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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Pentecostal Song, Sound, and Authentic Voices– Ashon Crawley
Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest– Jonathan Sterne
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LMGM’s “Lost: Choirboy” & El Jefe’s “Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon. . .” (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)
Come, let us sing of great men. Well, just one man, not men—and masculine gender is not essential for our purposes. Come to think of it, his greatness isn’t nearly as important as his fierceness, his queer significance, his brown sensibility. But we’re still committed to singing—or at least to music—well, to sound and noise, in any case. José Esteban Muñoz often wrote about queer scenes where music and sound were central to participants’ world-making activities. His archives buzzed with the sounds of West Coast punk, vogue-ball house, cruisy toilets, genderqueer burlesque, and salsa echoing down the barrio streets. And so, for this Round Circle of Resonance, we at La Mission are here to make some noise about a badass thinker who deeply impacted the way we dance/sing/talk/write/sweat about dance music, identity, and politics.
And this is just the beginning of our cacophonous, four-part response to Muñoz’s intellectual holler. The first installment, written by La Mission’s resident essayist / deranged propagandist LMGM (Luis-Manuel Garcia) provides a brief introduction to our collective, some reflections on Muñoz’s relevance to our activities, and a frame for the next three missives from our fellow cultists. It is backed with a rousing sermon-cum-manifesto from our charismatic cult-leader/prophet, El Jefe (Pablo Roman-Alcalá). In the coming weeks, our Naked Mennonite/randy dramaturge (Mandie O’Connell) will prepare and film a urinary performance piece; and our saucy Choir Boy/Linguist (Johannes Brandis) will compose a dirge to our dearly departed José (August 9, 1967- December, 4, 2013).
LMGM a.k.a. Luis-Manuel Garcia
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La Mission’s “(p/A)001: A non-Aristotelian Drama in Five Acts,” 2013, Image by Julien Barret
Lost: Choirboy (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)
La Mission
Named after San Francisco’s Latino barrio, La Mission is a satirical utopian doomsday cult, a music label, a queer situationist art-gang, a magazine, and a group of dancers with a very dirty sense of humor. We release music on vinyl, publish DIY ‘zines, and make performance art, aiming to re-politicize genres of dance music that have been important to queer people of color. La Mission’s identity is perhaps best summed up by cult-leader El Jefe’s manifesto-sermon, “The Sermon for the Steps of the Ziggurat in our Hearts,” published in our first La Mission magazine:
La Mission is a Community. La Mission is a Collective. La Mission is a Cult. La Mission is a Situationist Art Gang. La Mission is a Anarcho-Syndicalist terror cell. La Mission is a Family. La Mission is You. La Mission is Us. La Mission is gonna strip you butt nekkid, gonna check all your body cavities, gonna give you a shower, gonna give you a goodie bag, gonna give you a clean sheet and a towel. You at home with us now children, you understand me? You home with us now.
Founders Luis-Manuel, Pablo, and Mandie, caught on film at the performance for LM002, ‘a slow mutiny.'”
La Mission was first formed in 2012, in a small café in the Neukölln district of Berlin. The collective initially began with just three of us—Pablo Roman-Alcalá, Mandie O’Connell and Luis-Manuel Garcia—but like any good charismatic doomsday cult, it quickly expanded to include a broad network of lovers and collaborators, led by a core of four instigators (Johannes Brandis joined us later in the year). After a fundraising run in the fall of 2012 (witness our surrealist fundraising video here), we held our first two performances in the winter and spring of 2013, which involved experimental performance art pieces held in unusual spaces. The performances incorporated music and text from our vinyl EPs and their corresponding ‘zines, which were released at around the same time. These multi-channel productions were also conceptually coherent, with (kunst/WORK)001 introducing La Mission’s “mission” and (kunst/WORK)002 focusing on the relevance of utopianism to dance music. After a “quiet spell” where we released an out-of-series vinyl record of “lost remixes,” 2014 has been dedicated to preparing the next volume in the series (due in February 2015), which examines the depredations of capitalism, forced austerity, and false scarcity on music.
Hearing José
La Mission has no idols, but we do have influences—and José Esteban Muñoz is foremost among them. We share with Muñoz a focus on queer nightlife-worlds, a non-classical take on utopianism, a commitment to intellectual interventions outside of academic channels, and a certain brassy tone of voice. His revival of Ernst Bloch’s notion of a utopia based in real-life struggles was crucial in helping us reconcile revolutionary politics with dancefloor utopianism; or, put differently, Muñoz helped us find the critical politics latent in the queer, brown, sweaty gatherings that form the core of our scene of commitment. As “EDM” continues to blow up into a primarily white, hetero, cis, mainstream phenomenon, his insights have helped us maintain clarity and critical focus.
From the outset, we have also been profoundly influenced by Muñoz’s lifelong theorizations of brownness, affect, and (dis)identification. Since three of our four core members are Latina/os in varying states of stripped identity, we have been especially interested in Muñoz’s notion of the “brown commons,” as he was developing the concept in the last years of his life. In promotional texts that circulated ahead of his speaking engagements on the topic, he described brownness as “an expansive sense of the world, a feeling and being in common that surpasses the limits of the individual and the subject.” Notably, he understands brownness and the brown commons as being shaped not only by suffering and struggle, but also by thriving, providing a pool of resources for a better, more vibrant kind of life.
