AbstractsIn 1915 the Ottoman Turkish government ordered the deliberate expulsion of Armenians living in the eastern portion of present-day Turkey. Any culture that undergoes such a cataclysmic event faces not only the process of recovering from its horrors, but also that of retaining, re-discovering, or reforming an identity that would serve to unify them again. Music can often be the glue that binds after massive losses and deportations. For diasporic communities, music becomes a site for the negotiation of multiple consciousnesses, or identities. It serves as a nexus of cross-references that at once symbolizes the past (the homeland and its associated myths and symbols), the present (displacement), and the reappropriation of these in the future (reconstructing the past and present in order to create meaning). The study of music in diasporic communities offers many opportunities for the exploration of music’s function in forming cultural identity—whether it serves to reflect, create, or confront it. In addition to the symbols to which these communities cling in order to preserve their identity, they must also moderate their position with their surroundings, whether it is to reject, embrace, or negotiate between the two. For the Armenian diaspora, music plays a crucial yet little studied role in identity maintenance and appropriation. A basic question thus guiding any such study would concern the ideological circumstances out of which musical identities have emerged. This paper will utilize a semiotic approach to study the effects of the 1915 massacre on Armenian music and the subsequent efforts of composers to recover Armenian idioms, adopting them as signifiers of national identity in their own art music. The musical “negotiations” in the works of Armenian-American compos! er Alan Hovhaness reveal the complex, often problematic, nature of the artistic search for cultural identity. Bald will present excerpts from his 2003 documentary film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music as a starting point for considering the relationship between music and politics and asking a series of questions: What role(s) does music play in processes of social change? How do musics and music scenes embody, convey, and impart a "politics"? What happens when we locate the politics of music not in its lyrical content or in its direct relationship to activist campaigns (bands playing benefit concerts, etc) but rather in its ability to form and transform political actors, to create and catalyze new political unities and communities? Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian electronic music in 1990s Britain, as well as the decades of cultural and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Shot independently on digital video over the course of seven years, Mutiny features Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental and a host of other British musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent. Through a mix of live performances, candid interviews and seldom-seen archival footage, Mutiny presents the story of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s, defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents' cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds. The basic root of scratching is a musical instrument, you’re figuring out all these time signatures and rhythms and patterns and notes… We’re making our own music. And if this world doesn’t accept us we’re gonna make our own world. (from an interview with DJ QBert, 1999) The notion of turntablism was first articulated by DJ Babu of the World Famous Beat Junkies in 1995. According to Babu, a turntablist is “a person who uses the turntables not to just play music, but to manipulate sound and create music”. With this definition comes the reconceptualization of the role and creations of DJs whose music moves beyond the smooth mixes of the party DJ. Babu’s definition marks the beginnings of a community built by and for turntablist musicians. This community of turntablists can trace its beginnings from the sound creations of early 20th century avant-garde sound artists such as John Cage. In the same light, one can mark the changes and developments within the technology of sounds made by hip hop’s party DJs. From the beginning scratches of Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore to the innovative chirps, tweaks, and beatjuggling of the Beat Junkies and Invisibl Skratch Picklz, turntablism takes into account the connection between musicality and virtuousity. These advancements bring to the foreground the musical qualities of turntablist creations and complicate the divide between “noise” and Western classical notions of music. By utilizing musicality and virtuousity as performance imperatives, turntablists find themselves articulating their sounds through Western musical terms and traditions (as noted by DJ Qbert’s quote). At the same time, the funk and grooves of the beats serve as traces of turntablists’ particular community formations. In this paper, I will use the particular case of DJ QBert’s car accident and recovery as the starting point for his career as and place in the world of turntablism. Confined to a wheelchair for three months, QBert chose to sit in his parent’s garage in Daly City—a suburb of San Francisco-- and commit himself to learning turntablism’s sounds