptions to intelligibility and, by implication, to territorial and national/collective allegiance, I turn to a contrast between the stable referentiality of the music of Irving Berlin, and the intelligibility-shattering of the signifying play in much of the tradition of African American music, from blues, through jazz, to hip-hop. Jumping from the musical developments and national appropriations of France in the nineteenth century to competing musical genres in "America" in the twentieth century, my concern is also with diverse literary and musical personae who have been implicated in both assimilative and disruptive moments in American collective nationhood: assimilative Jewish Americans, assimilation-denied, Afro-Americans, and, ultimately, colonization-resistant Native Hawaiians.
Becoming American: Irving Berlin’s Music and the Jewish-American Novel
By the mid twentieth century, American Jews - at least those who were third generation Americans - were well integrated in an American national imaginary. There is perhaps no better expression of the assimilationist sentiment than that of, Nathan Zuckerman, the author’s alter ego in Philip Roth’s novelistic treatment of the red scare years of the early 1950's:
I was a Jewish child, no two ways about it, but I didn’t care to partake of the Jewish character. I didn’t even know clearly, what it was. I didn’t want to. I wanted to partake of the national character. 43
Nathan Zukerman’s assimilationist sentiment is much more exacerbated among the first and second generation Jewish characters in Jewish American fiction. For these characters, "America" was a reprieve from a history of discrimination in Europe. It was a place of freedom or emancipation as compared for example with Czarist Russia. For diasporic Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in contrast with the more contemporary diasporic third world intellectuals such as Rushdie) there was a strong impulse to become an unambiguously national citizen, to form a bond with the new host country. This impulse to what Sam Girgus has called a "new covenant," articulated itself in both the novels and the musical compositions of Jewish Americans. 44
The drive to assimilation shaping the American Jewish novel has resulted in a particular, ethnic version of what M.M. Bakhtin has identified as the bildungsroman, whose "organizing force" as a genre, according to Bakhtin, is "held by the future" a historical future in which "the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change along with them." 45 Wanting to be an integral part of a new American political culture, many Jewish novelists and composers sought, Gurgus argues, to "recreate American themes and values in the form of a new language that is now part of American consciousness and culture." 46 In the case of the novel, early twentieth century Jewish writers such as Abraham Cahan and Henry Roth constructed young Jewish characters who were in the process of escaping the still alien environment of their families to become converts to American culture. 47 These novelists were not simply treating "America" as a context for the dramas of their characters; they were helping to invent a version of America as a myth and idea, as a historically unique venue and a model for the politics of the future. 48
Irving Berlin’s music was also involved in inventing this kind of America. He said, in 1915 that he was "writing American music," 49 and like many of the Jewish novelists, his early ethnic songs contained a pedagogy about becoming American; they often contained a narrative in which a young ethnic is being absorbed into American culture. I want to call attention in particular to one of Berlin’s lesser known early songs, "Jake! Jake! The Yiddisher Ball-Player," 50 because it articulates with an exemplary American Jewish novel which treats the same theme in the same time period. Participating in or becoming a fan of baseball, the quintessential "American pastime," constitutes an exemplary gestures for assimilating into American culture. Accordingly, in his contemporary novel, The Celebrant, 51 Eric Greenberg reproduces the early twentieth century Jewish version of the bildungsroman in a novel about a Jewish baseball fan. The story-line features the New York Giant’s pitcher, Christy Mathewson, who, at the turn of the century, was one of baseball’s best, and Jackie Kapp, an immigrant Jew who, having failed to realize his dream of becoming a major league pitcher, becomes instead one of Mathewson’s devoted fans. Having joined his family’s jewelry business, he uses his design skills to fashion and present to the great pitcher commemorative rings to celebrate each of his no-hit games.
Like the characters in the early Jewish American novels, Jackie Kapp is in the process of extracting himself from the values and cultural attachments of his "old world" parents. When, for example, he tells them he wants to play professional baseball, they respond that "we had not crossed the ocean to find disgraceful employment," 52 And, although he is at times rebuffed and reminded of his marginal status as he tries to establish his bond with America through his devotion to Mathewson and his pitching prowess - "Listen Jew....stay away from Matty," he is told by team agents - he uses his attachment to the American pastime to effect his transition from immigrant Jew to mainstream American . The transition is symbolized at one point when he and his brother, attending a ball game sing "take me out to the ball game," in both English, and German, the language of their European patrimony: "For it’s ein! zwei! Drie strikes unt raus At the old ballgame." 53
Irving Berlin’s ethnic baseball song about "Jake the Yiddisher ball-player" effects a similar mixing; in this case it’s American vernacular idiom and Jewish/Yiddish syntax:
Go on and give it a smack, crack! That’s a l-la-paloos-a!
Run, you son of a gun, Run, - you son of a gun,
What’s that I hear the people shout?
