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Sonic Interventions

Thamyris/ 

Intersecting: Place, 

Sex, and Race 

Series Editor 

Ernst van Alphen 

Editorial Team 

Murat Aydemir, Yasco Horsman, Isabel Hoving, Saskia Lourens, Esther Peeren

Sonic Interventions 

Editors 

Sylvia Mieszkowski 

Joy Smith 

Marijke de Valck

Colophon 

Design 

Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands 

www.warmerdamdesign.nl 

Printing 

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, 

Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”. 

ISSN: 1381-1312 

ISBN: 978-90-420-2294-2 

© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007 

Printed in The Netherlands

Mission Statement 

Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race 

Intersecting is a new series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus. 

Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of 

black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue 

and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the 

socially committed international journal which was established by Jan Best en Nanny 

de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency 

of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work 

on the cutting edge. 

We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring categories: 

place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that 

order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will 

necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will 

keep analyzing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil concepts 

(ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sexuality 

has to be addressed as an always active social strategy of locating, controlling, 

and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural practice. 

And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most productive 

framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move 

beyond narrow identitarian theories. 

The title of the new book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think 

together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of 

our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to 

theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these intersections 

one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be understood in 

practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-reflexive, 

contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoretically relevant 

issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different backgrounds) and 

activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational 

community? 

We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting 

addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented perspective 

with intellectual rigor and theoritical insights, interdisciplinary and transnational 

perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating 

and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at 

intersecting@let.leidenuniv.nl

Contents 

9 Acknowledgments 

11 Sonic Interventions: An Introduction Sylvia Mieszkowski, 

Joy Smith and 

Marijke de Valck 

29 I. Resonance – Politics – Resistance 

31 The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s) Fred Moten 

57 “Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: 

Sound, Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s 

Germany 

Carolyn Birdsall 

87 You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s Marisa Parham 

Acoustic Illusion 

101 II. Incantations: Gender and Identity 

103 Reciting: The Voice of the Other Mahmut Mutman 

119 Disturbing Noises – Haunting 

Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist 


147 Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: 

New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing 

and Subjectivity 

Milla Tiainen 

169 III. Performing Subjectivity: Literature, 

Race and Mourning 

171 Invisible Music (Ellison) David Copenhafer 

193 Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly 

Sight: James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie 

Soyica Diggs

211 Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Joy Smith 

Folktale in Ellen Ombre’s Short Fiction “Fragments” 

239 IV. Mixing Music: Event, Place and Transculturality 

241 “Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise 

Andalusian Style in Contemporary Spain 

Susanne Stemmler 

265 Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics Anikó Imre 

287 Situating Sound: The Space and 

Time of the Dancehall Session 

Julian Henriques 

311 The Contributors 

313 Index 

8 | Contents

Acknowledgments 

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 18 (2007) 9–10 

We would like to thank everyone involved in putting together this volume. Special 

thanks go to Isabel Hoving, the series editor who supervised the editorial process, 

Saskia Lourens for helping with the copy-editing, and Mart Warmerdam whom we 

thank for the cover design. We are grateful to Toni Liquori, Media Relations Manager 

at the Montclair Art Museum for granting us permission to reproduce the Morgan 

Russell painting that appears on the cover. We are also grateful to the participants of 

the workshop-conference Sonic Interventions, hosted in spring 2005 by the Amsterdam 

School for Cultural Analysis. It was their expertise on sound, and their enthusiasm 

about the academic potential of the concept of sonic interventions, that convinced us 

to compile the themed volume that we now present. 


Joy Smith 

Marijke de Valck 

Amsterdam & Frankfurt, August 2007 

Acknowledgments | 9

Sonic Interventions: 

An Introduction 


Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith 

and Marijke de Valck 

As an interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging field of “sound studies,” Sonic 

Interventions sets out to explore the potential of the aural realm in search of productive 

new approaches to investigating cultural practices. Sounds are as fundamental 

for understanding the world as things visible, and the ability to hear, and/or 

to listen, is as indispensable for analyzing cultural formations – be they social, political, 

artistic, psychic or technological – as the ability to see. 

Within traditional European philosophy, sound is categorized as our second sense, 

and, especially in the West, our belief in a visually dominated culture still prevails. 

This hierarchy of the senses often becomes invested with a supremacist touch when 

translated into a relationship between different cultures, for example, when “the 

West” is conceptualized as primarily visually structured, while other societies are 

considered to place more importance on the acoustic dimension. In academia, 

sounds and orality are often subjugated to the visual and/or theorized in opposition 

to images and the written word. In our daily lives we care more about the way we look 

than how our voices sound. We worry about the effects of violent or sexually explicit 

(media) images while easily forgetting that sounds can have an (ideological) impact 

as well. One of the underlying assumptions of this volume is that sounds, noises and 

voices are neither natural nor neutral nor immediate, but complex cultural constructions 

that may lend themselves to processes of individualization, as well as to political, 

religious or ideological instrumentalization or resistance. 

Sonic Interventions concentrates on how sounds intervene with notions of gender 

and race as critical categories of identity formation. The volume’s third focal point, 

place, draws attention to the fact that neither identity nor the processes which shape 

it can be understood independently of a setting, either historical, or social or topographical. 

It was not until the 1990s that an “auditory turn” in the humanities occurred. 

Sonic Interventions: An Introduction | 11

Since then, scholarly interest in the exploration of sound and its phenomenology, in 

voice, in the poetics of sound in culture, history, and in cultural politics, in the formation 

of acoustic communities and soundscapes, and in the links between sound, place, and 

affective life, continues to grow. 1 The emerging and increasingly diversified field of what 

has been called “sound studies” covers a much broader area than the traditional discipline 

of musicology, and precisely because it has not yet been institutionalized, new perspectives 

from diverse and, at times, unexpected corners are constantly added to the 

academic discourse on sound. We welcome this characteristic interdisciplinarity of the 

field as a productive condition for exchange, dialogue and mutual enrichment between 

the various disciplines and perspectives. 

The volume includes contributions by scholars of musicology, literature, philosophy, 

film and media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, American and ethnic 

studies. All of these articles tune in to the relevance of sound for either racial and/or 

gendered identity in one or several cultural contexts that stretch topographically from 

the US and the Caribbean over Spain and old “Al Andaluz” to The Netherlands, 

Germany, Hungary, Israel, and historically from the 6th century AD to the present. 

They show it is possible to move beyond the theoretical dichotomies between the 

visual and the sonic, the oral and the literate and, instead, do justice to the diverse 

and often multi-faceted manifestations of sonic interventions. 

Sound and Race 

Much of black modernity is characterized by its obsession with sound, and sound within 

literature (Weheliye 1–72). Music and orality figure prominently in black literature as 

sources, topics, and act as models for writing, providing a sense of rhythmic, colloquial, 

or musically inspired texts. Research on sound, in terms of black musics and orality, 

really began to gain scholarly recognition within the academy in the eighties, where 

theories of analysis based on history and the cultural, the black vernacular, were proposed, 

rather than unreflectively imposing European theories on to black literature. 2 

Sound in the text, in terms of the oral tradition, was also asserted. 3 In the 

Caribbean, orality has been linked to 20th century neocolonial affirmations of identity 

and nation-state formation (Brathwaite; Glissant). The assertion and appreciation 

for indigenous and creolized cultures, language and literary works was part of these 

movements. In African literature, there was a shift from merely documenting the continuity 

between literature and oral forms, to analyses that take into account the 

“strategic deployment” of orality in literature practiced by its authors (Quayson). In 

the United States, the performative, conversational aspect of the oral, particularly 

Gates’ notion of the “speakerly text,” had tremendous influence on the analyses of 

African American texts. The recognition of folklore as part of a black literary tradition 

helped in developing different approaches to African American literature with a view 

toward communal affiliations, and the prominence of voice and dialogue. 

12 | Sylvia Mieszkowski, Joy Smith and Marijke de Valck


The cultural field became the ground for exploration of black subjectivity, and 

music became an important site for research in race studies. Music and signs other 

than linguistic were also explored in research on African American literature. These 

studies gained momentum through the 1990s with two major works on music, Black 

Noise by Tricia Rose, and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Black Noise was a precursor 

to a developing genre of works about of rap music and its importance to American 

culture. Rose made astute analyses of rap music’s post industrial, urban black roots, 

and its relationship to black culture in the North East part of the United States. 

Rose makes clear rap’s continuity with black vernacular forms that rely on repetition, 

rhythm, orality and percussion. She also states that rap blurs the line “between 

literate and oral modes of communication by altering and sustaining important 

aspects of African American folk orality” (85). The literature-based music technology, 

the high tech equipment, beat boxes, electronics, and the practices and innovations 

that accompany them, alter and inform orality, while the oral performance makes the 

technology “tactile.” In other words, “rap simultaneously makes technology oral, and 

technologizes orality” (86). Rap is where orality and music meet in this volume, and 

is represented strongly here in terms of a gendered critique. 

In Black Noise, however, there is little mention of women, or more importantly, gendered 

critiques of rap lyrics, or hip hop culture. While Rose devotes a chapter to 

women in rap, and their up and coming status in the music industry, the focus is on 

their dialogue with black male rappers, and their existence within the field, rather 

than on a strong critique of how women are (mis)represented in this musical genre. 

There are several articles included in this volume that deal with rap, race and gender, 

in the United States, as well as an analysis that critiques the various ways gender 

and ethnicity come into play in these appropriations of an African American art form 

outside of the United States, and also an examination of its now world-wide appeal. 

Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, also published in the 1990s, was concerned with establishing 

the centrality of blackness to modernity, as opposed to understandings of 

modernity that place blackness and slavery outside of it, where slavery has been construed 

as an ancient hold over of the past. This marginalization seemed to be 

reflected in the marginalization of black cultural productions in general, particularly 

those whose formations were historically coterminous with enforced illiteracy. In addition 

to critiquing the academic predilection for the textual, and shifting music to the 

analytical fore, Gilroy took a transnational approach to his research on of black subjectivity. 

These shifts would come to influence African American studies, its attempts at 

rewriting modernity, a concern with transnationalism, and of course, a focus on the sonic. 

An approach to black studies that explores internationalism, and the cross-cultural, as 

an important strategy of analysis, is represented in this volume. 

Recently there has been a veritable explosion of music and poetics in black 

expressive culture, what Brent Hayes Edwards calls a “jazz poetics.” 4 In his introduction 


to an issue of the journal Callaloo, devoted entirely to the subject of “jazz studies 

through its approaches to literature,” Edwards’ attempts to define a broader more 

inclusive category for sound in black literature in general: 

If we can define a black poetics, it may be elaborated most consistently in what 

Albert Murray terms practices of “reciprocal voicing” – the relations between the words 

and the music, sound and sense, in black expressive practice. A black poetics works 

that interface, in other words, mining the fertile edge between “orality” and “literacy.” 5 

Edwards’ black poetics refers to the influences of sound in literature, in terms of style, its 

mimetic function, rhythm and rhyme, call and response, as well as repetition and revision. 

Following the dramatic import of African American theory on the fields of race, ethnicity 

and sound studies, race, in terms of blackness, is well represented in this volume. 

It is always conceived as a social relationality rather than an identity one 

somehow possesses. To use Saidiya Hartman’s words, 

Blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among 

blacks, whites and others, and the practices that produce racial difference. Blackness 

marks a social relationship of dominance and abjection and potentially one of redress 

and emancipation; it is a contested figure at the very center of social struggle. 6 

Hartman’s work is concerned with a particularly hurtful history and its effects; the 

pain of the traumatic Middle Passage, slavery, stolen bodies, loss of origins, history, 

family, and the lack of continuity. In terms of communal identifications, cultural memory 

(Eyerman) and cross-cultural engagement in political and aesthetic practices, 

slavery is a point of continual return for the negotiation of black subjectivity. 

The repercussions of this history are still felt, not only in terms of economic 

oppression and racism, but also as psychical and emotional effects, that Anne Anlin 

Cheng, in her book, The Melancholy of Race, describes as “racial grief.” The response 

to the predicament of social objectification and invisibility is a kind of mourning, and 

reflections on these conditions are often captured in the aural realm of black cultural 

production and are explored in this volume in terms of blues and its interaction with 

theater, and jazz music in literature. Sound produces innovative ways of theorizing the 

subject that do not necessarily privilege the linguistic or visual sphere. Acoustic histories 

signified in music, scatting, or “monin” provide counter-histories to those that 

are written. For critics who work on sound and subjectivity, it is not the goal to replace 

language, or the visual, with sound as the preferred mode of discursivity in apprehending 

the gendered, racialized subject. Rather, sound contributes new insights to 

these fields while questioning their primacy. 

Ethnicity is also represented in this volume, often in reference to black identity politics 

and art forms in the United States. This connection to African American and black 

diaspora studies is a unique approach to Roma studies, and it is explored here in two 

articles that deal with the Roma in Eastern/Central and Western Europe, and rap music. 

The best-known studies on the Roma uncover and explain the Romani genocide during 



World War II (Lewy; Zimmerman). Other studies continue to focus on their marginalization, 

with a view toward historical oppression, and their persistent discrimination after 

the Cold War, as well as the disciplining, governmental structures that continue, despite 

the political and economic restructuring that attended the overthrow of communism 

(Barany). 

Romani agency and attempts at self-determination, in their negotiations with governments 

and larger, majority populations, are an understudied area. This has only 

recently received academic attention where ethnic and political mobilizations have been 

examined. 7 The articles in this volume add to the scant research on Roma attempts at 

resistance and self-fashioning. Interventions in media and representations are examined 

here. The ways in which Romani groups utilize the arts is discussed as well as the 

dangers of national/state reappropriation of these cultural productions. 

A recent trend in Islamic scholarship has been to examine women and their place 

within Islam in various countries. Several approaches can be observed, including sociological 

and anthropological studies on Islam and modernity that include problematizing 

Western views on, and explorations of the politics behind headscarves, women’s roles 

and education. There have also been controversial, liberal readings and interpretations 

of the Qu’ran by women who critique patriarchal interpretations. 8 Closer to the research 

on the understudied role of the acoustic and its relevance to Islam, are the studies dealing 

with orality and Islam. There is an anthropological body of work on oral tribal poetry 

that includes examinations of Arab, Islamic identities (Abu-Lughod; Caton). Recently, a 

claim to the importance of orality to Islamic law and practices has been asserted 

(Souaiaia), as well as an analysis of the timbre of the voice in relation to Islamic cultural 

events (McPherson). Gender and orality, with regard to Islam, are, however, still seldomly 

explored. This type of analysis is represented in Sonic Interventions by a discussion of 

the interpellative force of recitation and prayer on religious identity formation. 

Sound and Place 

The study of sound and space/place has been given considerable attention as early 

as the late 1970s. Murray Schafer’s groundbreaking work on the notion of “soundscape” 

(Schafer) distinguished between the pre-industrial soundscape, in which 

sounds were clearly audible (high-fi) and the modern soundscape, where individual 

sounds were muffled (low-fi). According to Schafer, the conditions of the modern 

soundscape were schizophrenic due to the split between original sounds and their 

electro-acoustic reproduction. As Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld have pointed out, 

Schafer’s pessimistic outlook has been countered by recent contributions to sound 

studies that “offer a more optimistic view in which there is the possibility of control 

over one’s sonic accompaniment to daily life.” 9 The introduction of radio, for example, 

allowed the middle classes to enjoy their leisure time in the privacy of their own 

homes, far away from the noise and agitation in public theatres (Douglas). 


REGISTRAR SILENCED DUE TO RACE REGAINS VOICE 

Racism comes in many forms. In contemporary Western societies there is racial 

discrimination in selection procedures, ethnic exclusion from social circles, verbal 

pestering and even physical assault. If one looks at the way sonic strategies are 

appropriated for racial purposes, then “silencing” strikes as one of the most 

common and radical. In Belgium a shocking incident occurred in the winter of 

2007. Several couples refused to be joined in matrimony by Wouter van Bellingen, 

the first black registrar in the Flemish city of Sint-Niklaas. These couples, in other 

words, deprived him of performing the perlocutionary speech-act which his office 

requires him to perform in public. He was silenced in his regular activities and 

responsibilities because of the color of his skin. The incident became a news item 

in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Van Bellingen was invited to talk shows and 

received support from many indignant citizens; people decided to sign up for 

marriage with him. Although upset, Van Bellingen said he would not file a complaint 

against the refusing couples, because he did not want to turn the incident into a 

“symbolic dossier.” This position seems to make sense in another way as well. 

Considering that the legal steps are predominantly a red-tape process (with 

perhaps a short moment of spoken judgment), one could argue that the benefits 

are small. What is needed to counterbalance the radical act of silencing is not 

writing, but an equally radical public act of reclaiming the silenced voice. This is 

precisely the strategy Van Bellingen chose. He appeared on television, the platform 

for public speaking per se, and performed a public marriage on the big square of 

Sint Niklaas on 21st March, the International Day against Racism. In doing so he 

reclaimed the public voice that had been denied to him before. On the 21st March, 

hundreds of couples joined in the mass ceremony in St. Niklaas’ most prominent 

public location in protest against racism. Most of the participants renewed their 

vows some used the public protest to actually get married. 

Algemeen Dagblad, Monday 5th February 2007 

Many of the studies on sound and space deal with (the history of) new technologies. 

Emily Thompson, for example, has explored how the influences between 

acoustics, new technologies and architecture brought about the new sonic experiences 

and the “soundscapes of modernity” (Thompson). Jonathan Sterne focused 

on sound reproducing technologies – the telephone, phonograph and microphone – 

and the way these constitute a distinguished modern sound culture (Sterne). Other 

studies dealt with the relation between the sonic and the spatial in installation art 

(Pichler; Leitner, Sound: Space) or paid special attention to the audience’s resonating 

bodies (Leitner, Kopfräume�Headscapes). Theater and dance studies have drawn 

attention to the role of bodies in perceiving sound as time-based acoustic-geometric 

space. Under the umbrella of sound studies we, in short, find a rich and varied 

palette of works that deal with space and place. 