and techniques. Coming after the work of Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of scapes as ways of understanding disjunctive spaces where the global and local meet, Pilipino American soundscapes will attempt to deal with the various flows of the local and global through each other in the fields of hip hop music, technology, and ethnicity. The specific site of the garage provides a rich space for examining the particular issues of suburban mobility and architecture, spaces for youth culture, and Pilipino immigration’s relationship to technology. Not an isolated or exceptional case, QBert only gestures towards a culture of Pilipino American y! outh for whom DJing and turntablism proves a welcome release from the isolating and hegemonic air of suburbia. In the summer of 2000 a number of Detroit community members who had been researching their family history discovered that their families had been deeply affected by the forced removal of Mexican Americans through a federally sponsored “repatriation” program. In the metropolitan Detroit area alone, 15,000 people were “repatriated” to Mexico during this era, many of whom were U.S. citizens. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez document this in their book The Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930’s (University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Using this book as a point of departure, Mexican American students from the Chicano/Boricua studies department at Wayne State University began researching their own family histories in the Detroit community. When first broached, the subject of repatriation was initially met with resistance by many of these Mexican American students’ families. It is only through their continued efforts, and a need to fully understand their own heritage, that they overcame their families’ trepidation and have achieved a strong sense of empowerment in the telling of these stories, their grandparent’s stories, for themselves, their families and the communities where these stories have the deepest associations. Working through a generation of pain, mistrust and betrayal, the story of what truly happened to thousands of Americans during this period of history is finally being explored and digested through art, scholarship and civic action. Since race and ethnicity are bound so tightly in this history, as are the understanding of perceptions of self and other and how these find expression in creation, performance and perception of art and experience, at this time in these annals there exists a unique opportunity to examine the historical, social and artistic processes and their significance in the emerging clarity around a once secret and obscured section of history for a specific population. In the process of understanding their own stories, various artists are reflecting the impact of that era in their work. Nora Mendoza created The Caravan of Sorrows, a drawing representing the journey that the repatriados made across the continent. Benny Cruz wrote music in response to this heritage, as well as working with Matrix Theatre Company to combine some of these stories into a play called Recuerdos de los Repatriados: Remembrances of the Repatriated. A highly personal, intergenerationally created and performed w! ork, Recuerdos elicited astounding interest and support from the Southwest Detroit community where it was first performed, as well as from the Beyond Boal Conference where it was performed in 2000. In examining two very different documentaries on the subject, created within 5 years of each other, as well as in observing the wealth of artistic expression in various media spurred by these personal chronicles (these artistic expressions even heralding critical government investigations- such as the current legislation in California regarding that state’s involvement in the illegal deportation of Americans of Mexican or Indio descent during the depression), it is compelling to observe the evolution of meaning and comprehensibility in the art and research around this subject. In the first documentary, some of the initial interviews are confusing and sometimes difficult to follow, just as some of the stories told in the first rushed assembling of scenes in the first production of Recuerdos are disjointed and in need of further development. Nevertheless, they are critical expressions of a community’s self-understanding- a socially realized catharsis. Given what is continually emerging from the fields of performance studies, historiography and their modalities, what can we deduce from the emergent clarifying of the art around this subject? Is there a corollary purging of pain and denial with the revelation of a particular community’s truth? What enables people to confront the reflexive, protective avoidance of what actually occurred? What are the effects of exile, shame, and betrayal on national and cultural identity and the historical perception of this period? How do these things express themselves in art and culture? What are the roles of creation and performance in the evolution of identity? How can these be mid-wived into most honestly and powerfully representing the creators intention? During the nineties, Israel began importing a large number of foreign workers to replace its traditional labor force, the Palestinians of the occupied territories. Among these foreign