You’re out! Jake, I lose my half a dollar,
Poi-son you should swal-low; Jake, Jake,
You’re a reg-u-lar fake...
By 1914, however, Berlin had ceased writing ethnic novelty songs. Indeed his movement through musical styles was not unlike the movement of the characters in the Jewish American Bildungsroman, which, in its early version inaugurated by such writers as Abraham Cahan, is organized around a story of the vertical movement of young Jews up the status hierarchy. 54 While his earlier ethnic novelty songs were performed in Vaudevillian theaters, thereafter Berlin moved into mainstream American music, performed in respectable musical theater venues such as Broadway. And at this point, having left his ethnic preoccupation behind, he began to develop a distinctive American voice.
Of course Berlin constructs a hybrid musical voice; like others who wrote for the musical theater - for example Jerome Kern and George Gershwin - he incorporated African American musical styles in his songs. Nevertheless, Berlin saw himself as one constructing a unitary national voice. Once he ceased writing his ethnic novelty songs, he forged ahead with the intention of creating nothing less than a musically inspired American public culture, a "culture" that was one among many sub-cultures in an increasingly urban-dominated nation. Berlin’s intention was largely realized. While, for example, Habsburg Austria expressed itself as a nation in the nineteenth century in operatic and waltz time, the United States in the twentieth expressed its national coherence - at least for much of white America - with the music of Irving Berlin. 55
In contrast with the French symbolists’ disruption of collective structures of intelligibility, and in keeping with Attali’s argument abut the allegiance-producing effects of music-as-the-the-organization-of-sound, Berlin’s music is territorializing; it is complicit with the official mythology of the state as a container of a unitary national culture because it is musically simple; it is designed so that anyone, anywhere in the country, can sing or hum it. It is therefore structured to incorporate rather than disrupt familiar musical styles. Moreover, it is thematically as well as musically territorializing in two important senses. First, its literary geography is national in scope. Berlin’s patriotic songs: "God Bless America," "The Freedom Train," and "the Song of Freedom," among others, map an ideationally undifferentiated national space. 56 Second, its personae are protagonists rather than antagonists. In accord with the ideological frame of the Jewish American Bildungsroman, Berlin’s early songs, as Charles Hamm has pointed out, were usually written as the expression of a single protagonist "whose identity was encoded into the text and music, then projected, clarified, or even changed in the act of performance." 57
In these songs, familiar ethnic identities are reinforced rather than contested, and the single-voiced style tends to operate, as Bakhtin has noted with respect to literary genres, "centripetally." Its meanings pull toward an official, ideological centrality. 58 African American musical forms have contrasted markedly with the territorializing complicity and univocality of Berlin’s music. They have - at times covertly and at times overtly (as in the contemporary hip-hop/rap genre) - incorporated antagonists rather than simply protagonists, because, in effect, black musicians have lived in a different nation than the one recognized and/or invented in the music of Irving Berlin.
The Music of a Different Nation
In a direct articulation of the relationship between hip-hop and African American nationhood, Toure’ suggests that this nation is constituted as a series of musical events rather than in terms of territorial extension:
I live in a country no map maker will ever respect. A place with its own language, culture, history. It is as much a nation as Italy or Zambia, a place my countrymen call the hip-hop nation...We are a nation with no precise date of origin, no physical land, no single chief...The Hip-Hop Nation is a place as real as America on a pre-Columbus atlas...The Nation exists in any place where hip-hop music is being played or hip-hop attitude is being exuded. 59
Similar insights can be derived from a trajectory of African American musical genres that runs from the blues, through jazz and bebop to hip-hop. To appreciate the political predicates of the black national separateness articulated by Toure’, one needs a view of "the political" that contrasts with the simplistic homogenizing gloss on the American polity that animated the musico-literary aesthetics of the Jewish American novelists and composer I have treated.
The primary difference between the politics of Jewish American and African American musico-aesthetics relates to a difference in the locus of wrongs the two groups have experienced. The vertical movement of the Jewish American, which is part of the thematic of the Jewish American novel, and is intrinsic to Irving Berlin’s construction of musical America, has been largely realized despite significant levels of discrimination. At a minimum, the American scene has been relatively liberating for this group compared with the European scene they left behind. Spatially as well as in terms of outcome, the African American case is quite different. Most of the wrong that focuses their politics has been experienced on the American scene.