The authors in this volume take up many of the issues that have been analyzed in previous 

works and, in addition, bring them to bear on questions of cultural identity, often 



understood as racial or gendered. Although the study of sound in its spatial dimensions 

cannot be considered a novelty, knowing the legacy of work on soundscapes, and the various 

social and political manifestations that occur as result of the specificity of history 

and geography, i.e. place, the articles we present here do succeed in calling attention to 

sound as a cultural construction. They show, on the one hand, that the links between 

sound and places can be influenced, mixed culturally or colored politically, and promulgate, 

on the other hand, that our understanding of these cultural and political practices 

can greatly benefit from “sound” academic research on such sonic interventions. 

Some of the articles deal with contemporary musical practices and the way they 

interact with different spatial (local and national) influences. It is shown that cultural 

resistance or cultural divergences tend to come with this kind of musical hybridity. 

Hip-hop in particular, seems to lend itself to being appropriated by various musicians 

worldwide in support of their local and national identities. Thus, new hybrid genres 

blend African-American global hip hop culture with regional musical elements, mobilizing 

them transculturally and offering alternatives for homogenizing mainstream 

musical collective identities. Like most recent work in sound studies, the perspective 

that is offered on the emerging genre of world music is ultimately a positive one. The 

concept of sonic interventions, however, does not close the door to criticism. In the 

case of world music it is been shown that beneath creative appropriation and cultural 

diversification, other, less heterogeneous, openly normative or even oppressive agendas 

may be hidden. This is where the appropriation of sound to cross from one place 

to another becomes less important than the appropriation of certain places by 

sound. 

Finally, the volume counters the trend to focus on the individual listening experience. 

In recent sound studies some serious attention has been devoted to contemporary 

listening practices. Michael Bull, for example, showed how people employ their 

personal audio-sets to block externals sounds and impose control over their environment 

(Bull). The papers in this volume complement his excellent work by also studying 

collective listening practices. They point out that a crucial role is reserved for the 

event where performer(s) and audience interact or, in other words, where the act of listening 

to music becomes a performance in its own right. It is here that musical hybridities 

become sensori-bodily experiences and sounds may infuse – unconsciously or 

with full political awareness – cultural identities. Here again, the articles in this volume 

strive to demonstrate that the influence sound can exercise on collective consciousness 

may be employed in radically differing political contexts, on the side of oppressive 

regimes just as readily as on the side of cultural resistance. 

Sound and Gender 

Contrary to the wealth of research which has been done on sound/orality as a 

shaping element of racial identity, that investigates the poetics of sound in culture, 


SOUNDS UNDER SURVEILLANCE 

In the twenty-first century visual surveillance is a widespread and well-known 

practice. Every day many of our actions are recorded by an increasing number 

of cameras; in urban areas, in public transportation, at work, in shops when 

withdrawing money from an ATM – at all these occasions is it likely we are under 

the surveillance of a camera. In the Netherlands, the first city to implement 

permanent camera surveillance in urban spaces was Groningen in 2000. 

The experiment was considered a success and by 2007 the entertainment 

district had sixteen “electronic eyes.” Some of these are static others can 

revolve 360 degrees to allow security personnel to focus its gaze on the center 

of disturbances. Where visual surveillance has become a common tool 

in maintaining public order, surveillance of sounds is (still) a novelty. Techniques 

have long been optimized for intelligence purposes – as the multiple prize-winning 

film Das Leben Der Anderen (Germany: Henckel von Donnersmarck 2006) on 

the system of observation in former East Germany elegantly shows – but as a 

practice, sonic surveillance has not yet crossed over from crime and defense 

to civil departments. Why is this so? Is “listening in” assessed differently from 

visual observation and, as a result, are other considerations prioritized? Or is it 

only a matter of time before the surveillance society extends its grip to our 

“second sense”? In the Netherlands, recent newspaper reports seem to suggest 

the latter. Groningen, the first city to implement camera surveillance, launched a 

pilot project in 2007 to test “digital ears.” Some of the sixteen cameras in the 

inner city were equipped with microphones that can detect signals of violence, 

such as screaming, yelling and cries of distress. The technology is already quite 

refined, because most ambulance sirens, motorcycles and barking dogs are 

recognized as not-relevant (non-violent) noise. Its success – the implementation of 

sonic surveillance led to 67 detected reports of violence in five weeks – is not 

unlikely to spur the interest of other customers, be the governmental or 

commercial. 

NRC Next, Monday 2 April 2007 

history and culture politics10 or to the host of publications that establish and work 

with the concept of the “soundscape” in relation to “acoustic communities,” 11 the 

role sound plays for the constitution of gender identity has been relatively neglected 

to date. 

The Auditory Culture Reader’s index, for example, contains neither an entry for 

“sound and gender” nor for “female voice” nor for “male voice” (Bull and Back). 

There is, however, one entry for “voice, mother’s,” which refers readers to a two-pagelong 

subsection in Vic Seidler’s article on “Diasporic Sounds”: 

The first sounds that you hear as a baby find a deep resonance. It is through hearing 

the sound of the mother’s voice that you know where you are in the world. It is through 

this voice that you feel comfort and security. […] Mothers sing the same songs to their 

babies that their mothers sang to them. 12 


Seidler’s key interest clearly does not lie with questions like “does it matter if the first 

sounds you hear as a baby are uttered by a male or a female voice?” or “what impact 

do the voices a baby hears have on the development of its gender identity?” or “what 

makes a voice into a ‘mother’s voice’? Pitch? Timbre? Love? Genes?” or “can a man 

speak in ‘a mother’s voice’?” or “Do fathers sing the same songs to their babies that 

their mothers sang to them?” A few pages later, Seidler writes “Often young men 

learn to keep their silence so that they will not express the hurt they carry to others, 

and will do their best to hide it from themselves.” 13 The very phrasing implies that 

this might neither be true for all men nor might it be true for men only. Yet again, 

questions like “which cultural/historical/social factors help to gender silence as 

‘masculine’?” or “if silence is gendered masculine, what does that mean for women 

who refuse to suffer without making a sound or for men who hide their pain from 

themselves or others by keeping silent?” or “how might a dichotomy of silence�masculine 

vs. noise�feminine be deconstructed?” remain unasked. 

One could argue that it is hardly fair to pick on Seidler for not dealing with questions 

of sound and gender when his topic is sound and diasporic identity. But the 

point here is not to blame Seidler; the point is to realize that there might be questions 

about gender in the context of sound studies that have not yet been asked. In 

other words, although it seems possible to write about mothers’ voices and young 

men’s silence without reflecting on gender’s relevance for sound or sound’s relevance 

for gender identity, it might be more productive to do so. 

One might argue that Seidler’s is only one of twenty-nine articles in The Auditory 

Culture Reader. But since the other articles in this important collection do not show 

any more interest in gender, Seidler’s turning a deaf ear can be considered symptomatic. 

When gender does get mentioned in The Auditory Culture Reader, it is in the 

context of staging “otherness” as, for example, in an observation made in Mark 

Smith’s article of the “Heard worlds of Antebellum America”: 

At base, what was deemed noise – and who was noisy – was very much shaped by 

class relations, which were […] influenced by considerations of race and gender. 

Gentlemen North and south [sic] blasted putative ladies for their ‘love of little tittletattle’ 

and ‘gossiping tales,’ but remained convinced that ‘doubtless, there are many 

ladies … who do not come under the denomination of gossips, which prefer silence to 

scandal. 14 


In quoting these statements from a journal article originally published in 1811, Smith 

points to the fact that some sounds (noise, gossip), here, are gendered (feminized). 

But although he also implies that this gendering both reflects and helps to stabilize 

a sexist (and classist and racist) power structure, he does not pursue a closer investigation 

in the direction of gender and sound. 

To remain fair, the editors of The Auditory Culture Reader do, albeit implicitly, address 

the category of gender in a two-page sub-section of their introduction. Tellingly, it is titled 


“Dangerous Sounds” and draws attention to the fact that “sound and its reception are 

infused with cultural values. Just as sight is understood in terms of scopophilia, so sound 

has its own narrative of desire.” 15 On these two pages, Bull and Back comment on 

Horkheimer’s/Adorno’s reading of the sirens’ episode in Homer’s Odyssey. But the implicit 

gendering of both desire (masculine) and danger (feminine) remains uncommented. What 

also stays completely beneath the horizon of observation, here, is the quoted statement’s 

tacit assumption that desire necessarily takes place between men and women. There is, 

in other words, absolutely no consciousness of the heteronormative ideology at work 

here. A question like “how may sound represent male/male or female/female desire?” is 

as completely out of ear-shot as “which roles does sound play in the de/stabilization of 

the dichotomy which opposes heterosexual and homosexual desire?” Also, there is no 

indication of an understanding that calling the section “Dangerous Sounds” reproduces 

and perpetuates stereotypes concerning gender and sexuality rather than analyzing them. 

But it distorts facts to keep criticizing only The Auditory Culture Reader for having a deaf 

spot when it comes to gender, since this is true for a great number of publications in the 

expanding field of what has been called “Sound Studies,” John M. Picker’s study of 

Victorian Soundscapes being the rare and laudable exception. 

It seems to be no coincidence that the brief sound bites readers are offered by Bull 

and Back on gender deals with the sirens. Indeed, there is one branch of research on 

sound that is generally more interested in questions of gendering than others, namely 

studies which analyze the voice, its myths, fictionalizations and performances. 16 The 

voices of Echo or Orpheus, of the Sirens, of the opera queen, or the castrato singer are, 

as a rule, investigated as gendered voices or voices that question or criticize the gendersystem. 

Most of the articles in this volume which comment on the intersections between 

sound and gender start out from vocal phenomena as well, while dealing with a wide variety 

of voices that sing, moan, chant, speak, imitate, recite, rap, are recorded, sampled, 

played back and distorted while being gendered or de-gendered, or changed from one 

gender to another. By analyzing these voices, the contributors ask new questions about 

how music or literary texts that focus on the sonic, explicitly or implicitly, use gender as 

a category and – moving in the opposite direction – how these texts and musical pieces 

try to undermine gender as a stable category by using discourses on sound. But this volume’s 

articles also investigate the gendering of non-vocal sounds, the sounding out of 

gender, and the ways of intersection between gender, race and place through sound that 

is not voiced, but whistled, percussive, played or electronically produced. 

Overview 

The first sub-section, titled “Resonance – Politics – Resistance” assembles three articles 

that address music – as diverse as jazz, calypso, propagandistic song, and rap – 

as politicized sound which may produce a sympathetic reverberation in the audience, 

provoke opposing repercussions of resistance or national identifications. 



Fred Moten’s article on “The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)” explores 

divergences in Afro-diasporic culture(s) through an analysis of two recordings: 

Trinidadian calypsonian Rupert Westmore Grant’s recording of “Crisis in Arkansas” 

and African American jazz bassist Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus.” Moten illuminates 

what to emulate and what to change in the black diasporic tradition of transoceanic 

aesthetic and political endeavors. 

Carolyn Birdsall’s contribution, “ ‘Affirmative Resonances’ in the City? Sound, 

Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany”, investigates how sound was 

deployed by the Nazi party to discipline crowds and safeguard mass support for their 

political regime. Looking at collective singing and cheering, loudspeaker technology 

as well as the call-and-response-interactions between orator and crowd, Birdsall 

CONFLICT OVER CALL TO PRAYER 

In March 2007 a Vlaardingen-based (Netherlands) mosque requested to be 

allowed the use of loudspeakers for its call to prayer. In Arabic countries Muslim 

believers are called to prayer five times a day: at dawn, midday, in the middle of 

the afternoon, just after sunset and at nightfall. Traditionally it is the muezzin who 

mounts the stairs of the minaret and calls into all directions to “hasten to prayer.” 

But now many mosques have turned to using loudspeakers. The request in 

Vlaardingen was made for Friday afternoon, the most important call to prayer of 

the week. It caught attention although mosques are increasingly visible in the 

Dutch urban landscapes – these architecturally traditional houses of prayer are 

usually built in areas with large Muslim communities. No mosque, however, had 

asked to be granted a sonic presence in the urban soundscape explicitly before; a 

sonic presence on an equal footing with church bells, that is. The request spurred 

discussion. Other mosques in the same city were reported to be considering 

sound-technology as well. The mayor took a liberal position, announcing he would 

not impose restrictions unless surrounding residents were to suffer demonstrable 

acoustic inconvenience; or if some community spokesperson objected to their life 

space being transgressed by these unfamiliar sounds. The event was exploited for 

political purposes as well. Several conservative and right-wing politicians grasped 

the opportunity to play on feelings of fear of a growing Islamic influence. 

Suggestive questions were posed in the Second Chamber: “How do you evaluate 

this development, in which loud calls to Islamic prayer enter the public domain? 

Do these emphatic calls create a climate that is alienating to a lot of Dutch 

people and which may increase the tension between the different cultural and 

religious communities? Would it not be wise to refrain from such calls to prayer? 

Does the constitution offer possibilities for interdiction?” Here a religiously 

intolerant attitude is masked by one-sidedly postulating “other” sounds as 

loud and intrusive. In response, the Minister of Interior Affairs pointed at the 

constitutional right to use sound, by ringing bells for example, in order to call 

believers to religious ceremonies. 

De Telegraaf, Tuesday 27 March 2007 


shows how these musical and non-musical sounds were effectively used to legitimize 

the Nazi party. 

Marisa Parham’s contribution, “ ‘You Can’t Flow Over This’: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic 

Illusion,” examines spoken word performance on The Roots’ 1995 album Do You 

Want More??!? exploring rap music through genre, oral and written poetry. Parham 

reconsiders rap as an oral form, and offers an important gender critique in terms of 

authorship based on an analysis of Rucker’s performance of “The Unlocking.” 

The second triplet of articles, gathered in a sub-section titled “Incantations: 

Gender and Identity,” brings to attention how repetitive vocal practice participates in 

forming (gendered) identity. Incantation is a key concept in all three contributions, yet 

the cultural contexts differ dramatically: Islamic recital practice; individualized selfhealing 

of a traumatized psyche represented in secular literature; and professional 

training for Western opera-singing. 

Through a discussion of Levinas’ concept of God, and Althusser’s theory of interpellation, 

Mahmut Mutman’s article on “Reciting: The Voice of the Other” explores 

the importance of the voice in Islam and in particular the Qur’anic recitation. The 

article asserts the hearing of the voice of the other as part of the monotheistic religious 

experience, positing this voice as feminine and questioning the patriarchal 

foundations of the Islamic and other monotheistic narratives. 

Sylvia Mieszkowski’s article on “Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds” analyzes 

how sound as noise, sound as chant and sound as mediated voice affect the restitution 

of gendered identity after traumatic loss. The psychoanalytically informed reading 

of Don DeLillo’s (post-) modernist novella The Body Artist introduces the concept 

of the “sonic symptom” and proposes that the protagonist’s game with her friend’s 

answering machine may be read as an aural version of Freud’s “fort/da-game.” 

Milla Tiainen’s article, while also dealing with questions of individual gendered 

identity, shifts the focus of attention from literature to opera, and hence away from 

representations of the voice in writing, back to actual sound-waves and their interference 

with the physical materiality. In “Corporeal Forces, Sexual Differentiations: New 

Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing, and Subjectivity” she investigates how 

sound, more precisely, how the production of a particular kind of vocal sounds, helps 

to shape a multitude of sexual differences in the body that produces these sounds. 

Sub-section three, titled “Performing Subjectivity: Literature, Race and Mourning,” 

consists of three articles on African-American and Afro-Caribbean literature that deal 

with sound and affect; with the searching for, expressing of and relating to racial identity 

through forms of musicality, or orality, that transform mourning in reaction to discrimination, 

oppression, aggression and physical as well as psychic suffering. 

David Copenhafer’s article on “Invisible Music (Ellison)” addresses the complex 

interaction of the audible and the visual in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, seeking 

to grasp the dynamics of race in music and figural language. 



Soyica Diggs’ “Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight” contextualizes 

James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie by placing it in a tradition of African 

American fiction that makes use of musical sound as a model for both individual and 

collective recuperation. In this article, Diggs uses psychoanalytic theory to investigate 

how the play, by using the blues as a metaphor, renders audible the affective 

and social histories of lynching victims as an acoustic legacy of mourning. 

Joy Smith’s “Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Folktale in Ellen Ombre’s 

short fiction ‘Fragments’ ” explores the “strategic deployment” of a well-known folktale 

by writers during the colonial years in the former Dutch colony of Surinam, as well 

as the story’s resurfacing in the postcolonial years in the Netherlands. The article 

discusses the folktale’s continual emergence and suggests it acts as a powerful 

force for Surinamese communal affiliations, namely sonic interpellation, while asserting 

an oral poetics within Ombre’s short story. 

The articles assembled in sub-section four, titled “Mixing Music: Event, Place and 

Transculturality,” share as their object of investigation the community-building musical 

event characterized through techniques of mixing and blending. While the first two contributions 

present one positive and one critical reading of new genres inspired by 

Hip Hop, the last article emphasizes the importance of place – both spatial and temporal 

– for the Dancehall Session. 

In tracing two musical traditions – that of hip hop and that of flamenco – Susanne 

Stemmler’s article on “ ‘Sonido ciudadísimo’: Black noise Andalusian style in contemporary 

Spain” investigates the cultural matrix that allows these traditions, by 

combining their elements, to both open up a space for the aesthetic performance of 

identity and allow for cultural resistance through a new urban sound. 

As a complement to this, Anikó Imre’s exploration of “Hip Hop Nation and Gender 

Politics,” takes a critical look at rap music’s deployment through identity politics, 

focusing on case studies in the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, and the United States. 

On the one hand, Imre agrees with Stemmler in her assessment of contemporary 

world music as characterized by hybridity. On the other hand, she shows that beneath 

the nationalist appropriation and cultural diversification of hip-hop as a global genre, 

another, less heterogeneous agenda is often played out. On this second level, which 

becomes a target for feminist critique and resistance, masculine (and militaristic) 

identity is normalized and sold as “natural,” while alternatives are devalued. 