workers are approximately 30,000 immigrants from 15 African countries. This research focuses on the Tel Aviv dance clubs operated by African foreign workers and examines how the workers use this social space to construct a sense of collective identity within Israel. My assumption, following the work of Stuart Hall and Simon Firth, is that the dance clubs are a ground for the emergence of a double meaning discourse, symbolic and tangible, which discursively represents shared and separate elements between different groups inside the African community and other groups in their environment. The primary questions that emerge from this orientation are the following: What kind of African–Israeli identity are Africans constructing of themselves within this space? How do the dance clubs act as a spac! e allowing for the formation of this dual meaning discourse? Based upon a year of fieldwork, I have outlined two main routs of identification among African workers/dancers, The Pan-African and the “global black”. I perceive this identification to express a process of detraditionalization and the striving for a sense of belonging to the “Modern world”. In the uneasy context of illegality and temporariness it is the dance club, more than any other space, which allow crossing the boundaries between past and present, east and west, traditional and the modern. My paper focuses on timbre, specifically the timbre of the singing voice and its relationship with the social constructs of race, class, and cultural capital. Starting with Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, I outline the taxonomy of race evinced through vocal timbre. I then analyze the public discussion following the first performances of African American singers (Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price) of major operatic repertoire, and specifically focus on the marginalization of the African American classically trained voices by the connecting of their vocal abilities to their (assumed) exposure to the negro spiritual. My research concludes that even within the well-established styles of classical vocal ideals, where the assumption is that the singers who succeed have accomplished the necessary separation between their everyday and singing voice, singers that visually appear as non-European are heard differently, and perhaps even trained differently. An analysis of the conventions of both pedagogy and practice in classical music illuminates the ways in which race and cultural capital figure into the construction, functioning and maintenance of timbral hierarchy. In this process, the concept of symbolic capital provides a pressing means to understanding the preservation of vocal ideals and norms in classical music. Still relatively untapped, this area of study will help uncover everyday assumptions, assumptions that emerge in tandem with institutionalizations, like that of classical music, of the racialized subject. Cultural products like the vocal timbres of the institution of classical music are essential to denaturalize and begin to speak frankly about. Janis Joplin is one of the major figures in the history of twentieth century popular music, and her performances have generated passionate reactions from both listeners and critics. She has frequently been discussed in relation to gender but her career, and the critical reaction to it, also demonstrates the exercise of racial imaginations both during her life, and in subsequent years. Joplin sang the blues, traditionally a form of music associated with an African American tradition, and in particular with black women. The scholar and critic Kalamu Ya Salaam describes the blues as one of the archetypal forms of Great Black Music. Yet Joplin, a white girl, is acknowledged as one of the ‘all-time great singers of the blues.’ This paper will explore the tension held within these two statements. The blues had always been a raced and sexed genre – one that Jana Braziel identifies as an ‘emergent audible site of identity as a matrix – a blues matrix of racial and sexual intersec! tionality.’ Joplin’s position as a white female performer of the blues added complications to the ideological terrain. In her deliberate occupation of a very ‘blues woman’ overtly sexualized, and independent stance Joplin subverted notions of white sexual restraint and black promiscuity. Her performance at the interstices of raced, and gendered musical spaces generated anxieties that will be explored in the paper. Many of these anxieties emerged in the discussions and descriptions of her ‘authenticity’ and therefore this exploration of Joplin is framed as an exploration of that value as it intersects with issues of gender, race, and musical activity. It will use musical examples, critical commentary, and contemporary theoretical frameworks to engage with Joplin’s career, and illustrate the challenge she presented to the discursive construction of a performative racial identity. In doing so it combines techniques gleaned from the disciplines of history, music, and contempo! rary critical theory. Joplin’s voice, as both physical entity, and critical construct, enters into the discussion as it is the source of many of the comments that illustrate the exercise of racial imaginations. The paper would feature at least one musical example, and any discussion time available could be used to discuss reactions