After Jacques Ranciere’s radically egalitarian approach to "the political," we can construe politics as not mere "policy" - the enactment of the principles of democratic norms: "Politics is not the enactment of the principle, the law, or the self of a community," he argues; it is something instituted by those who have heretofore have had "no right to be counted as speaking beings" and have, accordingly, made themselves "of some account" by "placing in common a wrong." 60 This account of politics resonates well with the African American experience. The trajectory of African American music in this century has not articulated a felicitous view of American nationhood. As Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones) has argued, the structure and thematics of blues, for example, reflect the historical pressures on African Americans and the structure of their adaptations. 61 As a result, the political predicates of African American musical forms are perhaps best captured in Ranciere’s summary of the form that politics takes when it is applied to its irreducible problematic, that of "equality." Politics is deployed, he asserts, on the "processing of a wrong." 62 Certainly many white Americans have also been excluded from the America that Irving Berlin tunefully invented. White composer/performers from Woody Guthrie to Bruce Springsteen have constructed counter-Berlin tunes ("This Land is Your Land" and "Born in the USA" respectively), which speak to the parts of the nation that have not enjoyed Irving Berlin’s "freedom train": "where the en-gen-eer is Un-cle Sam." 63 Guthrie and Springsteen, like African American blues composers, "use geographic makers" 643 to identify spaces where people are left out of the "American dream." But while the focus of Guthrie and Springsteen has been on working people, the blues genre has derived its forms as well as its objects of attention as a result of racism. The African American experience, from slavery onward, which has been wholly incommensurate with that of other Americans, has given rise to distinctive literary and musical genres.
Although, as Toure’ suggests, African American nationhood is realized in moments rather than in an institutionalized territorial extension, there are distinctive spatial predicates of black politico-musical forms. As is the case with Rushdie’s attachment to world music, the African American relationship to blues (and subsequent blues-inflected musics) arises from their dual diasporic experience - from Africa to the American south and, subsequently for many, to northern U.S. cities. The blues speaks, as LeRoi Jones puts it, to African peoplehood; "the history of the music, he argues, "is the history of the people...the Afro-American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, or narrative, or what have you." It is "the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection of Afro-American life, our words, the libretto, to those actual. Lived lives." 65
To get a purchase on the imbrication of the history of blues and the political predicates of the African American experience, one needs a dynamic and sectional rather than a static and undifferentiated national model of U.S. territoriality. Clyde Woods supplies such a model in his study of the emergence of a blues aesthetic in the context of racial struggles in the Mississippi Delta. The development of blues as a musical idiom cannot, according to Woods, be separated from the peculiar political economy surrounding its regional genesis. "Representational structures of African Americans [were] created, he notes, within the bowels of the plantation." 66 Woods argues that blues is more than simply a musical form; it is a generalized aesthetic practice and an epistemology. It is the musical expression of attempts to achieve an "autonomy of thought and action in the midst of constant surveillance and violence;" and, as a result, is part of "a highly developed tradition of social interpretation." 67 Subsequent to its regional development - in diverse areas of the South - blues hit the road along with the African American musicians who were a part of the move to northern cities. Whereas "classic blues" developed as entertainment and folklore, an expressive medium of a formerly captive people in a rural setting, in a city setting, "the blues and blues-oriented jazz of the new city dwellers was harder and crueler...the tenements, organized slums, gin mills, and back-breaking labors in mills, factories, or on the docks had to get into the music somehow," Jones/Baraka points out. 68
The spatial contrast between the way African American blues developed and the music of Irving Berlin is telling. While Berlin’s music spoke to the vertical movement of immigrant protagonists, precisely at the time of Berlin’s ethnic novelty songs, African American movement was horizontal, from a marginalized status in the South to a similar one in the North. By 1914, Jones/Baraka points out, "masses of Negroes began to move to the Northern industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, New York," 69 and what was vertical was not their movement but the city, whose "verticality" divided the blues into different types 70 - the older more expressive and vocal forms and the newer, highly instrumentalized, jazz-oriented kind that incorporated aspects of white music. However, despite the increasing hybridity of African American blues and bluesy jazz, as it departed from its predominantly African-inspired vocal and rhythmic forms, it remained a resistant, highly coded mode of signifying musical expression of the African American "meta society." 71 It reflected the situation of a separate people whose music enacted their sense of difference and their struggle for solidarity.
The signifyin’ style of African American musical forms, in blues through hip-hop - a quintessentially African-inspired mode of expression 72 - contrasts markedly with the representational and narrative orientations of many white musical forms. As the music of the "other" on the American scene, African American music manifests a fugitivity. Rather than seeking, like the protagonists in Berlin’s music, to mature into a fundamentally American mode of intelligibility, the music seeks to evade the normal structures of meaning. Like the linguistic play of blacks during the slavery period, when spoken and musical forms contained a "willful abuse," 73 designed to construct the referents of the language within a different meaning context, the subsequent blues through jazz compositions and performances contain multiple riffs on the same themes and contradictory clashes of musical voice, designed to reflect the resistant singularity of an African America way of being. It can be construed as a form of nationhood within a nation that achieves its coherence through a struggle against imposed interpretations of African American identity and against the white, commercial appropriation of the musical expressions of their peoplehood.