It is precisely one such alternative that Julian Henriques’ article comments on, 

when he claims that regular Jamaican norms – including conservative sexual ones – 

may be temporarily suspended during the Dancehall sessions. Queer performances 

are acted out in the otherwise rather homophobic Jamaican society. “Situating 

Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session” further demonstrates how the 

heterogeneous performative practices of the Jamaican dance crowd are monitored 

and manipulated by sensori-motor engineering techniques. While mixing and cutting, 


the engineer “sounds out” the audience’s experience to decide which specific sound 

may serve best to address the “Crowd.” 

Presenting a volume on the impact sounds – both actual and represented in language, 

both musical and non-structured, both vocal and instrumental, both acoustically 

and electronically produced – may have in these contexts, we hope to make a 

contribution that complements visual and literary approaches of understandings to 

culture. 


Notes 

1. Sounding Out in 2002, Sounding Out 2 in 

2004, Sonic Interventions in 2005, Sounding Out 

3 in 2006, Körperwellen. Zur Resonanz als 

Modell, Metapher und Methode (Bodywaves. On 

Resonance as Model, Metaphor and Method) in 

2006, Sound Effects. The Oral/Aural of Literatures 

in English in 2006, and Klangwelt Shakespeare 

(Shakespeare’s Sonic World) in 2007. 

2. Baker; Mackey; Gates. 

3. Brathwaite; Glissant; Mackey. 

4. Edwards 5–7. 

5. Edwards 5. 

6. Hartman 56–57. 

7. Fenton and May; Guy; Vermeersh. 

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Resonance – Politics – 

Resistance

The New International of 

Rhythmic Feeling(s) 

ABSTRACT 


Fred Moten 

The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s) 

Rupert Westmore Grant, the great Trinidadian Calypsonian known as Lord Invader, 

recorded “Crisis in Arkansas” in March of 1959. A couple of months later, bassist/ 

composer Charles Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus.” This article takes up the 

convergence of Mingus’ and Lord Invader’s musical indictments of the infamous 

former governor of Arkansas, who tried to block black students from attending the allwhite 

Little Rock Central High School in 1957, and argues that the convergence reveals 

articulate divergence in aesthetic and political ideology within Afro-Diasporic culture/s 

and illuminates some of what remains to emulate and correct in the tradition of 

anti-colonial, anti-racist, trans-oceanic aesthetic and political endeavor. 

This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities, 

Cities, Men. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay, 

ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, 

which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of 

the light of God, in which the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld, 

only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not 

threatened with this annhiliation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they 

move upon the same poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made 

immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keepe them from sinking to this center, 

Annihilation. (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 51) 

The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s) | 31

At the edge of the spiral of musicians Probe sat cross-legged on a blue cloth, his 

soprano sax resting against his inner knee, his afro-horn linking his ankles like a 

bridge. The afro-horn was the newest axe to cut the deadwood of the world. But Probe, 

since his return from exile, had chosen only special times to reveal the new sound. 

There were more rumors about it than there were ears and souls that had heard the 

horn speak. Probe’s dark full head tilted toward the vibrations of the music as if the 

ring of sound from the six wailing pieces was tightening, creating a spiraling circle. 

The black audience, unaware at first of its collectiveness, had begun to move in a 

soundless rhythm as if it were the tiny twitchings of an embryo. The waiters in the club 

fell against the wall, shadows, dark pillars holding up the building and letting the free 

air purify the mind of the club. 

The drums took an oblique. Magwa’s hands, like the forked tongue of a dark snake, 

probed the skins, probed the whole belly of the coming circle. Haig’s alto arc, rapid 

piano incisions, Billy’s thin green flute arcs and tangents, Stace’s examinations of his 

own trumpet discoveries, all fell separately, yet together, into a blanket which Mojohn 

had begun weaving on bass when the set began. The audience breathed, and Probe 

moved into the inner ranges of the sax. 

Outside the Sound Barrier Club three white people were opening the door. 

(Henry Dumas, “Will the Circle be Unbroken?”105) 

Artworks’ paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself. The movement of artworks must be 

at a standstill and thereby become visible. Their immanent processual character – the 

legal process that they undertake against the merely existing world that is external to 

them – is objective prior to their alliance with any party. 

(Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 176–77) 

Rupert Westmore Grant, the Trinidadian calypsonian known as Lord Invader, recorded 

“Crisis in Arkansas” in March of 1959. 1 Two months later, bassist/composer Charles 

Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus.” 2 The convergence of Mingus’ and Lord Invader’s 

musical indictments of Orval E. Faubus, the infamous former Governor of Arkansas, 

who tried to prevent black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High 

School in 1957, is of interest because of what it reveals of the articulate divergences 

in aesthetic and political ideology that animate Afro-diasporic culture. Mingus’ politics 

are complicated by something Paul Gilroy has diagnosed elsewhere as “African- 

American exceptionalism” – a parochialism derived, in part, from a sense of messianic 

singularity – even as the explicit political assertion embedded in calypso is something 

to which Mingus’ protest impulse corresponds, and even as its musical forms and techniques 

are the object of Mingus’ ambivalent desire (Gilroy 1–40). Meanwhile, Lord 

Invader’s pride in his and his music’s West Indian origins is infused with its own complex 

and problematic national politics of rhythm, even as it exhibits profound transnational 

solidarity. The coincidence of their attention to Faubus occurs against the 

32 | Fred Moten


historical backdrop of a triangle trade in bodies and labor that Cold War politics updates 

into the trilateral movement of imperial troops, a long trajectory of catastrophe that still 

engenders the resistance that prompted it. In examining this coincidence, and placing 

it within the context of Lord Invader’s and Mingus’ musical careers and lineages, I hope 

to attend to some of what is left for us to emulate and correct in the tradition of anticolonial, 

anti-racist, trans-oceanic aesthetic and political endeavor. 

That Afro-diasporic resistance to the very conditions of possibility of the African 

diaspora often manifests itself as a kind of internal strife – between musicians and 

instruments, between (and within) locales and their corresponding styles, and 

between freedom and confinement in the constitution of political aesthetics – is a 

matter that I would address with a kind of wary celebration. To accomplish this, I 

must also consider the relation between Mingus’ political assertion, his formulation 

of the idea of “rotary perception” – a theory and practice of rhythmic flexibility in the 

music that he refused to call jazz – and his denigration of another great figure of the 

Los Angeles musical diaspora, Ornette Coleman. An international relay of seduction 

and marketing will become apparent here, one in which Mingus sees both Coleman 

and the calypsonians as competitors and interlopers. Here, appositional articulations – 

however vexed, however burdened by the trace of what they would appose – emerge 

in (or, more precisely, as and by way of) the space between scenes, in intervals determined 

by barriers of sound and color. 

As the acerbic lyrics he throws in Faubus’ direction show, in addition to his brilliant 

musical achievements, Mingus was a genius at showing contempt. My concerns 

begin with the fact that some of his sharpest rebukes are intermittently and ambivalently 

directed towards certain key figures in a richly differentiated set of movements 

called “free jazz,” particularly Coleman. 3 When especially intent upon abusing 

Coleman’s musicianship, Mingus called Coleman a “calypso player.” Here are two 

such instances, one from a June 1964 interview with the French magazine Jazz, the 

other recalled in Tonight at Noon, the memoir of Mingus’ widow Sue Graham Mingus: 

“Don’t talk to me about Ornette Coleman. There are a bunch of musicians in the U. 

S. like him who are incapable of reading music and who have his particular approach. 

Coleman is a calypso player. Besides, he’s West Indian. He doesn’t have anything to do 

with Kansas City, Georgia or New Orleans. He doesn’t play southern music. He might 

have come from Texas but that doesn’t stop his family from being calypso, the same as 

Sonny Rollins’s. All these musicians have, because of their origins, a feeling that is 

entirely different from ours. Sonny, at the beginning of his career, had a lot of difficulties. 

He copied Bird frantically. Now, fortunately, he’s found his way and got himself 

together. To return to Ornette, he can’t play a theme as simple as “Body and Soul.” He 

belongs, along with Cecil Taylor, to the category of instrumentalists who are incapable 

of interpreting a piece with chords and an established progression. I remember trying 

to play with him. Kenny Dorham and Max Roach were with me that day. We started 


“All the Things You Are” but at the end of a few measures Ornette Coleman couldn’t 

keep tempo or follow the chords. He was completely lost. Let him play calypsos. 4 ” 

I met Charles Mingus shortly before midnight in July 1964. I’d gone down to the Five 

Spot, a jazz club in lower Manhattan, because the producer of a film I was acting in had 

commissioned a jazz soundtrack from saxophonist Ornette Coleman – at least he 

thought he had commissioned a soundtrack – and my friend Sam Edwards, who was 

working on the film, suggested I check out the scene […]. 

Mingus called for a bottle of Bordeaux – his own, which he’d evidently brought from 

home – and was standing so close to our stools that, as he drifted into wine talk with 

the bartender, I stole a glance at his eyes. They were large innocent eyes, I thought, vulnerable 

and questioning, deep brown amused eyes that darted about the room while 

he remained fixed on his conversation with the man at the bar. I decided to ask Mingus 

whether he’d seen Ornette Coleman, the musician Sam and I were looking for, whose 

free style of playing was still causing disputes among jazz fans. 

“You mean the calypso player?” Mingus replied scornfully. He looked at me with 

curiosity. “You his old lady?” he asked. 

“His mother?” I said. I hadn’t the faintest notion what he meant. 

Mingus laughed. “No, baby, I mean his woman, his lady.” 

“He’s writing some music for a movie I’m in” 

“You in a movie?” He seemed surprised. “With those teeth?” 

Now I laughed. “It’s an underground movie,” I said. “They’re not fussy.” A missing 

tooth in the back of my mouth was hardly visible – certainly it had never been singled 

out by a curious stranger. 

“Isn’t your daddy rich?” Mingus persisted. I looked sideways at Sam. He was sitting 

straight-backed and noncommittal, staring at himself in the mirror across the bar. I 

imagined he was waiting to see exactly how far down this communication failure was 

headed. (S.G. Mingus 13, 18–19) 

According to Mingus, Coleman exhibits an harmonic ignorance that is manifest as an 

inability to navigate the music’s spatio-temporal structure. The origin of these faults 

is double: idiomatic strangeness and technical incompetence. He doesn’t know 

where or when he is because he comes from the wrong place, is of dubious, Antillean 

origins even if he is, in fact, from Texas, even if he migrated, like Mingus, to New York 

by way of Los Angeles. And so Coleman starts to fold, bending toward the center, the 

absolute singularity of an inescapable point or beat. He loses force, loses drive, spiraling 

to nothing, to confusion. He can’t keep up, can’t return and so the very figure 

of the black musical centrifuge stands in for what Mingus despises under the rubric 

of the centripetal, the concentrique. Coleman’s music exhibits the deathly gravity that 

goes with being out of the loop, outside the circle of occult musical understanding 

and interpretive im/possibility that Frederick Douglass associates with knowledge of 

slavery (Douglass 262–3), 5 that Mingus associates with knowledge of the south, that 

34 | Fred Moten


Henry Dumas associates with an embryonic collectivity, born of a range of exiles, that 

is in part defined by the impenetrable attraction it seems to hold for a kind of 

hipsterism that Dumas fictionalizes and Sue Graham Mingus autobiographically 

records. But what if such rootless rootedness is the deliberate aesthetic effect and 

affect of wanting out? When does the decaying orbit of centripetal force itself become 

a kind of centrifugitivity? How would one know the difference? More precisely, 

how would one inhabit such eccentric, such impossible, ground? This is the 

essential question concerning the radical in general and black radicalism in 

particular – it’s comportment towards a center that is, if not nothing, certainly not 

there. But the question of such comportment cannot be dealt with by avoidance no 

matter how vexing any or all particular addresses of it have been or might be. 

Moreover, the absent but determinate centers of such structures are multiple. There 

are many impossible origins toward which we must comport ourselves; this is what 

might be called – in the full force of each of these terms – the question concerning 

the scored, scarred, richly internally differentiated, authenticity of blackness. Mingus’ 

vexed, jealous, intolerant, ambivalent, beautifully ugly attendance to this question – 

his out inhabitation of the center of the circle – is, therefore, of great interest 

precisely because of its troubled and troubling nature. From the broken and unbroken 

circle (of slavery) to the vexed structures of musical emancipation and subjection; 

from Little Rock Central to the outskirts of town; from (Sweet) Home to Harlem: “the 

thought of the outside,” in Foucault’s terms, is bound up with the centrifugal, the 

fugal, the fugacious, the fugitive, the “destination out,” in Nathaniel Mackey’s terms 

(Mackey, “Destination Out” 814). 6 The experience of the (sparkle of the) outside that 

resurfaced, according to Foucault, “at the very core of language” occurs in relation to 

an upheaval that is authentic however much it is broken in the performance – at the 

core of language and everywhere else – of blackness (Foucault, “The Thought from 

Outside” 18). 

Mingus’ anti-calypsonianism is all the more problematic if thought in relation to the 

vast range of his Afro-Latin moods and modes, his Spanish tinge and turn and dinge, as 

Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Reid-Pharr might say, his cante moro or cante jondo as 

Mackey might say (after Garcia Lorca). 7 Mingus’ spatio-aesthetic chauvinism had to do 

with what he heard as a rhythmic and temporal structure whose vernacular linearity could 

be said to bespeak both idiomatic singularity and elective bondage. Such dismissal of 

the vernacular, which moves by placing its features under the sign of the Caribbean, is all 

the more complex when seen within the context of Mingus compositions such as 

“Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” “Los Mariachis” and “Haitian Fight Song” – songs 

whose titles and musical character reveal a profound engagement with southern U.S. 

and Caribbean Afro-diasporic vernaculars. At the same time, the supposed harmonic and 

rhythmic deficits of calypso and free jazz mark a more general deficiency that Mingus 

hears in Afro-diasporic music when compared to Euro-American concert music. 


Sometimes it seems as if Mingus is in search of a certain capacity for freedom in music 

that is to be found either in European development or Afro-diasporic primitivity, but neither 

in some combination of these imaginary poles nor in their deconstruction. And yet 

Mingus’ proper musical home is precisely this interstitial, interarticulatory space that 

“neither” or “naught” signifies. This is to say, among other things, that the nationalist 

discourse on jazz is generally structured, above all, by a deep ambivalence. The way out 

of the limitations of jazz turns out to be nothing other than the way back into those 

limits that constitute its absent ground. There are two rhetorical strategies apparent in 

Mingus’ discourse on those limits: one is the spatial chauvinism glanced at above; the 

other is a kind of spatio-temporal anti-foundationalism in his musico-theoretical discourse 

out of which emerges the term “rotary perception.” 8 

Jazz biographer Brian Priestly argues that Mingus’ practice and theory of “rotary 

perception” begins to emerge in an experience of the frontier, in the vexed circuits of 

politico-economic, aesthetic and sexual desire that mark the U.S./Mexico border, its 

cycles of conquest and conquest denial, its Afro-diasporic traces and erasures. 

Mingus’ Tijuana Moods, an album recorded in late July and early August of 1957, just 

a few weeks before the National Guard had to be deployed in order to escort nine 

black kids into Little Rock Central, replicates that circuitry. Of one of the signature 

tunes from that album Priestly writes: 

Dizzy Moods, apparently conceived while driving to Tijuana, was described by 

Mingus before it was ever recorded: “Try a song like Dizzy [Gillespie]’s “Woody’n You,” 

for example, and make some changes; fit a church minor mode into the chord structure,” 

and in fact a bluesy phrase in B flat minor is reiterated throughout the D flat 

circle of 4ths that constituted Gillespie’s original A section (based on the sequence of 

Fats Waller’s “Blue Turning Grey” and “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling”). Mingus’ B section, 

however, is in 6/4, but phrased in such a way that the 4/4 time-signature is still felt 

subliminally, and it may be that the idea of adapting this polyrhythmic approach (hinted 

at in the C sections of [Mingus’ composition] “Pithecanthropus”) surfaced after the trip 

to Tijuana, since it is a fact that Mexican popular music is typically in multiples of three 

syncopated by multiples of two. (Priestly 84) 

Priestly then quotes Mingus’ long-time drummer Dannie Richmond on the rapport 

they developed “in negotiating such novel terrain for jazz”: 

I could see that [Mingus] stayed completely on top of the beat, so much so that, in 

order for the tempo not to accelerate … I had to lay back a bit. And, at the same time, 

let my stroke be on the same downbeat as his, but just a fraction behind it … So that, 

when I would play on the 2 and 4, and sometimes switch it around to 1 and 3, he liked 

these different kind of changes that were taking place between the two of us. And I 

think it was when we first started to play something in 6 that we knew the magic was 

there, and that we could within a second be out of the 6 into a smashing 4/4 and not 

lose any of the dynamic level that had preceded it. (84–5) 

36 | Fred Moten


This rapport was cemented, according to Priestly, in the nine months of intense collaboration 

in Mingus’ Jazz Workshop before the recording of Tijuana Moods. That 

period came to a kind of climax when Mingus said to Richmond: 

You’re doing well, but now suppose you had to play a composition alone. How would 

you play it on the drums? … OK, if you had a dot in the middle of your hand and you were 

going in a circle, it would have to expand and go round and round, and get larger and 

larger. And at some point it would have to stop, and then this same circle would have 

to come back around, around, around to the little dot in the middle of your hand. (85) 

What’s at stake here – by way of Tijuana’s magic circle and broken market, by way of 

Mingus’ self-described massive appetite for sexual and aesthetic control, his location of 

Tijuana as a key point on the circuit on which those appetites were indulged, and his 

identification of Tijuana with his experience and understanding of his own self-described 

hybridities – is Mingus’ sense of the play of the centripetal and the centrifugal in this 

early formulation of what he comes to call “rotary perception.” 9 This new approach to 

negotiating the circle and its border emerges from another border experience, from a 

music whose idiomatic specificity Mingus has to learn in order to achieve or more definitively 

to claim the kind of grounded eccentricity he desires. This is where the 

re-singularization of the Afro-US musical idiom (which we’ll come to understand as an 

example of the reconstruction of techniques of feel) takes and is taken by the time of 

Mexican celebration. But this is accomplished within the context of Mingus’ otherwise 

distancing and denigrating remarks regarding another Afro-diasporic music. 