to the ideas presented in the paper in relation to the audio material. Hazel Scott, composer, actress, pianist extraordinaire, was a major figure in 1940s American music. Whether at Café Society or Carnegie Hall, she played to packed houses and her stylish approach to the classics, boogie-woogie, and bop attracted diverse audiences. So bright was her star that she was featured in five Hollywood films between 1943-1945—each time appearing, by choice, as herself. This paper is an exploration of what Richard Dyer would refer to as Scott’s polysemy, that is, the multiple meanings that her performing image signified. I read the Scott star image through relevant ideas and discourses that circulated at the time: the changing roles of blacks in film and the wartime roles of gender and jazz. My goal—and Scott’s complexity demands this—is to write from a perspective that can analyze multiple identity categories simultaneously. In this regard, Abigail Feder-Kane’s conception of the American musical of the 1940s as “structurally queer” is helpful. What! ever the “realistic” narratives of the musicals may have defined, the privileged space of performance and spectacle could be used to contest or deny. As herself, Hazel Scott used this space in a powerful and knowing way to represent accomplished, integrated black womanhood. My paper highlights the tension between the expressive practices of black gospel music in sacred contexts and the manner in which popular media depict this music. To illustrate this tension, I focus on the performance practices of Mahalia Jackson and the visual record of these practices from television, film, and, in particular, on album covers from the 1950s and 1960s. While recent scholarship has attended to the crossover appeal of gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, little has been written about how and why Jackson appealed to white audiences and what this indicated about popular notions of race. Following Tharpe’s success, Jackson became the most widely recognized gospel singer. Like Bob Marley and reggae, her face became virtually synonymous with gospel. This paper examines a recent collaboration between pianist/composer/scholar Vijay Iyer and hip-hop and spoken word artist Mike Ladd entitled In What Language? (2003). Drawing from interviews with Iyer and the recent flurry of journalistic literature, I discuss the how this project chooses to represent complexities of diasporic identity through sound and performance. Far from adopting a homologous model of music and identity, their project demonstrates how music is a part of the process of identity formation (Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000:31). I also build on the work of Stuart Hall and Sherry Ortner to suggest that In What Language forces us to recognize how multiple social identities can locate people in multiple social categories (Hall, 1991). By dealing primarily with the musical aspect of the collaboration, I show how their project offers unique contributions to the representation of a transnational ethnic identity, as well as to ethnomusicological issues of sound s! tructure and social structure, and as a method of performing ethnography. Iyer and Ladd experiment with forming a language that begins to express the frustration of “brown skinned travelers” through a project that is “a song cycle about people in airports, narratives of lives in transit” (Ladd and Iyer, 2003). They interpret the experiences of people of color whose lives are intertwined with the reality of human migration. Iyer and Ladd’s purpose is to articulate the complicated identity of this group through their experiences with a specific site that represents a type of global locality: the power laden non-neutral sites of airports. They are speaking for a group unique to the present global market place—the brown skinned global worker. Primarily, I focus on how Iyer and Ladd articulate a type of resistance to old injustices in new places, and with new forms of collaboration. I show how the complexity of the sound structures Iyer employs relates to the complexity of their central purpose of representing this social group through the voices of several individuals. I will analyze the formal structure of one piece to reveal its multi-layered poly-rhythmic logic, showing how Iyer draws on elements of South Indian tala, the rhythmic principle that structures South Indian classical, or Karnatic, music. I also problematize Iyer and Ladd’s production of this identity and reveal their own skillful use of language that simultaneously critiques and uses existing power structures. My interpretation of In What Language? also includes relevant contributions for the fields of jazz studies and ethnomusicology, outlined in the paper’s conclusion. In Latin America racial and national projects have always been closely linked, and the concept of mestizaje or racial mixture has been central to Mexico’s nation-building projects ever since Justo Sierra declared Mexicans the "children of two races" in 1910. As a theatrical art form that reaches large audiences both at home and abroad, dance is an important means of constructing and disseminating images of race and nation. Since the mid-twentieth century numerous state folk dance companies have been created around the world to do just that, and in Latin America the earliest-formed and most