Among the numerous relevant examples is the music of jazz musician, John Coltrane, who kept revising his sounds and their frames of musical expression to resist their absorption into popularized forms of music. His multiple riffs on common musical themes - for example his many versions of "My favorite Things" from Mary Poppins - constitutes an anti-representational approach to meaning. Resisting complicity with the musical forging of an undifferentiated national public, Coltrane’s improvisational musical style contrasts dramatically with the music of a Berlin, whose appropriation of African American musics such as ragtime is in service of constructing a univocal national culture. In accord with one of his favorite musical words, Berlin sought to provoke a national "Hurrah," a form of undifferenitated mass communication. 74
In contrast with Berlin’s music, and not unlike Debussy’s resistance to the musical forms being appropriated to construct nineteenth century French nationhood, Coltrane’s music combines musical fragments that he then binds with "continuously different musical associations to produce compositions that resist appropriation to an American national imaginary. Preserving a blues aesthetic, Coltrane fashions an evasive musical art outside of expected models of "lyrical control." 756 In so doing he connects up with a black nationhood that exceeds any particular nation- state space, existing instead in "dispersed structures of feeling." 76 The music is therefore both enclosed within the American state, inasmuch as it is essentially urban, and outside of it inasmuch as it is connected with dispersed musical forms that are legacies of the black diaspora through the Atlantic.
Accompanying the urbanization of blues and jazz, evident in the musical styles ultimately elaborated by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, among others, was an African American literary outpouring, especially by writers associated with what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's. A blues aesthetic is manifest in the novels and poetry of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and many others associated with this moment in African American literary production. 77 These lines from Hughes’ poem "Lenox Avenue: Midnight" are exemplary of a literary manifestation of the urban-centered version of a blues/jazz aesthetic:
The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey...
The Broken heart of love
The weary heart of pain,-
Overtones,
Undertones,
To the rumble of street cars,
To the swish of rain... 78
The literary manifestation of a diaspora-inspired version of a blues aesthetic - a poetic expression of African American voices and experiences after their displacement from the South to the North - continues in the contemporary writing of African American authors. For example, it structures Walter Mosley’s novel RL’s Dream. 79 The "RL" in the novel is R L Johnson, a blues singer from the Mississippi who died in 1938 at a young age. His impact on the blues is represented through a fictional disciple, Atwater Soupspoon Wise, who is dying of cancer in new York as the novel opens. Expelled from his flat, he is taken in and has medical assistance arranged (through creative fraud) by another displaced southerner, Kiki Waters, a white woman, who is also in pain because of a stabbing. Before the novel ends, Soupspoon seemingly captures the essence of R L’s blues while performing in his last musical gig in a rundown gambling spot. The blues, which emerges first in the Delta, manifests itself again as Soupspoon, having chased it all over the Delta, following R L’s tortured path of "sufferin’ and singin,’" finally catches up with it, far from home, near the end of his life.
Mosley’s novel is not merely about the blues and some of the persons associated with it; his writing expresses it. The story of the two diasporic characters from the South, Soupspoon and Kiki, is scripted as "a prose ballad - a blues - of pain and redemption." 80 This blues-inflected "prose ballad" is articulated most frequently, in the thoughts of Soupspoon - for example in a moment when he awakened by Kiki’s cries during a nightmare: "The blankets were kicked off her bed. Her naked behind was thrust up in the air because she was hunch d over the pillow and some sheet." And Soupspoon reacts:
A white woman; skinny butt stuck out at me like a ripe peach on a low branch. There was nobody left to tell. Nobody left to understand how strange it was, how scary it was. Nobody to laugh and ask, "An’ then what you did?" An then I died, Soupspoon said to himself. There was nobody to hear him. And even if there was - so what? That was the blues. 81
Rap/Hip-Hop: African American and Hawaiian Modalities
The contemporary impulse to preserve a distinctive and politically enabling African American aesthetic articulates itself less through intricate coding and evasion than through a direct form of musically expressed critique. The diaspora to the North is now an old story. The "hood" and the street are the new one. There are occasional fugitive elements of hip-hop that reveal a genesis in the blues aesthetic, but, as Paul Gilroy points out, it is more of a hybrid, world music; it combines African American vernacular culture with Caribbean equivalents. 82 And, most significantly, much of its force derives from a different approach to the spaces of African American existence. As Tricia Rose has pointed out, Rap music television articulates a decidedly African American spatial predicate. Unlike heavy metal performances, for example, which are simply shown on sound stages, the scenes of its performance as well as its content reference the "hood, the street, posses." It displays an explicit recognition of the terrain of African American habitation. 83