Those remarks are inseparable from the emerging discourse on “rotary perception.” 

That discourse is one of marketing as well as of a more “purely” musical exigency. 

Mingus invents terms meant to compete with those that were being attached to free jazz, 

especially to the music of Coleman, the calypsonian. His intervention is intended to 

announce a musico-theoretical advance as well as to attract the critics and the women, 

thereby fostering a dual seduction at the sound barrier. As Priestly shows, Mingus’ most 

well-known exposition on “rotary perception,” which occurs toward the end of his autobiography 

Beneath the Underdog, comes from an interview that was ghosted into an article 

in a British journal called Jazz News in July, 1961 (Priestly 124). 10 The article’s 

formulations on “rotary perception” come right after a diatribe against John Coltrane, 

and other members of the jazz avant-garde, whose innovations Mingus felt he had anticipated 

with a rigor that proponents of the new thing never approached. In Beneath the 

Underdog, Mingus’ explanation of “rotary perception” comes in the midst of a seduction 

scene at the start of a romantic relationship, a scene reminiscent of Mingus and Sue 

Graham’s initial encounter. The denigration of Trane, Ornette, or more generally, free jazz 

in calypso terms is part of some courtship ritual that also includes the codification of a 

new musico-theoretical formulation springing from a diasporic practice that crosses borders 

for its (im)proper articulation, and which has its origins in a desire that is both discursive 

and commercial. As we’ll see, critics and historians of Trinidadian history and 


culture, like Gordon Rohlehr and Harvey Neptune, are helpful in placing Mingus’ comments 

on Coleman within the context of the marketing of calypso in America. Mingus is 

fighting a battle against two sets of invaders. These formulations on “rotary perception,” 

then, are inextricably linked to the dismissal of Coleman and calypso. And, as Priestly 

intimates, the dismissal is always accompanied by a trace of indebtedness: 

When I first introduced the name to the press, I admit it was only a gimmick like 

“Third Stream.” I was tired of going hungry and I wanted to catch the public ear but, 

although the word was a gimmick, the music wasn’t … [S]wing proceeds in one direction 

only – but this rotary movement is, of course, circular. Previously jazz has been held 

back by people who think that everything must be played in the “heard” or obvious 

pulse … [Previously people regarded the notes as having to fall on the centre of the 

beats in the bar, or at precise intervals from beat to beat like clockwork. Three of four 

men in a rhythm section would be accenting the same pulse][…]. With Rotary 

Perception you may imagine a circle round the beat. [This is necessary because when 

you are playing you visualize this. It’s not parade music or dance music. If you imagine 

the circle, then with a quartet formula each member can play his notes anywhere 

around the beat. It gives him the feeling that he has more trace.] The notes can fall at 

any point within the circle so that the original feeling for the beat is not disturbed. If 

anyone in the group loses confidence, one of the Quartet can hit the beat again. [The 

pulse is inside you, only to remember the beat is important] (Mingus 124–25). 11 

Again, this passage, as Priestly points out, is something like a rough draft for what 

goes on in Beneath the Underdog. You’ll notice, though, refinements at the level of a certain 

insight into the possibilities of intra-ensemblic antagonism in jazz performance: 

There was once a word used – swing. Swing went in one direction, it was linear, and 

everything had to be played with an obvious pulse and that’s very restrictive. But I use 

the term “rotary perception.” If you get a mental picture of the beat existing within a circle 

you’re more free to improvise. People used to think the notes had to fall on the centre 

of the beats in the bar at intervals like a metronome, with three or four men in the 

rhythm section accenting the same pulse. That’s like parade music or dance music. But 

imagine a circle surrounding each beat – each guy can play his notes anywhere in that 

circle and it gives him a feeling he has more space. The notes fall anywhere inside the 

circle but the original feeling for the beat isn’t changed. If one in the group loses confidence, 

somebody hits the beat again. The pulse is inside you. When you’re playing with 

musicians who think this way you can do anything. Anybody can stop and let the others 

go on. It’s called strolling. In the old days when we got arrogant players on the stand 

we’d do that – just stop playing and a bad musician would be thrown. (Mingus 251–52) 

Throw the bad musician like a horse throwing a bad rider, a bad possessor. Refuse 

by way of induced confusion. The bad rider is not rhythmically self-sufficient, is radically 

distant from the complex inside/outside relation to the circle taken on by the 

ones who know. The ones who know are protected from a certain decay that standing 

38 | Fred Moten


on the beat, that occupying the center of the circle, ensures. The bad rider, on the 

other hand, succumbs to that disciplinary cadence and, in so doing, fails to know the 

relation that he signifies. But why link calypso, with its supposedly insistent groove 

and putatively simple harmonies, with the rhythmic fugitivity and atonal errancy of 

free jazz, modes of dissidence and dissonance which elsewhere Mingus lauds and 

which his music both prefigures and emulates? And why do it by way of both nationalist 

and regionalist discourse, even as one engages in critiques of the most egregious 

and brutal forms of American regional-nationalist vulgarity? Mingus’ work is 

partly an intense – one might say typically modernist – activation of the desire for both 

advance and nostalgia. The freedom that would allow unfettered musico-structural 

development is tied to the forging of minimal – which could be construed as primitive – 

musical forms. In the end, however, we’ll see that Mingus’ idea of “rotary perception” 

corresponds to musicologist Shannon Dudley’s description of the “interactive rhythmic 

feel” of calypso (the very music Mingus denigrates), in particular and Afro-diasporic 

music, in general – where cometric accents coexist with the contrametric; where 

those accents can be both audible and inaudible. 12 Against the grain of his own 

nationalist assertions, Mingus is after the discrepant drive of an international – as 

well as intranational and, even, contranational – musical ideal; a spatial universality 

that manifests itself as rigorously enacted and interarticulate temporal differences. 

In his analysis of the rhythmic correspondences and differences between calypso and 

soca, calypso’s North American- and Indian-rhythm influenced offspring, Dudley uses 

“the term ‘rhythmic feel,’ instead of ‘beat,’ because it is more suggestive of the possibility 

that many rhythms can combine to produce a distinctive musical sensation” (270). 

Moreover, in an attempt to “explain the interactive rhythmic feel of calypso” not as “a key 

rhythm around which the music is constructed” but, rather, as “the consistent musical 

logic and composite aesthetic effect of many parts which interact together rhythmically,” 

Dudley moves toward a description of something on the order of a public sphere or workers’ 

circle (270). The precision of Dudley’s description can be traced back to what he 

characterizes as “early scholars’ erroneous perceptions of African music”: 

Erich von Hornbostel, for example, was puzzled by the absence of a regular pulse in 

the recordings he listened to and theorized that such a pulse must be expressed not in 

sound but in the motion of the drummer raising his hand to strike. A. M. Jones drew a 

new measure line in his transcriptions of Ewe music every time there was an accented 

beat, with the result that various parts of the same ensemble were portrayed as having 

different, and very irregular meters. (272) 

But how did the perception of the absence of a regular pulse in African music become 

the perception of that same pulse’s often overwhelming presence in a certain discourse 

on Afro-American music that is shared by many musicians and critics ranging 

from Mingus to Adorno? Meanwhile, though Dudley argues that more careful observation 

of, and instruction in, African musical practices revealed that, “the Western 


concept of meter – a commonly perceived, fixed number of equidistant ‘main beats,’ 

with a first and last beat, that correspond to a musical period – is not foreign to 

African music,” he is also careful to point out that “[t]he traditional western time-signature” 

is an incomplete representation of African meter: 

What the time-signature description of meter lacks is a way to differentiate between 

the many patterns of accent that are possible in a musical period. Western listeners and 

musicians often assume that the metric pulse will be audibly articulated and that certain 

pulses will be consistently centered – for example, the first quarter note in 3/4 time, the 

first and third quarter notes in 4/4 time, or the first and eighth notes in 6/8 time. 

However, Mieczyslaw Kolinski points out that that way of thinking caused Jones to misinterpret 

Ewe music, and he reminds us that even in Western music one finds both “cometric 

and contrametric patterns” of accent. He asserts that “the interplay between these two 

types of organization represents an essential aspect of metro-rhythmic structure.” 

Kolinski’s distinction acknowledges that consistently recurring accents can be used for 

more than just indicating the downbeat and weak and strong pulses of the meter. In fact, 

in much African music the main beats, although they are conceived of (and often articulated 

in the dancers’ steps), are not audibly accented. Simha Arom refers to this phenomenon 

as “abstraction de mesure et du temps fort.” The distinctions made by Kolinski 

(cometric versus contrametric accents) and Arom (abstract versus audible meter) help 

explain how African music is understood by Africans to be characterized by regular groupings 

of a steady pulse, even though that pulse is not always audible. (272–73) 

Dudley continues: 

Robert Kauffman sums up the African perception simply and concisely when he says 

that “Shona musicians […] use the more dynamically tactile term ‘feeling,’ to express what 

Western musicians more abstractly call ‘meter.’ ” Of course, in European music there is 

clearly more variety of rhythmic feel than what is recognized by the concepts of 4/4, 3/4, 

6/8, and so on. It is just that Western concepts of meter have generally overlooked this, 

focusing on the number of pulses, the subdivision, and the downbeat. To illustrate this conceptual 

deficiency with an example, saying a piece is “in 3/4 meter” would tell much less 

about its musical character than describing the piece as having “a waltz feel.” (274) 

The distinction between time signature and accent, and the interplay of temporal and 

phonic difference within accent, are of great importance to Mingus and constitute, on 

the one hand, what is essential to his understanding of “rotary perception,” and, on the 

other hand, what he seems to refuse to hear in Coleman and calypso, namely the 

absence of a regulatory mode that he both abjures and desires. Mingus thinks that in 

the absence of a law of movement to break, calypso falls into the random constraint of 

a death spiral. However, Dudley shows how the maintenance of the circle’s integrity 

requires the legal procedure of an articulated ensemble, what musicologist Olly Wilson 

calls a “fixed rhythmic group” whose “rhythmic feel is not produced by a single pattern 

[…] but is a composite generated by several instruments that play repeated interlocking 

40 | Fred Moten


parts” (Wilson 3–22). 13 No hegemonic single pattern means no sole instrument or 

player is responsible for that pattern’s upkeep. There is, rather, a shared responsibility 

that makes possible the shared possibilities of irresponsibility. More precisely, attuned 

and passionate response is given both in the capacity to walk and to walk away. While 

freeing the individual player – say, the bass player – within the fixed rhythmic group or 

rhythm section from the sole burden of keeping time does constitute a liberation from 

collective temporal constraint, such escape or animation of the bottom is, itself, an 

effect of law. That law is a law of (stasis in) motion and emotion, articulated in forced 

migration and (con)strained revolt, whose truth is uttered in hermetic falsities and 

falsettos, as the possession and dispossession of time. 14 

This law is a law of genre, and gender, as well. One of Mingus’ (and Coleman’s) greatest 

sidemen, Eric Dolphy, called his favorite of Mingus’ instruments “The French Lady.” 

And both Duke Ellington and Kenny Clarke problematically assert that the “drum is a 

woman.” The area that drum and bass lay down constitutes that womb-like, family circle 

of which Dumas speaks, foregrounding a certain maternal responsibility whose fixed 

circumference Mingus would, at the same time, rupture and redouble by invagination. 

He strains against a maternal responsibility that he can only abdicate by disruptively 

confirming. Joni Mitchell, another of Mingus’ greatest collaborators, is “like a man”, 

Bob Dylan says, because she keeps her own time, is allowed to “tell you what time it 

is,” burns with that “untamed sense of control” he attributes to old-time musician 

Roscoe Holcomb without commenting on the sexual ambiguity of Holcomb’s complex, 

astronomical registers. 15 Such self-sufficient irresponsibility is the province of men. 

The rhythm section, on the other hand, is matrical, a locus where metrical antagonisms 

are mediated, where the regulative and diplomatic force of the mother is always tempered 

by her criminally empathic breaking of the law she lays down, by her inhabitation 

of the space where performance and commodification meet. This is to say that this 

other hand is the independent and untimely same of the one hand; it’s rhythm is of a 

sliced section or session, that other time of the ones who keep the other’s time if not 

their own, who let the others take their time, who place time within that impulsive strife 

of dis/possession that we call music, that breakdown or brokedown opposition located 

at and as if an irruption of sound recorded by something like an accent meter. 16 

Bearing the constitutive impetus of catastrophic oppositional failure, Mingus’ formulations 

are an edifice built on the ruins of a legal discourse and legal process, the 

impossible law and endlessly disrupted trial of the general economy of black maternity. 

What might be the sexual force of such nurturing? Mingus plays like a (play) 

mother; she keeps walking, walking away: they touch and go like adjacent variations 

out of one another’s time but bridged by an imperceptibly reminiscent tempo; like the 

mercantile maternal machinery of a money jungle; like the broken stroll of The ([interactive 

rhythmic] Feel ) Trio; like The Awakening into a band. But “these are men!” says 

William Carlos Williams. 17 Supposedly self-possessive, they’re supposed to keep 


themselves and/in their time. They don’t lose time, like the syncopic ones, the ones 

for whom “swing is (‘high lonesome) sound’ ” reconfiguring synoptic view, the dis/possessors. 

18 Imagine the always paradoxical sovereign subject, contemplative in his 

cell, tortured by the unkept, unkempt time of a musician who is, as it were, outside. 

The listener loses himself and is unmanned. The listener, speaking aloud, can no 

longer hear, or bear, himself. This is the contretemps of the soliloquy: having lost 

myself, subject now to another’s time, I speak to myself before you, imploring me to 

find me. Against the grain of the soloist’s proud time, the bass and drum lose the time 

they keep, holding it right there where they almost lose their way, not doin’ no soloin’, 

as “The Godfather of Soul” demands, ‘cause it’s a mother (who is impossible, who 

walks away, ain’t it funny how time slips away, “slides away from the proposed,” steals 

away, as life?). 19 What remains to be considered is something of the order of an 

extralegal process, a metrical assertion against the law that still exercises an uninstantiable 

matrical (ir)responsibility that is always before us, moving, still, visible, illusory, 

like a dot in the middle of your hand, like the drive of a French lady, a black 

woman, an impossible black mother, in a crawlspace (cramped, capacious). 

It is this drive that determines what Dudley calls that particular “relationship between 

the fixed rhythm and the vocal part or instrumental melodies and improvisations – 

what Wilson refers to as the ‘variable rhythmic group’ ” – that is characteristic of 

calypso (278). Dudley argues that the calypsonian sets off the interaction of fixity 

and variation by anticipating and delaying the accents of the rhythmic pattern. But 

Dudley encounters a certain amount of trouble in characterizing that pattern which 

presents itself with differences often enough to defy the name. This is to say that the 

singer – the political soli-loquist, the (unmanned) man of words – performs variations 

on a fixity that is always already in trouble. Interestingly, as Dudley points out by way 

of the work of Rohlehr, in part because of the influence of jazz, many early calypso 

recordings “used instrumental accompaniment that was rhythmically inappropriate to 

calypso singing style” (Dudley 279). 20 This irruption of a certain African-American 

impropriety into the idiomatic specificity of Trinidadian calypso’s fixed rhythmic group 

only redoubles the sense that the constant disruption of the proper is the condition 

of possibility of rhythmic feel in general. Many calypsonians, from Lord Invader to 

David Rudder, sing of “the American social invasion,” on top of the American rhythmic 

invasion which is, it turns out, just another singularity from within a diasporic time 

that is constituted by the geo-political disturbances of invasion and im/migration that 

it is most properly understood as constituting. 21 

This spatial politics of the ruptured groove, of the broken circle, corresponds to those 

“rhythmic nuances of the calypso singer” which are born of an originary and formal 

impropriety (Dudley 284). In this sense, what musicologist Charles Keil calls “participatory 

discrepancies” might be best understood as transcendental clues leading to a more 

accurate sense of idiom as a range of anoriginal differences. In turn, the groove might be 

42 | Fred Moten


best understood as a circle of such differences in which the players might be “in synch 

but in and out phase,” as Keil puts it; where the music comes fully into its own as something 

other than itself (8). 22 In a way that is the same, and radically different, “rotary perception” 

is swing’s “originary displacement” (to use Nahum Chandler’s phrase), swing’s 

Afro-American/Afro-Caribbean eclipse. Swing is, in other words, an international incident; 

the groove is not the groove; jazz is not what it is and as it is it is it is. The music instantiates 

the broken circle, the brokedown (public) sphere, the indecipherably breaking 

cipher, of black international fantasy. 

Consider the grooved, fantastic circle and its (spatial) politics as something along the 

lines of what literary critic Mary Pat Brady, in an echo of novelist Cherie Moraga, calls a 

“temporal geography.” 23 Brady’s criticism is indispensable to a proper understanding of 

Mingus’ border work, his linking of musical influence with a mode of sexual tourism not 

unlike that which he decries when it takes place on the Central Avenue of his heyday. 

That criticism is animated by a critical awareness of the way the border marks and helps 

to instantiate and perpetuate a collaborative process of imperial expansion that historian 

Edward Spicer calls “cycles of conquest,” the imperial and counter-imperial strife 

that is both between the U.S. and Mexico and within them in their own shifting scales 

and contours, strife that long predates 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe 

Hidalgo and that continues to trouble the forced stabilities that larcenous pact was supposed 

to ensure. 24 To be aware of this history and truly attuned to its challenges – even 

as one acknowledges the gross asymmetries of this border strife; even if one is primarily 

and legitimately driven by a critical and political desire to resist the current hegemonic 

force of all kinds of U.S. imperial desires in their necessary articulation with what Brady 

astutely describes as erotic-imperial paranoia – raises certain overwhelming questions 

for the study of Mingus and of jazz. Can a politics, aesthetics and erotics of liberation be 

forged from the ongoing construction of an identity that is based, on the one hand, in displacement 

and the resistance to displacement, and, on the other hand, in imperial conquest 

and exploitation and the establishment of bourgeois personhood, however inflected by 

bohemian style? Must revolutionary subjectivity also be geometric, geographical subjectivity? 