widely known of these is Amalia Hernández’s Ballet Folklórico de México. The group has been extremely influential in the arena of folkloric dance, prompting changes in the performance of local Mexican dance traditions and inspiring the creation of numerous regional companies both in Mexico and among Chicanos in the US. Through an analysis of repertoire, costuming, performances, program ! note s, press materials, and reviews of the BFM, I will reveal the specific image of Mexico the company promoted and popularized both at home and abroad, demonstrating that the promotion of mestizaje is central to the company’s mission. I will also show that its particular conception of mestizaje is strongly neocolonial, because it was colored both by Hernandez’s personal experiences and the political climate of the time. Finally, I will consider in what ways Mexican regional and US-based folklórico dance companies have both connected with and diverged from the BFM’s model. 'Hill hop' is an increasingly popular musical hybrid that presents country music?s 'white trash' and 'hillbilly' identities within hip hop?s black musical frame. 'Blackness' has been theorized by Eric Lott and many others as providing white audiences with an exoticized source of authenticity, 'otherness', and masculine power. But hip hop as a currency of 'blackness' is also essential to hill-hop performers? articulation of a white ethnic identity rooted in a complex intertwining of notions of class and race. White performers such as Bubba Sparxxx, Kid Rock, and the Kuntry Killaz fortify their performances of white, working class identities with hip hop, a music that deals significantly with (and is associated with) issues of ethnic marginalization and power, poverty, and locality. This paper explores 'hill hop' rapper Bubba Sparxxx's articulation of a masculine, white identity through hip hop. I argue that the Coen Brothers? film ?O Brother where Art Thou?? (2000) uses music as a sign for ethnic 'otherness'. I then demonstrate how Bubba's extensive use of aural and visual images from ?O Brother? in his publicity and music is counterposed with his construction of a masculine,'white trash' identity using the musical language of hip hop. Hill hop's race crossing furnishes a snug wrapper for performances of the class- and race-laden 'hillbilly' and 'white trash' identities. I investigate the workings of these identities and put them in the context of a broader understanding of hip hop's appeal to white America. “It [the mind] now invents a situation, lodged in the future, that represents the fulfillment of this desire. This is the daydream or the fantasy, which has its origin in the present experience and the recollection of the past: so that past, present and future are strung together on the thread of one desire that unites all three.” This paper takes up the nexus of music and racial formation in relation to Kiowa Indian ritual drumming. Drumming is understood within Kiowa cosmology as a moment in which the body is extended into sound as a result of the connection, or unity, between body and drum. It is tempting to view the performance of ritual drumming as a glimpse into the past and, furthermore, as an embodied preservation of such a past. However, attention to current drumming practices evinces a great deal of alteration to “traditional” ritual drum styles and cadences. What these alterations can be said to signify is at the heart of this paper. Ritual often functions problematically as both the center of Native American culture as well as the evidence of belonging. In effect, traditional ritual drumming confers the transmission of Indianness. The question I, thus, propose is can we begin to understand these alterations as a refusal of this logic? Indeed, can the use/incorporation of contemp! orary percussion technique allegorize a discomfort of performing authentic Indianness especially when to be Indian is so heavily aligned in the national imagination with performing tradition? To be clear, this is not to imply that there are assimilationist strategies at work in these performances, rather to illuminate the positioning of the Native American within the national imagination and how these performances interact with such a positionality. If being Indian is predicated on the performances of tradition, then, might these performances constitute a moment of doing race differently? Furthermore, how is imagination made use of in this doing race differently? While I must situate the whole of Native American performance practices within the dominant U.S. racial imagination, this paper focuses on the role of the imagination for the Native American community. As such, I contend that these alterations in “traditional” ritual drumming practice can be understood as an instance of putting the past/tradition to new use. Returning to the epigraph taken from Freud’s The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, we see that the imagination is capable not only of assuaging a discomforting past or present but more so the act of imagination, of the daydream is lodged in a future moment. For Freud, the daydream is an apt means by which one creates a, “world of his own or, to put it more correctly, by imposing a new and more pleasing order on the things that make up his world” (Freud, The Uncanny: 25). Within the scope of this paper, I maintain that