As primarily a music of political critique, hip-hop was the result "a concerted effort by young urban blacks to use mass-culture to facilitate communal discourse across a fractured and dislocated national community." 84 And it has reached beyond an African American national community, as hip-hop artists aspire to a dialogue that reaches a trans national, diasporic black counter public scattered throughout the globe. 85 However broad or limited its global reach and political effectiveness among dispersed, black counter publics, hip-hop has migrated across the Pacific and been incorporated into the contemporary musical expression of Hawaiian nationhood. Activist musicians, who constitute one dimension of a growing, multidimensional Hawaiian sovereignty movement, have recently produced a set of songs that articulate an indigenous political initiative aimed at reconvening a Hawaiian nation that was destroyed at the time of the US annexation at the end of the nineteenth century.In one of the pieces in the collection, Big Island Conspiracy: Reflective but Unrepentent, Hawaiian activist/composer/performer Kelii W. ‘Skippy’ Ioane delivers the following lines, which combine English and Hawaiian words in a hip- hop musical rhythm:
Colonial thugs with their bible and drugs - snitches, dopers, religious interlopers. The mission to seize secure ka aina pa’a i ka [the land that is held/secured in the] native pure. Cultures trampled, intellectual examples. Righteousness brought, the European thought...Steal the soul of the man you steal the life of the land. American sugar, pilgrim descendants. Broke the tribal laws of their own ten commandments. Thou shall not lie, thou shall not steal. From peaceful, friendly nations, - whos’s gods are real - touch that - haina ia mai ana kapuana, o ka poe i ka aina [tell the story of the people who love their land] - touch that. 86
Conclusion: The Musico—Literary Appropriations of Hawaiian Sovereignty
The musical poetics of Ioane’s song resonates with the history of the Hawaiian lyrical tradition. It is a mele, a Hawaiian word that applies to equally music or poetry. 87 And the last quoted line (translated as: "tell the story of the people who love their land"), is from a Hawaiian protest song, Kaulana ka puana, composed in 1893 and "still sung today by Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiian people] as a call to sovereignty." 88 Moreover, the collection as a whole evokes a history of Hawaiian traditional musical forms: for example a chant to the Goddess Pele, entitled "Chant," and Hawaiian/popular music hybrids: for example a ballad, "Samuela Texas," that combines chanted Hawaiian laments ("Auwe, auwe, auwe"), African American hymn-like moments ("Samuela Texas call Mr Pharaoh, let the original people go"), and rap styles ("Annexation, constipation, Kanaka cities in a stolen nation"). The collection is of a piece with the modern trajectory of postcontact Hawaiian musical forms, for since the period of western contact, through the moment of the annexation, and into the present, Hawaiian/western musical hybrids have been part of a Hawaiian politico-aesthetic resistance to colonization. Music, as Elizabeth Buck has put it in her analysis of postcontact Hawaiian cultural politics, "has been a continuing site of resistance for Hawaiians." 89
Without going into detail on the genealogy of Hawaiian hybrid musical forms, I want to call attention first to the composition of national anthems by a succession of Hawaiian royalty, for, as John Charlot has pointed out, "the Hawaiian national anthems are prime examples of bi-cultural religio-political thinking and expression." 90 And, more generally, like all postcontact musical forms, the music, although a western form, written in a western idiom, is, at important historical moments, appropriated to a project of preserving a Hawaiian nation.
Among the exemplary instances of anthems as national political initiatives is the first "truly original Hawaiian anthem" Hawaii Pono’i. 91 written by King Kalakaua (1874-1891). Like the development of French Grand Opera earlier in the same century, the anthem enacts a shift away from the cosmologically-oriented legitimation of a monarchy and nobility and toward a recognition of a social order and nation; it speaks to a nationhood that evokes a "people." However, because, in the Hawaiian case, the "people" are increasingly subjugated by a foreign power, the resistance dimensions of the music (as has been the case with much African American music) are esoteric. For example, attempting to keep alive the historical consciousness necessary to maintain a Hawaiian national imaginary, Kalakaua’s anthem articulates a perspective of a "unified nation" while, at the same time, dissimulating its commitments "to exploit the gap between Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian understanding." 92 Although overlaid with a non-Christian, religious rhetoric, Hawaii Pono’i is primarily a political anthem. In addressing "Hawaii’s own," and devoting attention to the specifics of the social order, the anthem is organized primarily around the problem of "the unity of the nation as well as its problems." 93
The impulse to Hawaiian nationhood has remained alive in the increasingly western—oriented musical forms since the annexation. The shift to western instrumentation and primarily to English language vocals has not compromised the music’s functioning within a Hawaiian collective imaginary. Postcontact Hawaiian musical forms are in effect akin to what Deleuze and Guattari have called a "minor literature." Focusing on Franz Kafka’s texts, written in Prague by a minority writer in the dominant German language of the country, Deleuze and Guattari argue that those who write from a minoritarian perspective within major literatures provide a politicized mode of articulation; they "express another possible community and forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility." 94 Writing from an alternative locus of enunciation, minority writers reinflect the words and expressions in the major language, giving themselves identity space they lack when the utterances come from the controlling majority. Put differently and more specifically, Hawaiian musical inscriptions are involved in what Russell Potter has called a "resistance vernacular...deploying variance in order to deform and reposition the rules of ‘intelligibility’ set up by the dominant [musical] language." 95