If it must, how will it successfully detach itself from empire’s spatial obsessions? How 

are the complex dis-articulations and re-articulations of space and subjectivity productive 

of theoretical insight and political possibility? 

Brady addresses these questions that are, in her work, partially animated by the fact 

that 1. metstizaje (and its partner, in an uneasy and complex relationship, indigenismo) – 

as scholars such as Herman Bennett, Martha Menchaca and Maria Josefina Saldaña- 

Portillo have shown – was a fundamental part of the Mexican colonial and imperial 

projects even as it now has been made to operate within the framework and in the 

service of profound anti-imperial and anti-colonial desire; 2. discourses of the border – 

across a vast range of historical articulations – constitute something like a spatialization 

of mestizaje; 3. the traversing and transversing of the shifting, bridge-like 


(non-)terrain between the U. S. and Mexico – or the more literal (in that they are more 

extensive in their metaphorical force) spaces between Aztlán and the Valle de Mexico 

or Pacific Palisades and Watts – is that spatialization raised to the level of somatic and 

discursive critical method. 25 Brady is interested in claiming that method for insurgent 

political and intellectual practice and her work offers a rigorous exemplification of 

that method – the deconstruction of a state-sanctioned imperial mestizaje meant to 

work in the service of political homogeneity and colonial indigenismo that violently 

imposes itself against the fugitive political force of nomads like the Apaches; the mobilizing 

reconstruction of the rich differentiations of the mix; and the critical deployment 

and displacement of origin (or something, again, like “originary displacement”). This 

movement – the most salient particularity of Brady’s critical discourse of the border, 

in particular, and space, in general – is of extreme value to African American expressive 

cultural criticism. A profound discourse of the cut and the groove and of their corollaries, 

the bridge and the circle, animates that strain of the African American tradition 

that Cedric Robinson calls black radicalism. 26 Something akin to a continuing excavation 

of the Mexican afromestiza – whose erasure is always attenuated by the insistent 

and irrepressible trace of her constitutive, migratory force (to which Bennett, 

Menchaca and Kevin Mulroy attest) for black radicalism in particular and radicalism 

in general – is a project to whose theoretical foundations Brady makes a great contribution. 

27 Mingus’ music also contributes to that project though work like Brady’s is 

required in order to listen to Mingus against his grain so that his contribution can be 

heard. Such work makes it possible to imagine – indeed, demands the imagination 

of – the border and the cut, more properly, as interinanimate, so that blackness is 

understood as an irreducible mestizaje (the mix as its condition, not its negation) 

whose inhabitation is a nomadic bridge; and as the internal differentiation and external 

transversality of what Robinson calls “the ontological totality”(171). Brady’s work 

is something like a cornerstone of the footbridge that would connect, say, Brent 

Hayes Edwards’ analysis of “the practice of [African] diaspora” with literary critic 

Rafael Pérez-Torres reading of “the refiguring” – and/or literary critic Genaro Padillo’s 

reading of “the uses” – of Aztlán. 28 The articulation of Aztlán and the African diaspora, 

amplified and distorted originarily by originarily distorted Euro-American (and, 

for that matter, Asian-American) voices and forces, sounds like Mingus and forges, 

however fleetingly, what historian Matt Garcia might call “a world of its own”(Garcia 

189–222). Mingus’ disavowal of the Caribbean can’t be properly understood without 

taking into account the vexed productivity of his musico-sexual “romance” with a 

Mexico that will have always been both more and less than itself. 

It is no mere coincidence that the erotic-imperial paranoia that marks the U.S.s’ 

and Mingus’ relation to Mexico can also be said to characterize U.S. relations 

to Trinidad. The incursion of U.S. power into colonial Trinidad’s geographic, social, 

and psychic space turns out to have been the vexed field within which a certain 

44 | Fred Moten


Afro-diasporic international contact was performed. That contact, at least in part, 

took forms such as this: 

Around 9 P.M. on Friday, April 16, 1943, a storm of sticks, bottles, and stones sent residents 

of Basilon Street, Laventille, scurrying under their beds. The source of the missiles, 

neighborhood folks would soon find out, was a group new to the community and, indeed, 

new to colonial Trinidad: African American soldiers. Helmeted and bare-chested in some 

cases, and bearing weapons in nearly all, the black men who belonged to the 99th Anti- 

Aircraft Regiment of the U.S.Army had set out on a seek-and-destroy mission in one of Port 

of Spain’s most infamous slums. The objects of their pursuit were the community’s 

self-proclaimed “robust men,” young, predominantly Afro-Trinidadian males whose 

unabashed hostility and alleged hooliganism scandalized “respectable society” in the 

British colony. How many “robust men” the marauding members of the 99th found remains 

uncertain. What is clear is that during the course of the night, these soldiers wrought serious 

property damage and assaulted scores of neighborhood men. In their wake, black 

Americans left broken windows and dented walls, and, by the end of what outraged municipal 

representatives condemned as a “wave of homicidal fury,” twenty-four local men, 

including four special reserve police officers, had to be hospitalized. (Neptune 78) 

Historian Harvey Neptune shows how a marauding band of African American soldiers, 

perhaps in response to threats and acts against their safety and that of some of their 

local female companions, sought out and attacked some of Trinidad’s “robust men.” 

The “robust men” – angered not so much by the loss of “their” women to the seductive 

powers of Yankee soldiers and their “Yankee dollar” but, more precisely, by the 

troubled decisions through which local women asserted an attenuated sexual autonomy 

in the face of local masculine control – acted out a specific ambivalence toward 

black Americans soldiers and local Afro-Trinidadian women to which those soldiers 

responded in ways that were also deeply ambivalent, ways that both reflected and 

refracted the American schizo-imperial imperative to liberate by destroying. 29 On the 

one hand, according to Neptune, Trinidadians and other Caribbean peoples who immigrated 

to the U.S. viewed black Americans as the highly constrained victims of a particular 

and extremely violent and debilitating mode of racism to which they had not 

been subjected. On the other hand, Neptune argues, Afro-Trinidadians were impressed 

by the militant resistance to racism among black U.S. soldiers – manifest in the many 

clashes between black and white soldiers that local blacks witnessed (with pleasure 

when the black soldiers came out on top) – even though those soldiers were operating 

in their work and in their leisure by way of the force of massive neo-imperial state 

power directed against and within Trinidad. Indeed, that power was solicited and welcomed 

by British colonial administrators precisely because it might also serve to suppress 

the island’s emergent non-white working class political mobilization. 

Neptune allows us to understand, then, that the presence of black soldiers from the 

U.S. produced oppressive and liberatory effects both of which were both embraced and 


ejected by Afro-Trinidadian national masculinity. Afro-Trinidadian men laid claim to certain 

protocols and performative styles of African American masculinity that could be 

deployed in challenging the slightly more subtle forms of white supremacy that served 

as the foundation for the colonial order. But when the performances of African American 

masculinity – augmented by the privileges of American military power and the force of 

the Yankee dollar – were directed toward Afro-Trinidadian women, now constituted as 

objects of liberation and mastery (which is to say desire), Afro-Trinidadian men also laid 

claim to styles, protocols and rhetorics that would bespeak a national identity distinct 

from (American) blackness. 

The possibilities of diasporic contact and solidarity were always structured, then, by 

a complex system of intramural and extramural antagonistic hierarchies, a condition 

that has now only become more pronounced and more articulated. Neptune’s work 

leads him toward the question of whether the black soldiers who spread around the 

“Yankee dollar” induced – or, perhaps more precisely, aggravated – a proprietary, 

homosocial, national misogyny. Such questioning quickly leads one to the realization 

that chauvinism is neither the exclusive domain of the US component of the diaspora, 

nor absent in the internal relations of any given component. In the end, what can be 

dismissed too easily under the rubric of chauvinism must be thought as that which is 

determined by the striated resistance to a complex of invasions and expansions. 

Such thinking might allow us to contemplate more fruitfully the identificatory claim 

Lord Invader makes in the chorus of “Crisis in Arkansas”: 

Please take off that black bow tie – lay-oh! 

And that black tuxedo, 

You callin’ us names, yet you wearin’ black, 

Please take off everything black off your back. 30 

Consider that Lord Invader invokes blackness by way of his rhythmic and phonic play on 

the color black. Mingus’ reference to blackness is, as it were implied. However, Lord 

Invader’s multi-syllabic irruption of accentual-metrical difference breaks and makes new 

musical (rhythmic/syntactic) law in a way that Mingus would valorize. Consider also that 

Lord Invader moves strenuously towards another arrangement of the social law as well, 

in his critique of U.S. domestic racial policy. In his lyrics he asserts his opposition to 

Faubus and, more generally, to a reactionary apparatus whose ethical and juridical dispositions 

were symbolized by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tardy response to 

the illegal obstruction of the students’ entrance into Little Rock Central. Mingus was, at 

first, prevented from any such verbal assertion of any such political opposition; Columbia 

Records suppressed his lyrics for “Fables of Faubus.” It was not until a year later, when 

Mingus (re-)recorded the “Original Faubus Fables” for Candid Records, that his protest 

could be heard uncut. 31 But even Mingus’ re-recording never approaches the canted but 

explicitly identificatory claim on blackness – which simultaneously constitutes the 

46 | Fred Moten

epeating ground and anarchic disruption of the song’s universalizing claims – that animates 

“Crisis in Arkansas.” One could argue, furthermore, that the complexity of the variable 

rhythmic group in “Crisis in Arkansas” – led by a vocal performance whose 

accentual richness is the dissonant effect and affect of lyrical political dissidence – is 

the aim of Mingus’ agonistic approach to “fixed” rhythmic performance as well. Lord 

Invader packs syllables into every measure with a precision that is manifest one moment 

as abundance, the next moment as economy, an interinanimation of more and less that 

bespeaks musical and political fugitivity. The (sound of the) oppositional emergence that 

both prompts and responds to the ongoing state of racial emergency is always non-full, 

always non-simple, always on the run and not (fully or simply) on the one. 

Writers Amiri Baraka and Samuel R. Delany have both explored what might be called 

the political feelings that attend an escape that is somehow both from and within the 

musical bar line. In “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Delany 

aligns such fugitivity with the specific political insurgence of singers who move between 

worlds on the tracks of an underground migratory circuit, while Baraka, particularly and 

repeatedly in Black Music, pays special attention to the way Coleman exemplifies the 

irruptive musical liberator’s challenge to time and tune. Lord Invader’s escape is manifest, 

however, as a kind of overactive cometric and contrametric inhabitation to whose 

strict criminality – for instance, the intensified negation and irruptive rhythmic feel of the 

two equally necessary instances of “off” in the chorus of “Crisis” – Mingus aspires, 

redoubling it to ever more anarchic effect in “Fables”: 

Oh Lord! Don’t let them hang us. 

Oh Lord! Don’t let them shoot us. 

Oh Lord! Don’t let them tar and feather us. 32 


Such out of time resistance to – such scarring of – scansion is laid down with the open 

deliberateness of a secret agent and with such an agent’s demolitionist and abolitionist 

intent against the very instruments and locale of (mean) time. But Mingus’ disruption of 

regular meter can also be understood as bearing the trace of subjugation both to commercial 

and aesthetic regulation. One form that commercial regulation took was the U.S. 

recording industry’s attempt to circulate, and to determine the popular reception of, 

calypso as an imagined alternative to the political energy animating World War II black 

American music. However, Lord Invader’s music reveals the deep political affinity at the 

very heart of the imagined alternative. Mingus and Lord Invader share a political aesthetic 

that seeks to deploy strenuous rhythmic and lyrical resistance to and within self-imposed 

regulatory forms in order to facilitate flight from externally imposed regulation. Such flight 

is the ongoing performance of a shared diasporic legacy that is always articulated in 

close proximity to intra-diasporic conflict. African American musicians’ persistent denigration 

and distancing of Caribbean rhythms and sonorities and the deployment of those 


same elements in the service of Caribbean disavowals of an African-American identity 

that is conceived as both dominant and abject, intimate a complex, many-sided whole. 

The lines of stress and lines of flight that animate the Afro-diasporic set, the Afrodiasporic 

gathering, comprise a terrible richness. Why must Mingus’ neo-abolitionist 

drive, or the King of Ghanaian highlife E. T. Mensah’s pan-Africanist musical and political 

impetus, take the form and/or lyrical content of calypso? Why is radical political 

desire all throughout the diaspora so often manifest as ever more complex 

reconstructions and deconstructions, recoveries and concealments, of sonorities, 

rhythms and sensibilities derived from a home that seems to withdraw from every 

return? Why do Fela Kuti’s insistent assertion of African idiomatic specificity against the 

neo-colonial force of state-sanctioned corruption and violence move with the complex 

in/direction of a Bootsy Collins bass line? What are the conditions of possibility and 

maintenance of a kind of permanent and unassimilable dissidence and dissonance and 

why is it that such a formation seems destined to find its fullest articulation not only 

against but by way of forms and resistant deformations that seem to confirm African- 

American cultural hegemony in the diaspora? How do we account for the popularity of 

the aesthetic and political force of this permanent dissidence when it emerges from the 

U.S.? Has this specific dissonance, which is both national and anti-national, which was 

born in ongoing modes of accumulative exclusion that are unique in their severity and 

bred in what had been and continues to be a radical detachment from power, attained 

hegemony not only by way of the circulatory system of an unprecedented cultural imperialism, 

but also because it continues to bear the trace of a radical, anticipatory opposition 

to state power that constitutes the fundamental element of an identity? 

What’s at stake here is the question of comportment towards the irreducible and 

constitutive specificity of a blackness that always manifests itself against the black- 

Americanism that it manifests itself as. The abstract and imagined space of internationalism, 

transnationalism or the eternally congealed and disappearing object/s of 

hybridity, with all the appeal of every other general equivalent, are not the same as a 

federation of disrupted locales. However, though it is tempting to say that internationalism 

or diasporism have become teleological principles run amok – false and empty 

universalities whose excesses align them with imperial, neo-liberal capitalism as an 

ideal and as a set of commodities – such a claim would not justify some easy disavowal 

of the international, the diaspora, or, for that matter, the universal or the teleological. 

An irreducible utopics of The International is still to be desired, against all positivisms, 

against any vulgar reduction to the empirical encounter however post- or anti-imperial 

that encounter might be or appear to be, even if no one can locate it anywhere other than 

in its disrupted and disruptive locales. Meanwhile, the disrupted and disruptive locale 

recedes and exceeds; aggressive, improvisational assertions of a certain teleological 

principle bring this into relief so that New York or Port of Spain or Lagos are understood 

as that which The International and its feelings make possible. At the same time, 

48 | Fred Moten


locale disrupts any crystallization of teleological principle: The International is in that 

it is in the local – the only and infinite possible space (effect of an irreducible deictic 

bond or bind) for that impossible place, the Internation. The International markets 

itself in the very disrupted locale that is disruptive of The International; landscapes 

and markets, mountains and things, make accents and (time) signatures. And it’s not 

difficult to point out complexities, crossings and antagonisms – the point is what to 

make of them – just as it’s not enough to say this or that is an instance of internationalism. 

So that if this or that particular instance is understood as an irruption of 

internationalism, this is interesting only in that it self-destructively raises the question: 

What is The International? It is a question that is inseparable from a couple of 

others: What is blackness? What is black Americanness? 

The irreducible and constitutive specificity of blackness-as-black Americanness; 

the irreducibly vexed specificities of blackness in Afro-diasporic internationalism or in 

what is valorized or hoped for in the new comparativism: both are at issue here. 

Violence to these specificities, done in the name of black American exceptionalism, 

intra-diasporic hegemony, the black-white binary, or their most viciously legitimate 

critique ought to be resisted. This is all just to say that it should still be permissible to 

study the disrupted and disruptive locales/objects of blackness-in-black Americanness, 

which is what I think I’m doing when I listen to the John Donne/David Rudder/Mary Pat 

Brady Trio. Moreover, such study is not only permissible but also imperative because 

it makes possible some more rigorous address of the real question, namely that of the 

(constitutive force of blackness in the anti- and ante-American, musico-democratic 

assertion of The Black American) International. This question – which concerns what 

Akira Mizuta Lippit might call the open history of the (objection to) “inalienable wrong” – 

might also complicate legitimate critical and theoretical disavowals of “states of 

injury” and their relation to the putative degradation of left politics or to the inability of 

left politics to think and enact new political dispositions. 33 Perhaps identities forged 

in severe injury might have something to do with a kind of persistent resistance to 

(states of) power and to taking power that not only will have clearly borne a deep 

attraction to those who remain excluded from power, especially when others have 

taken power in their names (i.e. the general constitution of what is called the postcolonial), 

but also will have served well the task of forming the genuinely new comportment, 

the out-from-the-outside thing, that is the aim and object of musical and 

political fantasy. Such fantasy constitutes and is constituted by rigorous analysis of 

the relation between blackness and the politics and aesthetics of a certain claim on 

dispossession that will have animated the range of musical homelessness with which 

I have here been concerned. This dispossession, this refusal, this objection – in all of 

its spatio-temporal complexity, in the full range of its irregularities, in the objects and 

events of the vast collection of sharp locations that link and differentiate Mingus and 

Lord Invader – is intact as sung, strained, scripted, articulation, as a choreography 


dedicated to the criminal movement of hips. It is, therefore, productive of new singularities 

(which is to say new ensembles). Blackness is the production, collection and 

anarrangement of new singularities (which is to say new ensembles). Diaspora is an 

archive (gathering, set) of new things productive of new things (which is to say new 

ensembles). 34 The Charles Mingus/Lord Invader Ensemble plays the radical spatial 

politics of the broken circle, the radical temporal politics of the broken groove. It’s the 

New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s). 

50 | Fred Moten

Notes 

1. Lord Invader, Calypso in New York, 

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD 40454. 

2. Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um, 

Columbia/Legacy Ck 65512. 

3. I want to emphasize, here, that the music 

forms in question – jazz, calypso, free jazz – are 

burdened by their names. Constrained to repeat 

and revise given musical forms, to redouble 

and to refrain from the assertion of given 

political and sexual content, Afro-diasporic 

musics could be said constantly to perform a 

kind of antinomian anti-nominalism. This makes 

Mingus’ nominative gestures, about which more 

shortly, all the more problematic. 

