SO! Reads: Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora
To follow a song, to trace its roots and genealogy, to consider the context of its emergence as well as its lineage. To consider how sound and song propels political movement. To trace histories and concepts through the enunciative force of sound, of song. This is the work of Shana L. Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014). Redmond is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the 2014-2015 Ella Baker Visiting Associate Professo of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, with research interests in music and popular culture, history and social movements, labor and working-class studies and critical ethnic studies. And this is to say nothing of her interests inAfrican Diaspora and Black political and social life. All these interests are made explicit within Anthem, a book that compels readers and listeners not only to ask questions about bygone eras, but to consider the soundscapes and beat drops of their own milieus. Redmond’s work, in other words, causes readers to consider the efficacy of sound and song making as the vibratory force that inheres in any social mood and movement. Anthem‘s power lies in the attention Redmond gives the circulation of sound and song: how each emerges from specific contexts as well as how songs end up being contested sonic sites wherein an intellectual practice of justice organizing can be articulated and Black sociality and personhood asserted and contended.
In particular, Redmond utilizes the concept of the Black anthem as a theoretical tool in order to consider the efficacy of organizing and fighting against practices of racism, sexism and imperialism. Redmond documents Black anthems as “sonic productions” that “were not ancillary, background noise” but “were absolutely central to the unfolding politics because they held within them the doctrines and beliefs of the people who participated in their performance” (8). That sounds, that songs, have so much potential to enunciate otherwise modes of living; that sounds, that songs, have within them the capacity to announce otherwise worlds, is something well known to those violently excluded from modernity and its epistemologies of the human, the citizen, the subject. We know this otherwise mode of living, this otherwise modality of world, affectively. And this affectivity is born out in aesthetic practice. Thus, to attend to the organizing of sound – as song – and how such musics made their way from, for example, Harlem to Cuba in the case of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s “Ethiopia” or from women’s singing in Charleston to international stages, is all within the analysis and the archives offered by Redmond. What pleases is how her historical archival work is inflected by sonic analyses of songs; Redmond discusses the musicality of songs, how chord changes, harmonies, and melodies offer fresh insight into ways to think sonically about the movement of sound and song.
Anthem appeals to those interested in Black social movements of the twentieth-century, to be sure. But the book also makes musicological argumentation central to its thesis. So, for example, readers not only learn about lyrical content and history of brothers James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnsons’ “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” but they are also compelled to think about the song in its sonic registers, with its musicological features. For example,
The first measure of the vocal line is a half measure and offers a running start to the A-flat major key signature, with the text ‘lift ev’-ry’ notated by three eight notes in the 6/8 time signature. While the song was written in 6/8, its performance follows a 12/8 phrasing, placing it alongside the Black gospel tradition, which…was growing in dynamic ways at this very moment. The quick introduction leads the vocalist to a strong tonic chord on the downbeat of measure 2. The melodic emphasis lands on the word ‘voice’ with ‘and sing’ (measures 10 and 11) following as long notes (72-3).
This so say that Redmond takes seriously the ways songs are constructed as part of the argument she wants to put forward about the efficacy of the Black anthem. Her work models how to attend to the musicological as a fundamental feature of sound and song-making in Black sociality.
In considering the context of emergence for sounds and songs, Redmond produces a text that fits squarely within Black performance theory, since she is less concerned with the rightness or wrongness and much more with the efficacy of performance. The concern and the question of efficacy displaces the necessity for results-driven analyses in Black performance theory, placing emphases on how the production of sound and song proliferates, how it finds life, how it creates – while also being created by – worlds. Impressively, Redmond’s thorough sonic-historical approach to her archive gives her method resonance beyond even its richness. Anthem can be radicalized through generalizing its treatment of to songs as objects that are both part of and propel movements, enabling us to consider the context of emergence for any song and performance. Generalizing Anthem means that readers would take seriously the attempt to move from the specific sonic moment to the general, from various, plural moments of emergence to considering how sounds and songs move, how they create otherwise temporalities and spatial zones. Anthem produces a new theory of thinking relation between specific performances and their history and social movements, both in local and in global diasporic contexts.
In addition, Redmond analyzes how songs–and sounds within such songs–can at times be utilized to further racialist, sexist, imperialist impulses and practices. For example, Redmond analyzes “Ol’ Man River” in multiple forms and contexts, including the performance changes produced by Paul Robeson. Here Redmond begins the tension in the dialect as written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Robeson’s deployment of the song in performance.