Hawaii musical and poetic forms (as minor literatures in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense and as "resistance vernacular"s in Potter’s) have amplified their political nation-referencing impact by adopting diverse politico-aesthetic forms from other political movements. Skippy Ioane’s incorporation of hip-hop into his Hawaiian sovereignty mele is the most recent in a history of politicized hybrid musico-literary appropriations that have accompanied a growing set of Hawaiian sovereignty movements. 96
From the late 1960's through the 1980's, for example, a blues aesthetic migrated into musical and poetic articulations of Hawaiian national consciousness. Like Ioane’s recent incorporation of hip-hop styles in his "In Flagrante Delecto," an earlier Hawaiian anti colonial, nationhood movement was accompanied by an African American musical style, a blues aesthetic manifested in such songs as Liko Martin’s and Thor Wold’s "Nanakuli Blues," which includes the lines:
The beaches they sell to build there hotels
My fathers and I once knew
Birds all alone, the sunlight at dawn
Singing Nanakuli blues. 97
The song served at the time (1968), as among other things, an "anthem" to a Hawaiian nationhood movement spurred by the plight of Hawaiian farmers being displaced from their homesteads in Waihole and Waikane Valleys on the North side of the Island of Oahu. 98 More generally, the major impetus of the blues-inflected mele from the Waihole-Waikane protests through the1980's was a reaction against the desecration of Hawaiian places as a result of a tourist- and military-oriented political economy.
The application of a blues aesthetic is produced in Hawaiian poetry as well as song, as for example in these lines from Hawaiian activist/scholar Haunani Kay Trask’s, "Agony of Place":
There is always this sense:
A wash of earth
Rain, palm light falling
Across ironwood...
and yet
our love suffers...
in a land of tears
where our people
go blindly
servants of another
race, a culture of machines... 99
In the song form of the Hawaiian mele, the blues aesthetic was manifested in the 1980's by the continued popularity of "Nanakuli Blues,’ which, in the hands of various Hawaiian performers, became "Waimanalo Blues." On one occasion, when sung by Israel, ‘Iz’ Kamakawiwo’o’le and the Makaha sons of Ni’i’hau, Iz prefaced the song, which celebrates the beauty of the Hawaiian landscape and laments its destruction by the economic practices of colonizers, with the remark, "Dis song tell how them stu-u-pid Haoles [whites or foreigners] fight ovah land, when it not theirs to fight ovah." 100 Through its successive performances, the song aligns itself with a continuous tradition of political mele, a "thin fragile line of social protest in Hawaiian music that, since the annexation, had been kept alive mainly in the rural areas by a handful of respected artists." 101
Finally, in the early 1990's, prior to Skippy Ioane’s appropriation of hip-hop, a "Jawaiian" musical form emerged. It is a popular musical style that incorporates a Reggae politico-aesthetics into a Hawaiian setting. 102 This development, like many of the indigenous reinflections of world musics, bears comparison with Salman Rushdie’s novelistic celebration of global rock musics that defy or transcend the world forged by the spread of the European nation-state. However, unlike Rushdie’s cosmopolitan political vision, which glimpses a post national future, the indigenous usages of global, hybrid musical forms visit specific histories of wrong associated with the process of colonization. Potter’s caution against neglecting the specific sites within which transcultural musical forms are developed is relevant here:
It would be foolish...to hail all transcultural or multicultural recordings or cross-influences, since the whole point of vernacular art forms is that they come from a particular place at a particular time, and are sites not only of invention and creativity, but of a history of resistance. 103
The musical repertoires articulate attempts to restore forms of nationhood that have been suppressed and have remained relatively uncoded in reigning official and academic political discourses. Just as the attachments supportive of nation state formation were often aided and abetted by musico-literary cultural productions in the nineteenth century, of late the resistances of alternative nationhood initiatives are receiving musico-literary assists. New hybrid musics reflect an indigenous locus of enunciation and, despite the considerable noise from the Tin Pan Alley-ization or commercialization of their music (against which African American resistant musical forms also had to struggle), manage to articulate compelling political voices of those who heretofore have had no "right to be counted as speaking beings." 104
Endnotes
Note 1: The hyphenated term, "musico-literary" is borrowed from David Michael Hertz, who applies it to the convergence of the poetry and music of the French symbolist movement in the nineteenth century. See The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 2: The expression is Simon Frith’s in his "Introduction" to World Musics, Politics and Social Change (New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 2. Back.