4. Jean Clouzet and Guy Kopelowicz, “Interview 

de Charles Mingus: Un Inconfortable Aprèsmidi,” 

Jazz, June 1964. I want to thank Brent 

Edwards for his help with the translation. 

5. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life 

of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. 

6. See Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: 

The Thought from Outside” in 

Foucault/Blanchot, and Nathaniel Mackey. 

7. See Jelly Roll Morton, The Complete Library 

of Congress Recordings, Rounder CD 

B000GFLE35; Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay 

Man. 85–98; Mackey, “Cante Moro,” in Morris, 

Ed. Sound States. 194–212; Federico Garcia 

Lorca, In Search of Duende. 

8. It is interesting to note here that Mingus’ 

fellow transplanted Angeleno, critic and 

erstwhile drummer/novelist Stanley Crouch, 

has recently offered Rollins a similar insult. In 

response to Crouch’s assertion that when 

Rollins is faced with a young audience “he 

often resorts to banal calypso tunes” the 

Harlem-born Rollins, whose parents emigrated 

from the Virgin Islands replies, “I completely 

reject that criticism and I think it was based on 

the fact that he denigrates that type of rhythm 

and I don’t. It’s something that I enjoy playing 

and is a challenge to play, just as much as a lot 


of the music we play. It’s not something I phone 

in.” While Mingus aligns calypso with a lack of 

musical knowledge, Crouch compounds that 

formulation by asserting that calypso is also 

bound up with a lack of musical effort. 

Ignorance that ends in self-parodic performance 

and laziness that manifests itself in a 

performative ease that indexes preternatural 

cheerfulness are, of course, familiar 

stereotypes assigned to African-descended 

peoples, ones that both Crouch and Mingus 

could be said to combat via a kind of intradiasporic 

displacement whose circuits of 

further transfer and return turn out to have 

been, up to now, inexhaustible. See Stanley 

Crouch, “The Colussus,” and Ashante Infantry, 

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Colossus.” 

9. For more on Mingus in Tijuana and a more 

general overview of African-American/Mexican 

musical interaction see Kun, Audiotopia: Music, 

Race, and America. 43–83. 

10. See also Charles Mingus, “What I Feel 

about Jazz…” Jazz News. 10–1. 

11. Mingus, with interpolations from “What I 

Feel about Jazz…”. 10. 

12. Shannon Dudley, “Judging ‘By the Beat’: 

Calypso versus Soca.” 270. 

13. Olly Wilson, “The Significance of the 

Relationship between Afro-American Music and 

West African Music,” Black Perspectives in 

Music 2:1, 3–22, quoted in “Judging ‘By the 

Beat’.” 274. 

14. I’m thinking of two late elaborations in 

Adorno of what he calls the Bewegungsgesetz. 

In the first, Adorno writes: 

The object of theory is not something immediate, 

of which theory might carry home a replica. 

Knowledge has not, like the state police, a rogues’ 

gallery of its objects. Rather, it conceives them as 

it conveys them; else it would be content to 

describe the façade. As Brecht did admit, after all, 

the criterion of sense perception – overstretched 

and problematic even in its proper place – is not 


applicable to radically indirect society. What immigrated 

into the object as the law of its motion 

[Bewegungsgesetz], inevitably concealed by the 

ideological form of the phenomenon, eludes that 

criterion. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 206) 

In the second formulation Adorno states: 

The semblance character of artworks, the illusion 

of their being-in-itself, refers back to the fact 

that in the totality of their subjective mediatedness 

they take part in the universal delusional 

context of reification, and, that, in Marxist terms, 

they need to reflect a relation of living labor as if it 

were a thing. The inner consistency through which 

artworks participate in truth always involves their 

untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art 

has always revolted against this, and today this 

revolt has become art’s own law of movement 

[Bewegungsgesetz]. The antinomy of the truth and 

untruth of art may have moved Hegel to foretell its 

end. Traditional aesthetics possessed the insight 

that the primacy of the whole over the parts has 

constitutive need of the diverse and that this primacy 

misfires when it is simply imposed from 

above. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176–77) 

15. Thanks to Alice Echols for calling to my 

attention Bob Dylan’s remarks on Joni Mitchell. 

See Echols, “ ‘The Soul of a Martian’: A 

Conversation with Joni Mitchell, Shaky Ground: 

The Sixties and its Aftershocks. Also see John 

Cohen, “Liner Notes,” in Roscoe Holcomb, An 

Untamed Sense of Control, Smithsonian 

Folkways Recordings, CD 40144, 2003. For 

more on the sexual politics and aesthetics of 

the falsetto see my In the Break: the Aesthetics 

of the Black Radical Tradition. 211–31. 

16. Three interventions are in the front of my 

mind here. Barbara Johnson speaks of “letting 

the other take our time” in her “Response” to 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Canon-Formation, 

Literary History, and the Afro-American Literary 

Tradition: From the Seen to the Told.” Rosalind 

Krauss speaks of a certain order of the 

invisible/fantasmatic that Lyotard calls “the 

matrix,” and which is aligned with “a beat, or 

pulse, or throb […] that works not only against 

the formal premises of modernist opticality – the 

premises that connect the dematerialization of 

the visual field to the dilated instantaneity or 

peculiar timelessness of the moment of its 

perception – but it works as well against […] the 

52 | Fred Moten 

notion that low art, or mass-cultural practice, can 

be made to serve the ambitions of high art as a 

kind of denatured accessory, the allegory of a 

playfulness that high-art practice will have no 

trouble recuperating and reformulating in its own 

terms.” See her “The Im/pulse to See.” Laura 

Doyle speaks of another matrix, “the racial 

matrix of modern fiction and culture” that is 

manifest in a “universal, race transcending 

mother complex” that marks and explains the 

commons, the circle, that modernism disruptively 

inhabits. See her Bordering on the Body: The 

Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture,3. 

17. I’m thinking of, in order to think with and 

against, William Carlos William’s beautiful 

misprision of New Orleans trumpeter Bunk 

Johnson’s band. 

Ol’ Bunk’s Band 

These are men! The gaunt, unforesold, 

the vocal, 

blatant, Stand up, stand up! the 

slap of a bass-string. 

Pick, ping! The horn, the 

hollow horn 

long drawn out, a hound deep 

tone – 

Choking, choking! while the 

treble reed 

races – alone, ripples, screams 

slow to fast – 

to second to first! These are men! 

Drum, drum, drum, drum, drum 

drum, drum! The 

ancient cry, escaping crapulence 

eats through 

transcendent – torn, tears, term 

town, tense, 

turns and backs off whole, leaps 

up, stomps down, 

rips through! These are men 

beneath 

whose force the melody limps – 

to 

proclaim, proclaims – Run and 

lie down, 

in slow measures, to rest and 

not never 

need no more! These are men! 

Men!

Williams’s romance with sound, misheard as 

erect, non-commercial command of time, is cut 

by an attunement to the cut, cutting force of 

proclamations of recline and declining speed. 

The melodic slowdown is enacted by way of the 

stomp down, torn terms and turns derived from 

an old, fugitive cry that speaks against what 

Williams means it to signify: a national 

manhood manifest in a black masculinist 

musicianship it excludes by fetishizing. Williams 

offers a pre-figurative mirror image of Mingus’ 

articulations of his own ambivalent technical 

desire; Williams perceives but cannot admit the 

maternity Mingus claims and disavows. See 

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 

Volume II, 1939–1962. 149–50. 

18. The formulation “swing is sound” is that of 

percussionist Billy Higgins. It is recorded in 

Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz 

Improvisation and Interaction, 64. I have mixed 

it with the phrase ‘high lonesome sound,” one 

used by a host of musicians and critics to 

characterize a sonority essential to music such 

as Holcomb’s. At the risk of explaining away 

whatever allusive clarity that may have emerged 

from certain activities of wandering, digging, 

leaping, leaving, giving up, turning, turning loose 

and returning, let me say that I hope the range 

of reference within which I am trying to operate 

intimates the complex ensemble to which it is 

necessary to listen in order really to listen to 

Mingus and Lord Invader. 

19. For more on the “motherhood” of the 

rhythm section see Saying Something. 64–66. 

20. See Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in 

Pre-Independence Trinidad. 

21. Consider the American occupation of 

Trinidad during World War II; or the Caribbean 

incursion into the New York musical scene after 

that war; or Lord Invader’s own irruption out of 

Trinidad’s second city, San Fernando, into the 

Carnival tents of Port-of-Spain; or the 

complicated itinerary of Ornette Coleman – 

from the impossible origin that Mingus assigns 

him in the Antilles to his “actual” birthplace in 

Texas, through Los Angeles, to New York; or 


Mingus own migration from Los Angeles to New 

York. Lord Invader speaks of “the American 

social invasion” in dialogue with Alan Lomax at 

a 1946 concert at New York City’s Town Hall 

recorded as Calypso at Midnight, Rounder 

11661-1840-2, 1999. David Rudder criticizes 

rapper Jay-Z for his unauthorized use of scenes 

from Trinidadian carnival in his music videos 

and for the increased presence of his music in 

the Trinidadian cultural milieu, particular during 

the carnival season, in “Bigger Pimpin’,” The 

Autobiography of the Now, Lypsoland CD 

45692, 2001. For commentary on Rudder’s 

response to Jay-Z see Harvey Neptune, “Manly 

Rivalries and Mopsies: Gender, Nationality, and 

Sexuality in United States-Occupied Trinidad.” 

90–92. 

22. Charles Keil, “The Theory of Participatory 

Discrepancies: A Progress Report.” 

23. See Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, 

Temporal Geographies. 

24. See Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The 

Impact of Spain, Mexico and the United States 

on the Indians of the Southwest 1533–1960. 

25. See Herman L. Bennett, Africans in 

Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and 

Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640; Martha 

Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing 

Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of 

Mexican Americans; Maria Josefina Saldaña 

Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the 

Americas and the Age of Development. 

26. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The 

Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 

27. See Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: 

The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian 

Territory, Coahuila, and Texas. 

28. See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of 

Diaspora; Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring Aztlán,”; 

Genaro Padillo, “Myth and Comparative Cultural 

Nationalism: The Ideological Uses of Aztlán.” 

29. Lord Invader sings about the putatively 

emasculating force of US weaponry and U.S. 

currency in his most famous song “Rum and 


Coca-Cola,” stolen by U.S. comic Morey 

Amsterdam while in Trinidad entertaining North 

American troops on a U.S.O. tour and turned into 

a huge hit by the Andrews Sisters in another 

modality of imperial invasion and occupation. 

For more on the genealogy of “Rum and Coca- 

Cola” see Donald R. Hill, Calypso Calaloo: Early 

Carnival Music in Trinidad. 234–40. 

30. Lord Invader, Calypso in New York, 

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD 40454. 

31. Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles 

Mingus, Candid LP 9005, 1960. 

32. Lyrics published in Mingus’ sheet music 

collection, More than a Fake Book. 47. 

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ABSTRACT 


“Affirmative Resonances” in 

the City?: Sound, Imagination 

and Urban Space in Early 

1930s Germany 

Carolyn Birdsall 

“Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: Sound, Imagination 

and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany 

This article focuses on the role of sound in producing urban space and reworking 

identity formations in the early years of the Nazi regime. I analyze a case study about 

the mythology created around the Nazi party martyr Albert Leo Schlageter in the 

German city of Düsseldorf. By tracing the cultural events, political struggles and propaganda 

strategies involving Schlageter during the 1920s to the three-day festival in 

1933 at the location of his death, I investigate the ways in which the Nazi Party 

(NSDAP) utilized music and sound in public spaces, particularly in urban street environments. 

This raises questions about the status of sound as an important part of 

Nazi spectacles, in popularizing mythology, and in disciplining the senses: How does 

sound perform or play out certain power relations in urban space? How are forms of 

embodiment produced through experiences of sound or sound-making? In which 

ways can songs and musical performance be used for political purposes and to capture 

the popular imagination? The concept of “affirmative resonance” is developed 

to address the role of sound in contexts where groups of people created resonant 

spaces within urban environments, whether through collective singing and cheering, 

loudspeaker technology, or in the call and response interactions between a speaker 

and the crowd. In this case, “affirmative resonances” are viewed as mechanisms 

that worked to affirm the legitimacy of the Nazi party, normalize social transformations, 

delineate patterns of belonging, and activate the “auditory imagination” (Ihde). 

“Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: Sound, Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany | 57

Introduction 

Albert Leo Schlageter, a former soldier and right-wing activist, was arrested for sabotage 

attacks on the Düsseldorf railway lines in 1923. After being sent to trial, 

Schlageter was sentenced to death by the French occupiers of the German Rhine- 

Ruhr area. Following his death in the early morning hours of 26 May 1923, various 

political parties tried to seize on Schlageter’s memory, with Communists attempting 

to downplay his right-wing allegiances in a bid to make a claim on this “service to the 

German people”. 1 In the following decade, the Nazi party effectively capitalized on 

Schlageter, producing a range of images, slogans, and commemorative events in his 

memory. 2 Almost all aspects of Schlageter’s biography and status as a heroic freedom 

fighter were fully exploited in their attempt to create a national symbol of resistance 

against the French. In fact, their success in promoting Schlageter as a Nazi 

patriot enabled them to fully achieve a popular account of the anti-French resistance, 

which magnified his minor part out of all proportion. 3 

The importance of Schlageter for Nazi propaganda took on new proportions after 

they came to power in January 1933. Schlageter’s role as a Nazi martyr offered an 

indispensable prototype of the “new man” needed for the party’s anticipated 

Volksgemeinschaft (national-racial community). As a symbol of male sacrifice for the 

nation, Schlageter thus provided a model for new social relations based on the subordination 

of individual needs for the community. Schlageter’s key function as an 

instrument of Nazi propaganda is best illustrated by the massive three-day commemorative 

festival in late May 1933, which was held in Düsseldorf on the ten year 

anniversary of Schlageter’s death. With over three hundred thousand extra visitors in 

Düsseldorf, the Nazi newspaper Volksparole described the large scale and intensity 

of the event in glowing terms: 

The dignity of the festival, its size and importance, made its impression on the 

cityscape. No house without flags, no streets without rows of façades decorated in 

greenery […]. Never before had Düsseldorf, indeed, one could say, never before had a 

city in Germany seen a richly coloured spectacle as this. Words no longer suffice, the 

eyes cannot grasp everything. Incalculable masses of spectators and marching 

columns. 4 

In this excerpt, Schlageter’s national significance and transformation into a Nazi martyr 

is emphasized by the magnitude of the visual spectacle. Its mention of flags and 

colors emphasizes a visual overstimulation of the eyes. Yet this description of sensory 

overwhelming also implies an auditory experience, with the loud cheers of thousands 

and the sounds of marching feet. This production of intense resonances and 

reverberations suggest an attempt to “sound out” the entire city landscape. 

Taking this newspaper excerpt as a starting point, in this article I want to establish 

the value of examining sound in the cultural analysis of Nazism. While significant 

academic attention has been devoted to the function of visual-textual elements in 

58 | Carolyn Birdsall


Nazi propaganda techniques, I turn my attention to a number of key questions about 

the role of sound for Nazi spectacles, in the disciplining of the senses, and the popularizing 

and normalizing of mythology. 5 My analysis will revolve around two key questions: 

how did the Nazis make use of sound for their propaganda strategies? How 

can concepts of the “Auditory Imagination” and “Affirmative Resonance” aid the 

analysis of Nazi ritual practices between 1923 and 1933? I will address these issues 

in four steps: firstly, I will introduce and define theoretical concepts and their relevance 

to my case study of Schlageter. Secondly, I will employ these conceptual tools 

to analyze the political attempts for an acoustic occupation of public life during the 

1920s in Germany. In the third section, I will focus specifically on the late Weimar 

period (1929–1933), in view of the standardization of songs and ritual practices concerning 

Schlageter, and the utilization of new sound technologies and distribution 

channels. Finally, I will analyze the 1933 Schlageter festival as the culmination of a 

number of sound-related practices and propaganda strategies, which are integral to 

the attempt to perform reconfigured identity patterns, social relations, and a new 

national spirit in the public arena. 

Theorizing Sound and Auditory Perception 

In his book Listening and Voice (1976), Don Ihde develops the notion of the “auditory 

imagination” as part of an analysis of the dynamics between listening and voice, corporeal 

experience and cognition. Ihde identifies two important modes for the auditory imagination. 

The first mode occurs in the “dual polyphony” between hearing external sounds 

and one’s own inner speech. 6 In Ihde’s view, the act of speaking prompts another kind of 

dual polyphony or feedback between speaking and hearing oneself speak: 

When I speak, if I attend to the entire bodily sense of speaking, I feel my voice resonate 

throughout at least the upper part of my body. I feel my whole head “sounding” 

in what I take to be sonic resonance. (138) 

It is precisely in this resonance that Ihde detects a polyphony between the perceptual 

and imaginative, a co-presence of these two modalities that facilitates the individual’s 

auditory imagination. When it comes to musical sounds, Ihde argues that intense 

sounds may in fact preclude the possibility of thinking. As he explains, “bodily-auditory 

motion” in the presence of music can engage both one’s subject body and experiencing 

body, thus leading to “a temporary sense of the ‘dissolution’ of self-presence” 

(134). This temporary suspension of inner speech, Ihde says, results in “auditory 

interruptions of thinking” (158). According to Ihde, sounds have the potential to disrupt 

thought patterns and one’s sense of self. 

Ihde’s theoretical distinctions offer an important foundation for understanding individual 

listening processes and their engagement of the body and senses. The dynamic 

between voice and listening makes a strong case for the affirmative qualities of speaking 

for subject formation. In turn, sounds can be generalized as provoking affects and 


physical reactions on listeners. In the case of Nazi rituals, there is clearly a relationship 

between sensory stimulation and manipulation. Yet it would be too easy to generalize 

the vocal-corporeal involvement of participants and crowds, with the intense 

sounds and resonances of the 1933 Schlageter festival as automatically subjecting 

listeners to an entranced “musical ecstasy” (Ihde). Overwhelming sounds do not automatically 

eradicate all possibilities for thinking and self-awareness. Ihde’s too-easy 

classification might lead to conclusions about listening as an irrational or primitive 

sense, an assertion made by media theorist Marshall McLuhan. 7 

Instead, it is necessary to acknowledge the variety of crowds and the range of 

reasons for attending large scale rituals like the 1933 Schlageter festival: out of 

political affiliation, social obligation, suspicion, curiosity or even a desire for entertainment. 