the daydream is a projection of how we would like to imagine ourselves, a newly anticipated future that is not severed from the past (or present) yet nonetheless is associated with the past in such a way that does not require a linear attachment in which the future materializes in terms of a contained and fixed past. Freud is of use in this discussion to the extent that his understanding of the psychic need for the daydream offers a blueprint for survival ! through difficult histories and subjectivities. In closing, this paper looks to the alterations in Kiowa ritual drumming as a moment in which the body and drum come together in an effort to extend a new sound that, although ambivalent about the past, does not disavow the past but rather makes use of such in the making of a newly imagined future that affects our experience of the present as we imagine ourselves otherwise. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. (trans. David McLintock). London: Penguin Group, 2003. Although hip-hop’s dominant narrative typically begins with the infusion of Jamaican sound-system techniques and technologies into the South Bronx—often personified in “founding father” Kool Herc (i.e., Clive Campbell, a Jamaican immigrant to New York)—the Caribbean presence in hip-hop becomes more of an absence after this originary moment. Despite an almost constant—and one might say increasing—infusion of reggae style into hip-hop over the last three decades, a hybridization reflecting New York’s increasingly foreign-born black population, hip-hop histories routinely ignore such “outside” influence. Narrative strategies that seek to validate African-American aesthetics against the denigration of mass media representations have obscured a more nuanced account of hip-hop’s true social character, with far-reaching implications for our understanding of such notions as race, ethnicity, and nation. The failure to acknowledge Jamaica’s place in the hip-hop imagination overl! ooks the context-specific identification practices through which a great number of performers have expressed the predicament of being both West Indian and black in New York, and such an oversight, in effect, maintains a discursive complicity with traditional, essentialized notions of race. If we look closer at (and listen more closely to) the intersections between hip-hop and reggae—for instance, at moments when New York-based performers adopt or conceal a Jamaican accent—the contingent, dynamic character of race comes into stark relief. By paying attention to the shifting significations over time of Jamaican-ness in New York, we see the way that historical context, social demographics, and cultural politics inflect conceptions of race and ethnicity. When Kool Herc loses his accent in the early-70s, KRS-One flirts with one in the mid-80s, and Mos Def adopts one in the late-90s, music’s powerful ability to mediate concepts such as race and ethnicity comes to the fore, ref! lecting as well as challenging dominant and often stereotypical repres entations. My presentation will survey the Jamaican-accented history of hip-hop, focusing on moments where the performance of Jamaican-ness gives the lie to more stable conceptions of race and ethnicity. I will close with my own patois-infused reflection on the way that music mediates our understandings of self and other. Over the last one hundred and fifty years, the relationship between the United States and Mexico has become crucially important to the economic, political, social and cultural development of both countries. As people of Mexican ancestry in the United States grow in number and political influence, the bond between the two countries will become increasingly difficult to disentangle. However, the binational relationship has been little studied from the point of view of its cultural and artistic impact. Music, in particular, shows the existence of what José Antonio Aguilar Rivera has called a “binational imagination.” This paper examines the place of rock music in the binational relationship. In the late 1950s, rock music arrived on the Mexican scene as an American media product and was embraced by middle class youth. On the other hand, Latin and specifically Mexican music and musicians have had a deep influence on popular music north of the border. Both types of music were t! ransformed by their migration and took center stage in the public discourse surrounding social issues such as race, class, and the binational relationship. The representation of “Mexican” and “American” identities (whether as Self or as Other) surface in the music of such disparate artists as Rage Against the Machine, Molotov, Maná, Dave Matthews Band, and others. These musics emerge as a site for public debate through an interaction between media, audience and state, illuminating the mechanisms through which foreign policy, culture, and music interact to create and mediate national and transnational identities. Within the realm of critical race theory, scholars like John O. Calmore and Paul Gilroy have located utopic visions in both the structure and lyrics variety of African-American and Black-Anglophile musical cultures. Not included in these musical realms is Black hard rock. In fact, the main-stream black hard rock bands expound on a more harsh urban reality, more akin to Derek Bell’s “Racial Realism”, where chaos, death, mental