Note 3: I am indebted to my colleague, Sankaran Krishna, for pointing out the connection between the actual Rai and the fictional Rai. Back.
Note 4: Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 203. Back.
Note 6: Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 14. Back.
Note 8: My use of the term "hybridity" is based on its application to novelistic utterances by M.M. Bakhtin, who defines the hybrid character of novelistic discourse as "a mixture of two social languages within the arena of an utterance.": See M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in Michael Holquist ed. The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 358. Among the more critical uses of the concept of "hybridity" - in a broad cultural sense - are Homi K. Bhabha’s in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Nestor Garcia Canclini’s in Hybrid Cultures Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Back.
Note 9: Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, p. 20. Back.
Note 11: Ibid., pp. 95-6. Back.
Note 12: See Tony Mitchell, "Indigenous Music and Music television in Australia," Perfect Beat 1:1 July 1992), pp 1-16. Back.
Note 13: The quotation, based on an interview with Djur Djura, is from Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 90. Back.
Note 14: Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, p. 157. Back.
Note 15: Jurgen Habermas, (1998) "The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship," Public Culture 10: 2 (Winter, 1998), p. 406. Back.
Note 16: Rushdie, The Ground Beneath He Feet, p. 458. Back.
Note 17: Timothy Mitchell, Nationalism, Imperialism, Economism: A Comment on Habermas," Public Culture 10: 2 (Winter, 1998), p.10. Back.
Note 18: Robin Balinger "Sounds of Resistance," in Ron Sakolsky and Fred Wei-Han Ho eds. Sounding Off: Music as subversion/Resistance/Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia), p. 15. James Clifford’s analysis of diasporas is relevant here. He points out that "specific cosmopolitanisms articulated by diasporic discourses are in constitutive tension with nation-state/assimilationist ideologies. They are also in tension with indigenous, and especially with autochthonous claims." See James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology 9: 3 (August, 1994), p. 308. Back.
Note 19: This point is made by Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore, "World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate," in Ibid., p. 125. Back.
Note 20: The contrast between the assimilation Jewish American, Irving Berlin, and the African American, anti-assimilation, LeRoi Jones, is reflected in their name changes. Irving Berlin was originally named Israel Baline. LeRoi Jones Africanized his name to become Amiri Baraka. Back.
Note 21: Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19 ), p. 6. Back.
Note 22: Peter Wade, "Music, blackness and national identity: three moments in Columbian history," Popular Music 17: 1 (January, 1998), p. 4 Back.
Note 24: Attali, Noise, p. 55. Back.
Note 25: Attali states, for example, that "with music is born power and its opposite: subversion, " Ibid., p. 6. Back.
Note 26: Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon., "Otherhood Issues: Post-National Operatic Narratives," Narrative 3: 1 (January, 1995), p. 1. Back.
Note 27: Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 1. Back.
Note 31: Hertz, The Tuning of the Word, p. 13. Back.
Note 32: Ibid., pp. 17-18. Back.
Note 34: See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 83 and 87. Back.
Note 35: Ibid., pp.296-97. Back.
Note 36: Hertz, The Tuning of the Word, p 16. Back.
Note 40: I am indebted to the ethno-musicologist Ricardo Trimelos for these insights into Debussy’s liberties with tonality. Back.
Note 41: See Hertz, The Tuning of the Word, p. 78 for this formulation with respect to Mallarme. Back.
Note 42: The quotation and material on Bruneau’s reaction to Debussy’s music are from Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics & Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44. Back.
Note 43: Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 39. Back.
Note 44: Sam B. Girgus, The New Covenant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Back.
Note 45: M. M. Bakhtin, "The Bildungsroman," in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist eds. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays Trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 22-23. Back.
Note 46: Girgus, The New Covenant, p. 12. Back.
Note 49: Irving Berlin: quoted in John Lahr, "Revolutionary Rag," The New Yorker March 3rd (1999), p 78. Back.
Note 50: "Jake! Jake! The Yiddisher Ball-Player,"words by Blanche Merrill, music by Irving Berlin in Charles Hamm ed. Irving Berlin: Early Songs Vol. III 1913-14 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1994), pp. 74-77. Back.
Note 51: Eric Rolf Greenberg, The Celebrant (New York: Everest House, 1982). Back.
Note 54: Girgus, The New Covenant, p. 18. Back.
Note 55: This point is made by Mark Steyne in Broadway Babies Say Good Night (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 75. Back.
Note 56: See The Songs of Irving Berlin: Patriotic Songs (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1991). Back.
Note 57: Charles Hamm, "Genre, performance and ideology in the early songs of Irving Berlin," Popular Music 13: 2 (May, 1994), p. 145. Back.