In this scenario, the silence of a crowd member might suggest refusal. 

Remaining silent could infer defiant opposition, but also silent agreement or being 

forcibly silenced by intimidation or violence. The same difficulty arises when trying to 

determine vocal-corporeal participation as always necessarily constituting affirmation 

of the Nazi regime. The sounds of the crowd might not have been an expression 

of support for the regime per se, but rather reflect a common knowledge of traditional 

songs and melodies, or even oppositional voices and responses that were drowned 

out amidst the intense sounds of the marchers and brass bands, the cheering and 

singing crowds. 

The various degrees of participation, subject positions and motivations for attending 

a large-scale Nazi festival are important considerations. To fully untangle the complex 

orchestrations of propaganda during the Schlageter festival – creating mass 

resonances and forms of sensory overstimulation in urban space – the concept of 

“auditory imagination” outlined by Ihde remains too limited in scope. To sufficiently 

analyze the impact of the Schlageter festival on the popular imagination, there are 

two vital elements that remain underexamined in Ihde’s analysis. The first issue is 

that of space. If the success of Nazi propaganda tactics and establishment of new 

rites of national loyalty are to be closely examined, it becomes essential to focus on 

the party’s utilization of space. Indeed, it is in the context of the various Nazi 

attempts to occupy, dominate and reconfigure social space, in the spatial arrangements 

of large-scale rituals, that the significance of sound can be properly understood. 

The significance of spatial practices immediately raises the second, interrelated 

issue of intersubjectivity. This concerns the group dynamics and power relations 

involved in large-scale rituals – in other words body politics and the disciplining of the 

senses. 8 Since Ihde is mainly concerned with individual auditory experiences, I take 

my cue here from Henri Lefebvre (1991, 2004), whose work gives equal attention 

to state uses and representations of space, along with the multiple rhythms, interactions 

and configurations of bodies in urban space. According to this taxonomy, 



bodily practices are viewed as integral to establishing selfhood, patterns of identity 

and belonging, and actively participating in the production of urban space. 

Therefore, to expand Ihde’s auditory imagination concept to include the significance 

of the body politics and spatial practices, I propose the notion of “affirmative 

resonance” as a useful concept for analyzing sound. 9 The phrase refers to resonance, 

which is an acoustics term pertaining to the frequency of vibrations within a 

particular system or area. Other uses of the term refer to the richness, variety or 

intensification of a sound, along with the reactions it provokes among people. 10 

When combined with the word affirmative – which suggests a certain optimism, making 

an agreement, or being in favor of a particular decision or person – the phrase is 

opened up to other possible meanings. 

My basic definition of affirmative resonance is when a group of people communally 

create sounds that resonate in a space, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of their 

group and its identity patterns. This definition is open to other variations, since I want 

to acknowledge the role of the individual processes, as much as intersubjective relations 

(patterns of collectivity and belonging). It is given different qualities when manifested 

through the sounds of multiple human voices, singing of songs, playing of 

instrumental music, or via technological recording and transmission. Affirmative resonances 

can be both heard or imagined sounds, ranging from forms of acoustic presence 

to the acoustic symbols produced by public discourse. They variously involve 

the voices, ears and bodies of listeners, and are predominantly experienced in the 

public spaces of the city, in enclosed spaces or domestic environments. 

The several dictionary meanings attributed to the word resonance provide a framework 

for my discussion of Nazi propaganda strategies and the Schlageter festival. 

The definitions refer to the intensification of sounds, their richness, variety and the 

reactions they provoke. In the case of Nazism, the loud cheers of massive crowds at 

official events not only comprised of the affirmations of individual speaking-hearing 

feedback loops, but also the intensification of the sounds recorded by the microphone, 

projected through the loudspeaker system, and fed back again into the microphone. 

This would be the illustrative example of affirmative resonance during the 

Nazi era, a propaganda goal that was not entirely achieved with sound technology 

during the 1933 Schlageter festival, yet realized more completely in subsequent 

years of the regime. The concept of affirmative resonances, however, is the key for 

identifying the increased intensity and effectiveness of Nazi propaganda strategies 

between the mid 1920s until 1933. During the period from 1925 onwards, the desire 

to create mass events went hand in hand with the Nazi aim to transform themselves 

into a mass political movement. This will be traced as a general shift from examples 

of sparking the individual auditory imagination (presence) to comprehensive 

attempts at sensory overwhelming, with large-scale techniques of affirmative resonance 

(omnipresence). In each section I will engage with these concepts to pinpoint 


how and why the sound and musical forms hold such significance for understanding 

key aspects of Nazi mythology, power relations and body politics, along with reconfigurations 

of urban geographies, identity and belonging. 

Aesthetic Occupations of Public Space during the 1920s 

[The street] is the location and medium 

for social encounters, the confrontation of 

classes, sexes, industry, generations etc. 

(Thomas Lindenberger) 

During the mid to late 1920s, the Nazi party developed a number of visual and acoustic 

propaganda techniques based on principles of mass persuasion outlined by leader Adolf 

Hitler. 11 The illustrations of acoustic presence and acoustic conflict I will now examine are 

precursors to the large-scale and multiple forms of affirmative resonance that emerged 

in 1933. While they might have sparked the auditory imagination of non-members or reinforced 

the identity of party members, these examples do not represent the possibility for 

paradigmatic shifts of community values and social allegiances. Nonetheless, the propaganda 

strategies pursued by both the Nazis and Communist parties reveal their tactics 

for attracting support and provoking fascination through sensory-corporeal activities in 

urban environments, encompassing both spatial practices and body politics. 

The urban street is the quintessential site for the interactions of individuals and 

groups within the city. As one of the most vivid symbols of modernity in Germany, the 

street was invested with revolutionary potential in the wake of World War I after 

1918. This sparked new forms of urban crowd behaviour and political participation, 

epitomized by the development of a Redewut (a mania for speaking out). 12 The street 

had wider repercussions, since not only political disputes, but also the most important 

cultural discourses were located: 

outside of the private and intimate sphere – on the streets, in public places, in halls, 

and in pubs. This applied not only to the cultural expressions of political and social 

revolt but also to the various forms of commercial entertainment and diversion; 

whether cinema, variety, or the department stores for ordinary folk. (Zielinski 150) 

During the 1920s, central figures in the Nazi party also maintained a core belief 

in the urban street as a key location for gaining symbolic power and for the 

“Eroberung der Masse” (conquering of the people). Nazi propagandist Joseph 

Goebbels reaffirmed this tenet about the Nazis’ so-called Kampfzeit (period of struggle) 

in the 1920s, citing their shared conviction that “whoever conquers the streets, 

conquers the state” ([1931] 1938). 

As has been frequently observed, both left and right wing groups aimed for visual 

presence in their strategies and battles for dominance of urban spaces. Particularly 



during election periods, the Nazis and Communist parties relied on a range of visual 

strategies to heighten their public profile. In the case of the Nazis, billboard posters, 

leaflets, newspapers, flags, symbols, party uniforms and swastika badges constituted 

the main modes through which their party established themselves visually 

throughout city streets and cultural contexts. These strategies are often attributed to 

the influence of French psychologist Gustave Le Bon on Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler. 

In one of the frequently-cited quotes from Le Bon’s 1895 publication The Crowd, he 

claimed that crowds can only think and be influenced through images, since “it is 

only images that terrify them or attract them or become motives of action” (35). This 

insistence on the suggestiveness of images has constituted a powerful legacy for 

contemporary accounts of Nazi propaganda and leadership principles, since visual 

forms are often preferred cultural objects for analyses of Nazism. 

To turn to the role of sound in the Nazis’ endeavors to figure in the popular imagination, 

it is important to note Adolf Hitler’s belief in the “magic force of the spoken 

word.” 13 Sound is suited to the task of establishing presence since it does not respect 

borders between public and private life, and travels beyond the field of vision. In doing 

so, sounds are able to appear in the auditory imagination, even if their source cannot 

be seen. During the 1920s, the Nazis were particularly effective in developing distinctive 

acoustic symbols as strategies for heightening their urban presence. The Nazis 

began to use their own form of greeting from the early 1920s, which consisted of the 

mutual exchange of the greeting Heil Hitler! with a straight, raised right arm. In 

response to the success of this acoustic symbol, left wing parties unsuccessfully tried 

to establish their symbolic greetings in the early 1930s, with the social democrats opting 

for Freiheit!, while some communists tried their luck with Heil Moskow! 14 These 

belated reactions to the Nazi greeting did not catch on with other left-wing supporters 

or the general public. By contrast, the Nazi greeting was a mobilization of the body and 

the senses, which gave the party a striking acoustic marker of their group identity in 

public life (177). The Hitler-greeting was a major mechanism for mass suggestion, for 

appearing in the auditory imagination, thus simultaneously operating as an indicator 

for the growing social presence of Hitler supporters prior to 1933. 

Drawing attention to the presence of sounds in public life during the 1920s is crucial, 

given that “part of clamour of modernity is a public sonic brawling, as urban space 

becomes a site of acoustic conflict” [my emphasis] (Cloonan and Johnson 31). The 

first instance of sonic brawling, or battles over acoustic presence, centered around 

urban streets and marketplaces, particularly on weekends, which were the tense locations 

for heated political debates, street battles and noisy group processions. These 

events represented both an opportunity to increase their support and a provocation to 

political opponents, often involving brass bands, marching and the singing of party 

songs. The parties at each end of the political spectrum used occasions for sonic 

brawling as attempts to “sound out” urban locations, albeit on a fairly localized scale. 


During the late 1920s, however, the Nazis amplified their acoustic presence with 

the growing ranks of their Sturmabteilung (SA) militaristic units. The SA groups, with 

their rows of marching columns, attracted public fascination and created the impression 

of a stable rhythm and order. Their role as a symbol of “the Volk on the march,” 

also positioned SA troops in a similar position to Schlageter, as heroic freedom fighters 

and embodiments of the New Man. 15 At the same time, SA units relied on 

“acoustic conflict,” in noisy forms of intimidation and violence. Large groups would 

descend on communist areas or Jewish businesses to sing out aggressive songs and 

slogans like “Jude verrecke” (Jew, rot to death). 16 

Thus, there are two general patterns in the creation of auditory presence. The first 

is comprised by the visual and acoustic markers of the Nazi party, with their distinct 

greeting and marching through city streets. The synchronized footsteps of SA troops, 

in particular, provided a palpable symbol for soldierly discipline and rhythmic order, 

posited as an antidote to the chaos of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, these 

troops maintained an ethos of warfare and fighting for the Nazi worldview, using 

sounds to mark out territories and delineate exclusionary identity patterns across 

urban spaces. The latter forms of acoustic conflict can be defined as creating “landscapes 

of fear” (Tuan) and “racialised geographies” (McCann), since the Nazi’s political 

program was based on aggressive attacks on Communists and spectacles of 

public humiliation and violence against Jews. 

The examples of acoustic presence and acoustic conflict discussed here point to 

the variety of ways that the Nazi party used sound to attract attention and make an 

appearance in the auditory imagination of both supporters and non-members during 

the 1920s. Although there were many attempts at visual and acoustic occupations in 

public life – involving corporeal and spatial practices – the propaganda strategies discussed 

here do not come close to the acoustic intensities, mass participation or 

organizational capacities achieved in 1933. Indeed while there were still significant 

amounts of “acoustic conflict,” with other political and institutional forces countering 

the Nazis, it was not yet possible for the party to achieve mass contexts for “affirmative 

resonance.” The gradual shift from the Nazi’s appearances in the auditory 

imagination towards mechanisms of affirmative resonance will be explored in the 

next section, in relation to songs, publicity techniques and sound technologies during 

the late Weimar period. 

Publicizing Songs, Sounds and Schlageter 

64 | Carolyn Birdsall 

Fascism was not an alternative to 

commodity culture, but appropriated 

its most sophisticated techniques. 

(Susan Buck-Morss 309)


I now turn to focus specifically on the late Weimar period (1929–1933), in view of a 

number of important developments that brought the Nazi party closer to creating the 

conditions for mass “affirmative resonances” in public spaces. The central elements 

of consequence here are the Nazi party’s standardization of ritual events involving 

songs and speech, the utilization of new sound technologies and publicity forms, in 

addition to the specific commemorative songs and memorial structures about 

Schlageter. Each of these elements are essential to the party’s appeals to the 

senses for promoting the Volksgemeinschaft as an experience, and realizing the 

mass nature of their political movement. 

With the increased profile of the Nazi party as a major political presence during 

1931 and 1932, their attempts at acoustic presence and occupations of public life 

grew in intensity. One of the key methods with which the Nazi party harnessed their growing 

ranks of supporters in the late Weimar period was through fortnightly local gatherings, 

known as Sprechabende (speech evenings). In large cities these evening 

gatherings were attracting between one and five thousand people on a daily basis 

(Paul 126). The focus on speeches during these events reflected Joseph Goebbels’ 

assertion that the spoken voice was more effective than the written word, given that 

word-of-mouth would enable their propaganda to be “passed on and recited hundreds 

and thousands of times” (18). This observation from Goebbels, as one of the key figures 

in Nazi propaganda, attests to the emphasis they placed on listening experiences 

of spoken voice and sounds as a means for generating enthusiasm for 

the party. 

By this later period, the Nazi party strove for further public notice through bold 

propaganda and election campaigns, characterized by strategies for a spatial occupation 

and perhaps even a “shrinkage” of public space, as Ulf Strohmayer has suggested 

(150). Although officially banned from making radio appearances, in 1932 the 

Nazis took the initiative to charter a plane for Hitler’s election campaign. His flights 

between public lecture events in various German cities were marketed with the slogan 

Hitler über Deutschland (Hitler over Germany). Along with the posters and slogans 

for this media event, both a book and propaganda film of the same name 

positioned Hitler as a statesman looking down over the nation from an omnipresent 

position. 17 As the only candidate to try to traverse between several large cities each 

day, Hitler’s physical presence across the nation was projected as achieving an imagined 

spatial dominance. 

During election campaigns, the Nazis also tried to heighten their acoustic presence 

by exploiting the new opportunities made available for record album releases. After 

1928, the party began to distribute songs as commodities for consumption, with record 

releases of militaristic and party songs, along with Hitler’s Appell an die Nation (Call to 

the Nation), that was released and sold prior to the 1932 elections. 18 This pattern 

demonstrates a growing presence of the Nazi party in the public’s auditory imagination, 


made possible through mass-produced recordings of songs and speeches. Through 

their marketing of songs through record releases, the Nazi party was taking advantage 

of a newly emerging publicity system during the late Weimar period, based on new configurations 

of popularity and publicity. When describing the popular phenomenon of 

Schlager (hit song) in the same period, Brian Currid summarizes this trend as the emergence 

of a “commercial mode of national fantasy.” 19 Thus, the mass consumption of 

national mythology through listening experiences was already underway prior to the Nazi 

takeover in 1933, offered to the public as a media experience with new sound recording 

and distribution practices. 

In 1932, the Nazi’s use of media distribution channels took a new turn, with the 

availability of a new sound device at their disposal: Lautsprecherwagen, which were 

purpose-built vans with loudspeakers attached to the outside. These vans were 

rented during election campaigns, as a means for attracting the attention of citizens 

with Nazi speeches, songs and party slogans (Paul 198). This represents an expansion 

of the principle of acoustic presence, since it enabled a significant intensification 

of sounds in support of the party. As a supplement to the strategies described 

in the previous section, these loudspeaker vans now opened up the possibility for 

penetrating public and private spaces with amplified sounds. Furthermore, this use 

of a mechanically reproduced and amplified version of the party’s songs and 

speeches represents an expanded attempt to compress and fill urban space, as a 

vivid precursor to the propagandistic uses of radio after 1933. Loudspeaker vans 

also intensified the possibilities for “acoustic conflict” described in the previous section, 

since the vans provided the party with new opportunities for intimidation tactics 

against Communists and Jews. Thus, the use of loudspeaker vans was an important 

development for the Nazi’s desire to achieve forms of acoustic dominance in the public 

spaces of cities, with the potential to mechanically drown out the sounds of their 

political opponents. 

I now return to the Nazi party’s desire to orchestrate sensory experiences and 

facilitate the consumption of national myth. By the early 1930s the Nazi party had 

standardized their use of songs and Christian-liturgical style rituals during gatherings 

or large events, such as the “National Socialist Days of Celebration.” 20 The party 

used such events to form impressive commemorative traditions, appealing to participants 

with group experiences of singing, solemn ritual and emotional climaxes. 

The standardization of song and incorporation of Christian-liturgical elements is 

illustrated by the 1932 publication of an instruction book by F.H. Woweries. In the 

book, Woweries offers a prototype for the necessary procedures of Nazi event programs 

as follows: opening choral piece, poem recital or chant, choral song Kein 

schön’rer Tod der Welt, a short speech, orchestra piece, ceremony for new Hitler-Youth 

members; orchestra piece, a closing chant and rendition of the second national 

anthem Die Fahne hoch! (Raise the Flag!). 21 The structure of the program alternates 


etween song, music and spoken texts, between chorus, recitations and chants. 

Revolving around these various rituals and forms of participation, these events 

included the ceremonial induction of new youth members into the Volksgemeinschaft. 

Equally as important are the two songs included in the program, which both mourn 

the death of “fallen comrades” and idealize male heroism for the nation. 22 These 

commemorative rituals, already established before 1933, provide clear indication of 

the strategies, rhythms and sensory stimuli incorporated into Nazi events designed 

to perform a sense of group participation in the nation’s rebirth. 