illness, violence, substance abuse and police brutality not only abound, but are unavoidable. Unlike some commercial rap, where artists like Easy-E, 50 Cent and 2pac relish this brutal lifestyle, mainstream Black hard rockers like Fishbone, Living Color, and Bad Brains lyrically express the need for social change and movement away from the realities of base urban life. Through a lyrical examination, I will identify the views of Black Hard Rock Bands and the realities which they address- elements of time, space and place- and equate them with various events about which the songs may have been written. The selected lyrics songs relate specifically to wider societal issues and social movements: police brutality, widespread mental illiness, substance abuse, invisible hegemony and gentrification- either specific or historic. After which I will theorize about why utopic space has not been created within black hard rock, even as rock in general has opened up and separated from its rebellious roots to include religious positivism, science-fiction, “love” and structural freedom- all of which are utopic interpretations embraced by other genres of African-American music. In examining these polarities, I will engage with a number of race and aesthetic theorists who have examined the expressive arts: Paul Gilroy, Fred Moten and Grahm Lock; psychiatrist Franz Fanon; theorist Derek Bell; and popular music theorists including Theodor Adorno. As a crucial part of historical understanding of race in America, I will also employ Cedric Robinson and Robin Kelley’s views of the black radical tradition and the opening up of historical and creative space for radical expression. Within this theoretical framework, I believe that resistance to domination and material commodification within the black radical tradition has spawned the creation of utopic space through the expressive arts. But unlike Rap, Soul, Funk and Gospel, Black rock musicians have been systematically barred from commodification within the American rock scene. From the beginning of rock ‘n roll, rock performed by white performers has met with more broad-base success than the same music as performed and recorded by its original writers- black musicians. This exclusion, rather than commodification, is at the root of Black Rock’s racial realism. If the suppression of previously existing culture, the creation of new modes of expression and the formation of new musical performer and consumer communities are at the root of black utopian musical expression, Black Hard Rock has been denied the ability to foster a musical community, and hence has not created a utopian musical space. The do! uble-edged status of being a minority in the greater sense and also being a minority in mode of musical expression and without community has lead to Black Rock leaning towards dystopic space. In other words, Black hard rock has never been in engaged in Gramcsi’s war of maneuver, which has given performers in other genres the ability to break free and to create their own utopic space.
In the city of Ostrava, at the eastern edge of the Czech Republic, Roma make up an estimated 10% of the population. As a group, their socio-economic level is drastically lower than the majority population and other minority groups, and they experience discrimination in many areas of their lives. Prevalent opinion in Ostrava states implicitly and explicitly that Roma are inferior to other races and cultures, and to some degree this has been imbibed by Roma themselves even though many are fiercely proud of “being Romani”. Roma have largely assimilated without experiencing integration, and there is a tendency for both Roma and non-Roma in Ostrava to explain Roma’s socio-economic circumstances and cultural differences in terms of race politics that often essentialises Roma and ethnic Czechs into a binary system of stereotypes. Music making provides contexts in which more ambiguous and subtler interpretations can be negotiated alongside more prevalent extreme positions. Is there a contradiction in valuing accounts of many Roma’s often traumatic, and sometimes rewarding, experiences of essentialising racial ideas in musical and non-musical spheres, and the researcher privileging less prevalent interpretations or assuming that racialization is an ongoing process that is inextricably linked to hierarchies of power, hegemony and other axes of differences? What are the possibilities for interpreting relationships between Romani music making and racial ideas in ways that engage with a more progressive politics that are not alienated from the real effects of racial politics in Ostrava? Based on fieldwork conducted between August 2003 and July 2004, this paper explores relationships between music making and racial ideas in Romani music making in Ostrava and associated political implications of research into this area. It offers ideas drawn from emerging diasporic discourses that challenge approaches to the connections between music making and racial ideas. Henry Flynt (b. 1940) has long been absent from scholarly accounts of experimentalism in the U.S. The recent release of several recordings from the 1960s and 1970s has provided an opportunity to grapple with the iconoclastic ideas of this marginalized thinker. As a member of the early 1960s Euro-American experimental community in New York, Flynt began to