Note 58: See M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press: 257-422. Back.
Note 59: Toure’ "Hip-hop Nation: In the End, Black Men Must Lead," New York Times on the web 8/22/99. Back.
Note 60: Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement Trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 27. Back.
Note 61: LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1999), p. 66. Back.
Note 63: See "The Freedom Train" in The Songs of Irving Berlin: Patriotic Songs, pp. 20-23. Back.
Note 64: See Bryan Garman’s treatment of the influence of Guthrie’s music on Springsteen: "The Ghost of History: Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song," Popular Music and Society 20: 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 69-117. Back.
Note 65: Jones, Blues People, p. ix. Back.
Note 66: Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta, (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 20. Back.
Note 68: Jones, Blues People, p. 105. Back.
Note 71: Jones’s expression in Ibid., p. 57. Back.
Note 72: On the African heritage of African American signifyin’ in both literary and musical forms, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 73: See Nathaniel Mackey, "Other: From Noun to Verb," in Krin Gabbard ed. Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 83. Back.
Note 74: Lahr, "Revolutionary Rag" p.78. Back.
Note 75: The quotation is from Jim Merod’s analysis of the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane: "Intellectual Collaboration in the Age of Technological Overdetermination: Miles Davis and John Coltrane," boundary 2 24:1 (Spring, 1997), p. 100. Back.
Note 76: The quotation is from Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 3. Back.
Note 77: For a treatment of the manifestation of a blues aesthetic in African American writing, see Houston A. Baker, Jr. Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Back.
Note 78: Langston Hughes, "Lenox Avenue: Midnight," in The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 39. Back.
Note 79: Walter Mosley, RL’s Dream (New York W. W. Norton, 1995). Back.
Note 80: The quotation, which captures the essence of the style, is from the book jacket copy: Ibid. Back.
Note 82: Gilroy, The Black Atlantic , p. 32. Back.
Note 83: See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, Hew Hampshire: University Press of America, 1994), p. Back.
Note 84: Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said, (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 136. Back.
Note 85: See Ibid., p. 165. Back.
Note 86: Kelii W. (Skippy) Ioane, "In Fla Grante Delecto," in Big Island Conspiracy: Reflective but Unrepentent (Honolulu: Deep Ka’a Ka’a Records, 1999). The translation of the Hawaiian expressions are by Noenoe Silva. Back.
Note 87: That the mele is either a musical or poetic form was noted in early western analyses of Hawaiian lyrical practices. See, for example, Nathaniel Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (Honolulu: Mutual, 1998). For a contemporary treatment from a Hawaiian perspective on the mele, see Noenoe Silva, Ke Ku’ E Kupa’aloa Nei Makou: Kanaka Maoli Resistance to Colonization (Honolulu: Department of Political Science, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, 1999), especially Chapter 4, "The Merrie Monarch: Genealogy, Cosmology, and Performance Art as Resistance," pp. 109-153. Back.
Note 88: Silva, Ke Ku’ E Kupa’aloa Nei Makou: Kanaka Maoli Resistance to Colonization, p. 167. Back.
Note 89: Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 118. Back.
Note 90: John Charlot, The Hawaiian Poetry of Religion and Politics (Honolulu: Institute for Polynesian studies, 1985), p. 15. Back.
Note 94: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Or Towards a Minor Literature Trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.17. Back.
Note 95: Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 68. Back.
Note 96: Despite significant division in the local Hawaiian community, there are at present there are at least "40 native Hawaiian groups actively promoting the restoration of the Native Hawaiian Nation." R.D.K. Herman, "Hawai’i at the Crossroads," in D. W. Woodcock ed. Hawai’i: New Geographies (Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i-Manoa, 1999), p. 80. Back.
Note 97: Nanikuli Blues Credits Back.
Note 98: The anthem reference and suggestion about the efficacy of the song is taken from Jon Osorio, "Songs of Our Natural Selves: The Enduring Voice of Nature in Hawaii Music," Unpublished paper, (Honolulu: Department of Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai’i). Back.
Note 99: Haunani Kay Trask, "Agony of Place," in Joseph P Balaz ed. Ho’omanoa (Honolulu: Ku Pa’a Inc 1989), pp. 8-9. Back.
Note 100: George H. Lewis, "Don’ Go Down Waikiki: Social Protest and Popular Music in Hawaii, in Reebee Garfalo ed. Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 171. Back.
Note 101: Ibid., p. 180. Back.
Note 102: See Andrew N. Weintraub, "Jawaiian Music and Local Cultural Identity Hawaii," in Philip Hayward ed. Sound Alliances (New York: Cassell, 1998), pp. 78-88. Back.
Note 103: Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, p. 145. Back.
Note 104: Ranciere, Disagreement, p. 27. Back.
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