The dialect demonstrates a particular version of blackness out of sync with the ‘fine intelligence’ of Robeson, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at Rutgers University and Columbia Law School graduate. Hammerstein’s dialect not only distinguishes Black from white in the musical but also serves to contain the Black characters in their natural state as uneducated and simple laborers and confidants (105).
Thus, sound and song can also be deployed otherwise, can be used in order to critique, to produce an intervention into such normative conceptions of blackness. And from Redmond’s text, readers learn something of Robeson’s radicalizing, of his deep engagement with thinking global blackness, through the way he changed the lyrical content, and thus the dialect and mood, of “Ol’ Man River.”
Paul Robeson Leading Moore Shipyard Workers in the “Star Spangled Banner,”
Oakland, CA, September 1942, Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
Still Picture Branch, Record Group 208, National Archives Identifier: 535874
Ultimately, Anthem produced for me the occasion to wonder if we can think the very concept of diaspora otherwise, as a following of vibrational moods and movements, as antiphonal participation in an ongoing call. And as an ongoing call that is resistive in its enunciation, that is ongoing and open-ended. If we did so, perhaps we would also come to understand Black sociality otherwise. In other words, perhaps we can think of it as making a claim on us, a ceaseless and performative ceaseless pulse that beckons and convokes. We are then forced to consider what our response will be to this ongoing call, what reply and resolve we give. In such a response, reply and resolve will have been irreducible, will have had no grounds, will have been constant. Sound and song are resistant to any desire for capture because of the internal disruptive capacities of vibration. Whatever the sound, whatever the song, it has within it vibration, vibration as the materiality that makes anything audible, that gives anything over to its possibly being heard. And if vibration is the grounds from which sound and song emerge, if thoughts of diaspora and blackness and sociality were inflected through such vibration, what we are called to consider is the ongoing sound, the ongoing echo, the ongoing verve and materiality of otherwise modes of living into the world.
As vibrational, Anthem forces readers to think of possibilities for sociality not grounded in categorical distinction as pure or as possibly maintained. “Through anthems,” Redmond argues, “the delineation between art and politics as well as listener and actor is blurred” (2). This blurring can be radicalized as a generalized feature of Black performance as theory and critical intervention into the normative world that depends upon invented–and distinct–categories in order to produce ongoing violence. In their accounting, the sounds, songs, and sonicity of blackness, Black sociality and Black antiphonal force demand a radical rethinking of categorical distinctions of racial classifications, gender binaries, and nation-states. And their vibrations resonate outward. On and on and on and on.
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Featured Image: American Civil Rights Movement leaders singing on the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Photo Credit: Bettman/Corbis
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Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Ethnic Studies Department of University of California, Riverside. He earned his doctoral degree from Duke University in the English Department with a certificate in African and African American Studies. Before Duke, he attended the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, earning a Master of Theological Studies degree with a concentration in feminist thought and queer theology. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. He has published work in Current Musicology; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society; The Journal of Theology and Sexuality; Black Theology: An International Journal and in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He is completing my first manuscript, titled Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, which investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective intellectual practice. this work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship by engaging queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies.
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SO! Reads: Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda
Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (2012) presents an alternate story of Chicana music through a collection of case studies in Chicana/o music history centering on Chicana/Tejana musicians active between the early decades of the 20th century to the present. Vargas assembles a mix of archival documents, interviews, images, songs, recordings, performances, ephemera, fragments, memories and engages intersectional feminist theory and queer of color critique to trace the music scenes her subjects inhabit.
A feminist oral historian, Chicano/Latino cultural studies scholar, and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Vargas’s research overlaps these disciplines and facilitates a conversation between popular music and sound studies that significantly considers gender, sexuality, and racialization in the construction of borderlands imaginaries. With Dissonant Divas Vargas makes an intervention both theoretical and methodological that greatly expands the Chicana/o musical archive and as well as the audiences for sound studies research. Furthermore, Vargas’s reflective writing voice locates her own Tejana/Chicana story in relation to her project and offers helpful insights into her research process at key moments. [The brief essay titled “Selena, Jenni Rivera, Eva Garza—meditations on an author’s soundtrack” published on the Minnesota Press webpages for Dissonant Divas is a generous methodology piece that should be read along with this comprehensive, satisfying, highly readable and often riveting text.]
“Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music” copyright University of Minnesota Press, all rights reserved
Vargas defines the term, la onda, in a general sense as “an umbrella term for Mexican American/Chicano/Tejano music (x).” More critically, la onda also “operates to represent musics that have been prominent in academic and cultural sites that have produced dominant discourses of sexuality, gender, class, race, geography, and language in the constructions of Chicano music.” “Dissonance” can be understood variously as “chaos, cacophany, disharmony, static” and “out-of-tuneness” that draws attention to “the power of music with regard to Chicana gender and sexuality (xiv).” Vargas’s main critique notes how the “limits of la onda” reveals the heteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings that construct dominant narratives of Chicano music historiography. She argues that the force of these narratives have naturalized a way of thinking about Chicano music in terms of the various “fathers” of Chicano rock, conjunto music, and of the field of borderland studies itself. The distortions produced by the assimilating cultural nationalist logic of “la onda” have not only suppressed Chicana music histories and/or enabled their mishearing, but they also hide the complex ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality converge to produce Chicana subjectivities within and against the Chicano musical canon. In theorizing “dissonance,” Vargas thus productively sounds the Chicana histories in Dissonant Divas as alternatively gendered and/or queered against the heteromasculine concord of la onda.
The chapter “Borders, Bullets, Besos: The Ballad of Chelo Silva” contains perhaps the most provocative pages, detailing Chelo Silva, a bolero singer with a distinct repertoire of songs that are still performed and kept alive by a diverse lineage of performers and audiences, yet whose renown is seemingly inseparable with her former marriage to Américo Paredes. Ubiquitous in borderlands studies, Paredes’s name and legacy are defined largely by his study of the corrido, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1970). Vargas strategically positions Silva and Paredes as “embodied representations” of the bolero and the border ballad, respectively, taking up Sonia Salídvar-Hull’s proposal to “imagine new corridos” by proposing Silva’s boleros as “feminist border ballads.” Vargas parses the constructions, aesthetics, and values carried in each song form, exploring how the border ballad has been the primary counter-site for narrating the injustice of Tejano/Anglo conflict (bullets) while the bolero, whose constant subject is love, luxuriates in all its jouissance (besos). Vargas reveals that the border ballad “has allowed its authors, singers, and scholars to sound the borderlands imaginary into being,” illuminating how the contest over historical representation is tied to musical representation. Silva’s story cannot be found within this articulation of la onda without, in part, redefining the border ballad (54).
Vargas innovates and meticulously crafts an alternative archive better suited to narrating and hearing Silva’s fragmented story, what Vargas felicitously calls her archisme of knowledge. Engaging the silences in Silva’s story, the archisme sounds her presence in the recorded memories of her fans which include testaments to her unique vocal qualities, her powerful and evocative performances, her improvisations in music and in life,,along with a healthy amount of the chisme or gossip surrounding Silva. Proposing the archisme as a “feminist project for historicizing nonnormative Chicana/o genders and desires” Vargas extends both Sonia Saldivar-Hull’s directive for Chicana scholars to look in nontraditional places for theory and Lisa Lowe’s theorization of gossip as a destructuring site of knowledge production (Saldivar-Hull, 1998; Lowe, 1996).
As I read through the first three chapters, a question that kept coming up concerned why we should not consider this study on more specific regional terms, or why this book isn’t titled, “Tejana Divas”? Vargas finds the overdetermination of these Chicana/Tejana musicians as “regional” subjects a problem not typically encountered by musicians from a city like Los Angeles, for example, because of its construction as a global metropolis. I cannot dispute Los Angeles’s status as a world center and I wondered how to earnestly engage Vargas on this point. What are the stakes of locating this study of Tejana/Chicana musicians within a broader Chicano/a musical context?
The final two chapters make the case for remapping Chicana music, advanced in part by the capacious notion of queer “diva-scapes.” In “Sonido de las Americas: Crossing South-South Borders with Eva Garza,” Vargas employs what she calls a “transfrontera musical compass,” a feminist methodology deftly juxtaposing the notion of a “musical scale” with the concept of “geographic scale.” Eva Garza’s career begins in her San Antonio hometown but she eventually came to embody the “la vóz de las Américas” in a hemispheric sense via her participation in early Spanish language radio, recordings, and live performances in nightclubs and films that took her to Mexico City and Havana for significant periods; her genre-crossing repertoire mirrored her travels. Garza began as a singer of the appropriately feminine bolero, but through her contact with Cuban musicians, the Afro-Caribbean guaracha song–decidedly phallocentric and risqué in its subject matter–also became part of her repertoire. The song she was most known for, “Sabor de Engaño” adds a sensual register to her transfrontera compass, a lingering sabor or taste exceeding regional, national, formal, and gendered limits. This is most evident in the repeated examples of impromptu performances of a song verse or refrain of “Sabor de Engaño” by many Cubanos Vargas encountered in her research travels. Vargas employs the transfrontera musical compass as a “listening instrument” to trace Garza’s musical trajectory through spatial-temporal moments disrupting rigid and normative notions of community, nation, and Chicano music (147).