combine blues, R&B, and country music styles with La Monte Young’s approach to extended improvisation. Flynt’s enthusiasm for folk and popular musics was linked to a deepening involvement in the radical left, and he quickly began to articulate his embrace of black music in the rhetoric of class struggle, anti-imperialism, and revolution. His “conversion” led to a strident critique of the New York avant-garde and a unique approach to combining musical and political liberation. Though he is an obscure historical figure, Flynt’s story pulls out several important points about the intersection of class and race in postwar experimentalism. I contend that narratives of desire and projection (for example, those directed at the beat poets) cannot be extended to all cases of white appropriation of black music during this period. Nonetheless, the catholicity of Flynt’s appropriations exhibit the kind of cultural mobility that is a constitutive element of whiteness in late capitalism. I also show that unlike most of his colleagues, who were generally interested in the elite arts of other cultures, Flynt explicitly sought to align himself with the black proletariat in his critique of “the domination of white, European-U.S. ruling-class art.” Afrobeat music is associated with urban Lagos, Nigeria, where Fela Kuti developed the style in the early 1970s. Kuti, raised Christian and educated in London, was greatly influenced by American jazz and funk as well as West African highlife, which itself drew on heterogeneous, creolized genres such as jazz and Cuban rumba. Since Kuti's death in 1997, several afrobeat ensembles have formed in New York City, with collective membership that cuts across racial, ethnic, and national lines. "American afrobeat" problematizes a liminal definition of afrobeat as African music and resists familiar tropes of cultural change, conjuncture, or bilateral movement (from rural to urban, African to American, traditional to modern, etc.); it represents instead a dizzying intersection of modern forms and modern peoples who may share little cultural similarity and may have no specific affiliation with Africa or Afro-America. In this paper I will attempt to reposition appropriations arguments by tracing the performance of a transcultural music that has been recontextualized and resignified in a polyethnic, cosmopolitan cityscape. My fieldwork in New York City has focused on the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, a large Brooklyn-based group that has attained commercial success in the U.S. and Europe. Music is often located as a defining element of blackness, an essentialism examined most insightfully by Ronald Radano. I am particularly interested in how the constructed racial categories of "black" and "white" maintain saliency when a hyperracinated "black" music is produced by a group of African, African American, Asian American, Latin American and "white" musicians, thus opening a space for what Michael Awkward has called transraciality. Iddrisu Saaka with Taisha Paggett and Kate Foley Kafin – The Quest for Wealth is a dance performance which incorporates video and African music. The piece looks at the economic disparities between whites and blacks (Africans). Video excerpts of interviews conducted in a village in Ghana shed light on perceptions and stereotypes that Ghanaians hold in their quest to understand why white people are economically better than themselves. The dance takes the concepts raised in the videos to a deeper level, and raises additional questions and issues through dynamic movement and African music. Choreography: Iddrisu Saaka in collaboration with Taisha Paggett and Kate Foley Literature on the appropriation of hip hop culture outside of the United States maintains that hip hop engenders local interpretations no longer reliant on African-American origins, and this research project is an attempt to determine the extent to which this is the case in a specific local context. My project is an effort to move beyond the rhetoric of much of what constitutes the debates surrounding globalisation, by employing a research strategy combining theoretical analysis and direct engagement with Berlin's hip hop community. My project not only aims to uncover the meanings young people in Berlin give to their hip hop practices, but intends to do so within a framework that does not ignore the discursive spaces in which these young people are operating. This is particularly relevant because of the complex ways in which race and ethnicity are related to German national identity. Furthermore, this project is concerned with the ways in which the spaces and places collectively known as Berlin shape the cultural practices found there. It may be that hip hop belongs to global culture, but it may also be the case that the city of Berlin plays a significant role in determining how hip hop is understood and reproduced by young people there. |
Sponsors at NYU
NYU Department of Music (FAS)
NYU American Studies Department (FAS) NYU Performance Studies Department (Tisch) NYU Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute (FAS) NYU Africana Studies Department (FAS) The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU (Tisch) NYU Office for African American, Latino, and Asian American Student Services NYU GSAS Dean's Office |
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