La Mission, (p/A)001: A non-Aristotelian Drama in Five Acts, 2013, Image by Julien Barret
The significance for La Mission’s project in dance music culture should be clear already, but we also take great inspiration in how Muñoz developed an expansive view of brownness and the brown commons, using Latina/o experience as an entry-point for “a vaster consideration of the ways in which people and things suffer and experience harm under the duress of local and global forces that attempt to diminish their vitality and degrade their value.” We here at La Mission are committed to exploring brownness for its potentials for lateral solidarities among people of color, who may have diverse cultural backgrounds but nonetheless share post-migrant experiences of struggle, devaluation, displacement, and inauthenticity. In fact, Muñoz’s work was a direct inspiration for the “Brown Corner” in our La Mission ‘zine (a parody of the “ladies’ corner” and “kid’s corner” of American mid-century lifestyle magazines). Published bilingually and featuring post-migrant authors, the Brown Corner reflects on aspects of brownness, as both specific to their contexts and generalizable to a wider “commons” of brown experience. In the process, we hope to highlight shared feelings, narratives, and resources for brown survival in a world of white supremacy.
A hand-drawn re-working of Frieda Kahlo’s own self-portrait, part of the Brown Corner for issue 001 of the La Mission ‘zine.
Singing into the Horizon
Brother Muñoz, what are we supposed to do with the vinyl records, the zines, the performance videos we had been accumulating for you? We’re trying to sing our way into a queer utopian horizon, and we had been counting on your voice. We know you’re not coming back. As a radical lefty utopian doomsday cult, we’re not so invested in the afterlife, anyway. But it still sucks for us and everyone else you left behind, left in the “here and now” that we struggle to turn into something less suffocating. The party was just getting started, dammit. Besides, we had such a kickass choirboy outfit picked out for you.
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LUIS-MANUEL GARCIA aka “LMGM”: LMGM/Luis-ManuelLMGM/Luis-Manuel is a Canadian of Peruvian-Colombian origins, currently an Assistant Professor in Popular Music at the University of Groningen (NL), after migrating between Toronto, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris. He has managed to turn his love of electronic dance music into a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, and into post-doctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Freie Universität Berlin. On the side, he writes about food and dances every chance he gets.
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“Portrait of La Mission” by Ben Hammond, who has not seen any of its members naked
Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon for the Imagined Sanctuary We Built Together
Welcome. La Mission is a family. A family of chosen comrades, chosen brethren, chosen hermanos, chosen сестры, chosen lovers, chosen students, chosen teachers, and chosen arms. Arms, linked and brandished through common thought, common feeling, common goals. It is with a heavy heart that we find ourselves here, remembering one of our family who (though never officially an acolyte or collaborator) was one who contributed to the ecstasy that we have felt and will feel for many years. José Esteban Muñoz was said to be a believer. Ernst Bloch and the New Revolutionary Epoch. Our utopias were described and imagined and realized and experienced. Rise up, my brown brethren, and let us celebrate Brother Muñoz’s legacy!
La Mission’s “(p/A)001: A non-Aristotelian Drama in Five Acts,” 2013, Image by Julien Barnet
The words and deeds of this fellow freedom-fighter, who infiltrated the bourgeois güero academy and infected it with a polylateral program for de- and reprogramming, has been our parallel and our inspiration. Colleague and comrade. A representative of our struggle. Not quite a patron saint—that honor we’ve reserved for communarde Louise Michel—but no less a visionary. As queers, as minorities stripped of identity, as angry and happy children in revolt for something better, we must all learn from each other as equals.
Brother Muñoz made utopia political again and located that utopianism in performance. La Mission’s performances bring forth utopias from our queer future through fleeting mindfuck happenings in the present. Through the work of Sister O’Connell and her band of terrorizing miscreants, we present a non-narrative and non-paternalistic path towards redemption, one of our own making. Can I get a “Fuck, yeah!”?
La Mission at Import Projects, 2013
Brother Muñoz loved music and dancing and life-worlds connected by the beat and said, “Take Ecstasy with Me.” He revealed to us the connections between collective dancing and feeling utopian. In his spirit, La Mission’s music strives to bring forth utopia through that ever-lasting beat. Through disassociation and reassociation, through transcendental repetition, and through getting the fuck down! Can I get a “Fuck, yeah!”?
Brother Muñoz believed in learning and critical thinking. Analysis and the great revolutionary trek through the jungle of our critically thinking minds. La Mission’s tracts enact utopia through a constant vomiting out of our recently digested learnings into the baby-bird mouths of those who read them. The brother was also a hilarious motherfucker, and from this we realize that it is not through the shrill screams of egoism disguised as activism that we will prevail. It is through the joy of laughter combined with thought that we will win our bread. Can I get a “Fuck, yeah!”?
Brother Muñoz loved fucking. La Mission’s fucking creates utopias through the ecstatic act in and of itself. If you aint fucking to make yourself a Temporary Autonomous Zone of happiness, then you aint doing it right. Can I get a copulatory “Fuck, yeah!”?
It is not all loss, though. The ideas live on. Caminamos juntos. On the dancefloor. In the reclaimed Torre David skyscraper and the Taller Tupac Amaru collective; in the informal classrooms and the sweaty bedrooms. Our hearts must burst after sagging, our heads must fill after hanging low, and our linked arms will raise! Oh honey, please don’t give your heart to a world system based on exploitation of the luckless, give your heart to US!
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La Mission at Import Projects, Common Revilings Project, 2013, Image by Julien Barrat
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All images courtesy of La Mission
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PABLO ROMAN-ALCALA: Yo. I am Pablo aka “Beaner” aka “Skirtchaser” aka “El Frijolero” etc. I am an internationally working musician and dj who has enjoyed a modicum of success, but who doesn’t like what has happened to the musical landscape vis-a-vis “conservatism” in respect to both Money and Art. I mean the relationship of the two, okay? It sucks. And I want to change it.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
Karaoke and Ventriloquism: Echoes and Divergences–Karen Tongson and Sarah Kessler
Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists– Tavia Nyong’o
“New Wave Saved My Life*”-Wanda Alarcon
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