“Selena Live” by Flickr user hellboy_93, CC BY-ND 2.0
In “Giving Us That Brown Soul: Selena’s Departures and Arrivals,” Vargas addresses the multiple problems in the mainstream media’s designation of “crossover star” to narrate Selena’s story as a spectacular rise in fame marked by her violent death in 1995. Vargas seeks to correct the assimilationist narratives of Selena’s musical history that, in addition to figuring her as a marginalized Latina on the verge of “legitimate” status, problematically narrates a south-north trajectory “devoid of blackness and queerness.” Vargas both critiques how “brown soul” has been musically deployed to stand in for cultural nationalist “brown power” and extends previous work focusing on blackness in Chicano/Latino music that includes R&B and Afro-Caribbean influences but not necessarily the Afro-diasporic. Cumbia, an Afro-Columbian dance form popularized in Mexico in the 1940’s – 50’s is central to Selena’s Tejano sound as are 70’s era disco and 80’s freestyle, particularly in the cultivation of her iconic diva look which together resonate a queer of color musical legacy on the sonic and visual planes.
Selena’s “brown soul” and style moves Tex-Mex cumbias in what Vargas calls “queer misdirections” by traveling north-south, for example, while sounding counterhegemonic femininities that continue to reverberate in the many tribute drag performances to Selena in and beyond the borderlands of Tejas. In these ways, Vargas traces the “topography of Selena’s transformations and remappings of Chicano music (205). Just as audio technologies have been key in circulating Eva Garza’s and Selena’s music in multiple directions, so are the memories, repeated performances, and queer embodiments of their music by their diverse audiences. For both of the these artists, sound expands Vargas’s engagement with spatialization theories so that we may hear these productive dissonances and in these ways begin to imagine alternative borderlands imaginaries.
Upon finishing, a question that remains in considering “diva dissonance” is the implied consonance of Vargas’s theorization of “la onda.” At times, the term becomes too totalizing, and I would argue for the presence of heterogeneity and other musical diversities even within what Vargas denotes as la onda. We must both make and leave room to imagine the possibility of many unrecorded, captured, or yet unsounded transgressions for Chicanas whose paths may appear to follow a heteronormative logic. For this reason I found the reiteration of such rich findings against la onda asomewhat repetitive distraction from the richer tales Vargas’s archival work tells. What would these histories sound like if they weren’t always positioned against la onda—if they were sounded instead more toward each other?
What Deborah R. Vargas richly accomplishes in Dissonant Divas responds to Alejandro Madrid’s call for musicologists to establish critical conversations beyond “the conservatory” and to engage larger intellectual dialogues (AMS Vol. 64, No. 3, 2011).Vargas’s intersectional feminist-of-color argument extends the body of feminist Chicana/o cultural studies scholarship and equally extends Chicano music histories that may engage gender to some degree but do not fully interrogate those categorical constructions. Her theorization of the title’s key term “dissonance” as “both a methodological and analytic device” and her construction of a differential archive combine to create “alternative sonic imaginaries of the borderlands (xii).” More broadly, Dissonant Divas is an intervention to the problems of conducting research in marginalized communities and the racialized subjects often left out of official archives, institutional records, and studies of sound (Trouillot, 1995; Taylor, 2003). Each chapter reveals and addresses various barriers to conducting research on Chicana musicians whose uneven historical representation lead Vargas to turn to other sites, methodologies, and embodied practices where Chicana voices resound across temporal and spatial lines. In these ways, Vargas’s sustained engagement of race, class, gender, and sexuality with Chicana/o borderlands music is thoroughly new.
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Featured Image: Pauline Oliveros by Flickr user Horacio González Diéguez, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Wanda Alarcón is a doctoral candidate of Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley where she is writing a dissertation titled: “Sounding Aztlán: Music, Literature, and the Chicana/o Sonic Imaginary”. Her research interests include Chicana/o cultural studies, U.S. ethnic literatures, popular music, sound studies, queer of color theory, and decolonial feminism. At Berkeley she has facilitated the working groups, “Decolonial Feminisms” and “Popular Music in Chicana/o Cultural Studies” at the Center for Race and Gender (CRG). Wanda is originally from Los Angeles and before starting graduate school she created the poetry zine, JOTA (2002 – 2006) and is updating that project by creating an archive for queer Chicana writing in cyberspace. She is a fan of radio genres and podcasts and writes micro radio plays while on the road. She is suspicious of the MP3 format yet enjoys curating party, tribute, and mood themed playlists on Spotify immensely. You can find her on Twitter depending on writing deadlines @esawanda.
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