Nationalistic songs and anthems, with uplifting lyrics and bombastic melodies, are 

particularly useful as propaganda, given their ability to harness feelings of optimism 

and belonging. 23 Prior to the Weimar Republic, popular music had proven to be 

an effective source of political mobilization during World War I (Watkins 213–26). One 

of the most popular tunes during the war was the song Wacht am Rhein, which 

locates the Rhine river as historically German (not French) and personifies it as a 

brave soldier standing in defense of the national border. Likewise, one of the most 

striking features of the Schlageter myth is the way it was embedded into national significance 

through song and ritual practices in lead up to 1933. Nazi song practice 

was primarily based on the coupling of simple, emotive music with strong, unambiguous 

lyrics, often from well-known poems (Meyer 569). In the late Weimar period, 

former comrades and members of the nation-wide Schlageter-Gedächtnis-Bund set 

about to rework well-known songs in Schlageter’s memory. 24 Several of these 

melodies were World War I or soldier songs, including Wacht am Rhein, which were 

given new verses. 

Among the numerous songs in circulation about Schlageter during the Weimar 

period, was a new song written by Nazi propagandist Otto Paust, 25 titled “Song of the 

Lost Troops” 26 : 

Rhine, Ruhr and Palatinate. 27 And – dungeon’s darkness, 

Sentence and prison! Trouble, unable to rest – 

Golzheimer Heath. 28 Schlageter’s death. 

Flaming blaze. Dawn! Do you remember? 

The Third Reich’s first soldier! 

You kept the faith! You were the living deed. 

You are the Reich. You are the nation, 

You are Germany’s faith, the son of the Volk. 


The song performs a noticeable shift, moving from the despair about the prison sentence 

for Schlageter, through to his death at dawn as the scene of rebirth for the 

nation. The first stanza gives a short and stylized account of Schlageter’s death and 


addresses Germans with the question “do you remember?,” to prompt not only 

remembrance but perhaps also as a test of patriotic loyalty. The second stanza 

addresses Schlageter as the “Third Reich’s first soldier,” and a symbol for Germany’s 

struggle in the face of defeat and occupation after World War I. The song, then, situates 

Schlageter both as a myth of origin and “the son of the people.” In this way, it 

becomes easier to discern how such songs were drawn on for rituals and rhetorics 

about unconditional loyalty to the nation, a discourse that the Nazis simultaneously 

used to reposition Communists and Social Democrats as unpatriotic traitors 

(Fischer 2). 

Two other significant Nazi appropriations of traditional melodies included the seventeenth-century 

folksong Kein schön’rer Tod der Welt and the popular song Zu 

Mantua in Banden, written in 1831. The historical references in Zu Mantua in Banden 

represent a striking parallel with the Schlageter myth. The lyrics to this melody were 

written about Andreas Hofer, who fought against Napoleon’s French armies in the 

early 1800s. Hofer was arrested and shot to death by a French firing squad, and this 

resemblance to Schlageter is emphasized in the lyrics of the Schlageter-Song: 29 


With the sounds of drum roll 

To Benrath on the Rhine, 

A thriving life came 

To an abrupt end. 

Albert Schlageter, German hero 

French anger cut you down 

You died for Germany’s honor. 

They forced you to your knees 

Out of baseness and malice, 

The wish to die standing, 

Was dismissed with a sneer. 

Twelve shots cracked at once, 

Comrades, let it be known in the German Reich 

Here fell an officer, a German officer. 

With aching hearts 

And suppressed anger 

We saw your life end 

And the pouring of precious blood 

With your unbroken male pride 

Staying as stable as German oak- 

Wood, in a mighty heroism.

German Andreas Hofer, 

You pearl of German loyalty 

Your luster will never fade, 

Will always be renewed. 

All of Germany swears, despite its woes, 

To show their gratitude for your martyrdom: 

Revenge will be mine! 


These lyrics, written during the 1920s, represent a similar attempt to Paust’s mythologizing 

of Schlageter. The song begins by describing drum rolls and the twelve shots 

of the French firing squad. These are two important illustrations of the acoustic symbols 

used frequently in the poems, songs and rhetorics about Schlageter’s death. 

These symbols were attributed with further significance in the lead up to 1933, as 

the French gunshots were commonly portrayed as a call to arms prompting 

Germany’s so-called national awakening. In the second stanza, Schlageter’s heroic 

behavior is pitted against the depravity of the French military. His example as a manly 

ideal and German soldier is then compared to the longevity and dependability of an 

oak tree in the third stanza – as upright, unyielding and principled. In the final stanza, 

the protagonist addressed as “you” in the previous stanzas is overlaid with the persona 

of Andreas Hofer. This doubling up of these two figures integrates Schlageter 

as heir to a lineage of male German patriots, thus reconfirming his role both as a 

myth of origin and a projected future for the model of a new man under National 

Socialism. The final part of the song functions as a pledge of loyalty, ending with the 

theme of revenge, and stressing the necessity for action. In this manner, nationalistic 

songs represented an important mobilizing force for the Nazi idea of a “people’s 

community.” The lyrics place semantic emphasis on action as central to the Nazi’s 

own objectives as a political Bewegung (literally, “movement”), and repeatedly appeal 

to the auditory imagination when citing gunshots as the acoustic symbols and triggers 

for Germany’s national rebirth. 

The lyrics of the Schlageter-Lied were submitted by a former comrade of Schlageter 

to the Düsseldorf Historical Museum, as part of a compilation begun in 1931 to create 

a “Schlageter Corner” in their permanent collection. 30 From 1932 onwards, a 

Nazi-dominated team began preparations in Düsseldorf for a Schlageter-Gedächtnis- 

Ausstellung (Schlageter memorial exhibition), which was opened during the 1933 festival. 

31 The calls to memorialize Schlageter’s memory intensified after 1927, when a 

prominent circle of Düsseldorf citizens, including Catholics and conservatives, called 

for donations to their Ausschuss für die Errichtung eines Schlageter-Nationaldenkmals 

(Committee for the Erection of a National Schlageter Memorial). The committee also 

lobbied the German Chancellery throughout 1927 and 1928 to assist them in building 

a memorial at the location of Schlageter’s death at the Golzheim Heath, yet Chancellor 


Wilhelm Marx expressed concerns at the nationalist and anti-French motivations of the 

committee, given the then-fragile diplomatic ties with France. 32 The monument was 

finally built in 1931, some fifty meters from the site of Schlageter’s death, according 

to the plans of Düsseldorf Professor Clemens Holzmeister (see image 1). The monument 

was overwhelmingly dominated by a towering iron cross, at a height of thirty 

meters, with a memorial tablet listing over one hundred dead men from the resistance 

to the French occupation. 

Two aspects of the memorial were ideal for the Nazi mythologizing of Schlageter. 

Firstly, the Christian overtones of the cross were suited to the Nazi’s use of Schlageter 

as a Christ-like symbol of heroic sacrifice. Surrounded by open fields, a concrete construction 

in front of the cross was partially below ground and circular in shape. This second 

aspect had the desired effect for an inclusive congregation of the people, spatially 

reconfigured as “a community, the people gathered within” (Taylor 191–92). Indeed, for 

the Nazis in Düsseldorf, the site was the perfect locations for repeated ritual gatherings, 

seen as further consolidating “the feeling of predestined solidarity of the new 

Volksgemeinschaft.” 33 While the Nazi party only exercised a partial role in the use of the 

memorial site in 1931, its significance was considerably expanded in the mid 1930s 

with a massive building project under Nazi directives. The 1937 Schaffendes Volk exhibition 

integrated the memorial site with the Schlageter-Forum, a grand columned 

entranceway, incorporating both a large number of pavilions and a Schlageter-Siedlung 


(housing estate). 34 Thus, the spatial dimensions of the Schlageter memorial were complementary 

to the Nazi’s will to create mass rites of national loyalty, or in other words, 

for achieving affirmative resonances. 

Hence, during the late Weimar period the mass publicity strategies of the Nazi party 

were characterized by a frenzy of propaganda and political agitation, striving towards 

principles of sensory overwhelming and spatial omnipresence. The party drew on a 

Christian ritual and symbolic framework, elevating each gathering to the status of an 

“event.” They took advantage of sound technologies and song practices as devices for 

widely circulating and popularizing their nationalist cause, heightening the possibilities 

for acoustic presence in public spaces. In this process, Schlageter’s death was emphasized 

as the awakening of the nation, facilitated by the acoustic symbol of gunshots. 

With the establishment of memorial groups, a museum collection and memorial site, 

Schlageter’s memory and significance was consolidated in Düsseldorf’s urban landscape. 

The symbolic and physical dimensions of the memorial site offered a sacrosanct 

space, which could easily lend itself to the nationalistic eulogizing, body politics and 

spatial practices of 1933. In the next section, I examine how the Nazi party, once in 

power, integrated these various strategies with their new control over public events and 

cultural production. I outline a number of ritual events prior to the Schlageter festival, 

before moving to the range of ways in which the party uses the Schlageter mythology 

and its commemoration to orchestrate large-scale techniques of affirmative resonance. 

Schlageter Memorial Festival 

Participation in a mass demonstration at a 

time of great public exaltation […] implies some 

physical action – marching, chanting, slogans, 

singing – through which the merger of the 

individual in the mass, which is the essence 

of the collective experience, finds expression. 

(Eric Hobsbawm 73) 


In his 2002 memoirs, historian Eric Hobsbawm conceded that he could no longer 

recall many details of his participation in a large Communist political demonstration 

in Berlin during early 1933. Instead, what he clearly remembers is the experience of 

collective singing with “intervals of heavy silence,” his trance-like state and the 

exalted feeling that “we belonged together” (74). In his description, Hobsbawm picks 

out the physical movement of marching in the city, and the shifts between speech, 

song and silence, as key factors for drawing individuals into inclusive mass rituals, 

characterized by its spatial and bodily practices. While the experiences described by 

Hobsbawn were situated within a Communist tradition, this example illustrates how 


the intersections of crowds, group rituals and urban space can contribute to the collective 

performance of a group identity. 

To turn first to the early months of Nazi rule, a number of large public events 

staged by the party are equally revealing as establishing social legitimation and inviting 

popular participation in the Nazi’s conception of Volksgemeinschaft (nationalracial 

community) as a panacea to class divisions in German society. On the day that 

the Nazis seized power, 30 January 1933, one million supporters took the streets of 

Berlin in a nighttime procession with torch lights, which proceeded past the German 

chancellery and through the triumphal archway of the Brandenburg Gate. A number of 

official rituals were organized in the four months prior to the Schlageter festival, 

which were public holidays and the occasions for whole day broadcasting programs 

under new Nazi radio administrations. One of these, Der Tag von Potsdam (Day of 

Potsdam), was held on 21 March 1933 to replace the annual German Reichstag celebrations 

and appropriate the key ceremonial site of the former Prussian monarchy. 

Some weeks later, on 1 May 1933, the international worker’s day was similarly transformed 

into Der Tag der Arbeit (Day of Labor), an occasion described as performing 

the symbolic destruction of the German labor movement (Elfferding 1987). 

A third major event in this short period was the national public holiday created for 

Adolf Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1933. After a whole day of national celebrations for 

Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday in Berlin, the highlight of the evening was the premiere 

and radio broadcast of a new theatre play Schlageter, with Hitler and high-ranking 

party officials in attendance. 35 The play, which was written and staged by Hanns 

Johst, used every opportunity to portray Schlageter as a Nazi hero and “first soldier 

of the Third Reich.” 36 Even in the final death scene at dawn, Johst put the propaganda 

slogan “Germany Awake!” into Schlageter’s mouth. Positioned upstage with 

his back to the audience, Schlageter faced the guns of the firing squad (which were 

also pointed at the audience) (see image 2). In this climactic scene, with the sound 

effects of French car engines and headlights shining towards the audience, his character’s 

last words were “Germany! One last word! One wish! Command! Germany! 

Awake! Catch flame! Burn! Burn beyond imagining!” (Johst 135). At this moment gunshot 

sounds rang out, and the bright spotlight shining in the audiences’ eyes went 

out, leaving the audience in the dark. 

This represented an important acoustic moment for the audience members, with 

the question of patriotism ringing in their ears. In the dark silence that ensued, 

German audiences were left with the image of Schlageter’s sacrifice, left to think 

about the necessity of taking action and fighting for the nation. After this pause, the 

applauding audience joined in song for the two national anthems Das Lied der 

Deutschen and Die Fahne hoch! (Strobl 308). This was the climax of a public holiday 

and rituals for Hitler’s birthday, where not only the acoustic symbol of the gunshots 

reconfirmed Schlageter’s importance, but also with the affirmative resonances of 



collective singing of both national anthems, whether participating as theatergoers or 

listening as part of the radio audience. 

In this example, it becomes clear how the Nazis were able to expand on their earlier 

strategies, using specific forms of acoustic symbols and acoustic presence to 

appeal to the auditory imagination. On the one hand, the whole day radio broadcasts 

replicated the acoustic symbols and the sensory stimulation of the songs, sounds and 

heightened anticipation of the public events. These broadcasts are illustrative of the 

Nazis’ desire to bridge private and public spaces through radio and other media, insofar 

that “networking private and public experience within an expanded frontier of 

national space became an important political point of legitimation and control” 

(Bathrick 4). On the other hand, in the appropriation of familiar public events and a preexisting 

knowledge of songs for collective singing, the Nazis’ could engage crowd participation 

in songs, chants and sound making. In this sense, even if crowd members 

felt like autonomous subjects engaged in acts of self-expression, the elements of 

these speaker and crowd encounters marked the merging of “expression and repression 

[within] the same mechanism” (Koepnick 46). 


Ultimately, through the realization of sensory overwhelming and spatial omnipresence, 

these party rituals enabled the creation of affirmative resonances that could 

sound out the entire public space of the city, saturating the ears and bodies of the 

people. Moreover, these ritual practices supported new characterizations of urban 

space, with its Endlose Strassen (endless streets) and Ewige Strassen (eternal 

streets), replacing an earlier characterization of “die freudlose Gasse” (the joyless 

street) in the economic crises of the twenties and the early thirties. 37 Such positive 

notions of streetscapes were boosted by plans for a national Autobahn network, 

which performed the additional function of promising to network the nation in the 

form of transport routes (Vahrenkamp). 

The expanded significance of acoustic presence and acoustic symbols, of corporeal 

and spatial practices is central to the three-day Schlageter festival held in 

Düsseldorf from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 May 1933. Like the festivals described 

above, the attendance of crowd members was in part obligatory, such as for the 

eighty thousand local Hitler-Youth members, who were required to attend the event. 

For most of the other crowd members their participation was voluntary, since the festival 

was popularized and normalized as a tourist event, with souvenirs and commodities 

for consumption. 38 In the lead up to the festival, German radio stations 

broadcast radio plays and biographical accounts about Schlageter. Visitors could 

attend the opening of Johst’s Schlageter play or screenings of the film Blutendes 

Deutschland (1932), which restaged the story of Schlageter and the rise of the Nazis 

through newsreel footage. On the first day of the festival in Düsseldorf was the official 

opening of the Schlageter memorial museum and exhibition, which went on to 

tour in other major cities competing to partake in the popular enthusiasm for 

Schlageter-related events (Fuhrmeister 7–8). 

In addition to the postcards and pins available for sale, a significant number of biographies 

and commemorative books were published during 1933 and 1934, which further 

encouraged the consumption of national myth. One example of the insistence on 

Schlageter’s national significance can be found in the afterword to a collection of his letters, 

edited by Friedrich Bubenden (1934). Bubenden emphasizes the simplicity of 

Schlageter’s prose, before situating his story in acoustic terms. Schlageter is positioned 

as true patriot who listened to “the call” of the unknown soldier in post war Berlin and 

who could hear “the subterranean rumbling […] of the Ruhr” during the anti-French resistance. 

39 Towards the end of this text, Bubenden stresses that Schlageter was an example 

to the German people in his devotion to the nation, as “a man of action and not of 

words,” who continued to struggle, rather than “sinking into non-militant contemplation.” 

The call for a national awakening and creation of a Volksgemeinschaft was performed 

via a number of acoustic means during the Schlageter festival. On each of the 

three days of the Schlageter festival, different uniformed groups with thousands of 

members marched through the streets of the city. By the first day of the festival, the 


Ehrenfeuer (memorial flame) had already been burning at the memorial site for five 

days. A national memorial broadcast for all school children took place between ten 

and eleven a.m., with a radio play about Schlageter written for the occasion. 40 That 

evening, at seven p.m., the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne broadcast a special 

edition of the daily Stunde der Nation (Hour of the Nation), in honour of Schlageter. 

Immediately following this classical concert program, another Schlageter radioplay 

(based on Johst’s production) was broadcast from Berlin until half-past nine. In 

Düsseldorf, one hundred airplanes circled over the city at five p.m., while a bronze 

bust and plaque were unveiled in the district court, where Schlageter had been sentenced 

(Knauff 174). Later that evening, the Schlageter memorial group arranged a 

concert event for long-time party members in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle (concert hall), 

with a chorus singing a range of songs from Richard Wagner, World War I and folk 

repertoires. 41 


The second day of the festival celebrations, titled the Schlagetertag der Hitler- 

Jugend (Schlageter Day for the Hitler Youth), involved eighty thousand local school 

children in a march to the memorial site in Golzheim (Baird 37). Hitler Youth members 

met at seven p.m. and went to the empty factory halls, which would serve as 

mass accommodation facilities for the festival. After assembling with torch lights and 

flags at nine p.m., the youth groups marched through the city to the Schlageter 

memorial, where they had a ceremony of hymns, brass bands and speeches. 

Positioned as the new members and future of the German Volksgemeinschaft, for 

both boys and girls, Schlageter was projected as the embodiment of the role that 

youth could play in the rebirth of the nation. Furthermore, the enthusiasm for marching 

as part of the Volksgemeinschaft generated in many of its young members has 

been described in one memoir as something that “pulled us along – namely, the compact 

columns of marching youths and waving flags, eyes looking straight ahead, and 

the beat of drums and singing. Was it not overwhelming, this fellowship?” 42 For some 

younger members, the intensity of these experiences and the ubiquity of Schlageter’s 

persona earned him the status similar to contemporary pop idols. 43 

The last day of the festival, Sunday 28 May, involved the most impressive performances 

of affirmative resonance. The day began at six a.m. with a Großes Wecken, a 

large reveille through the city, which was designed to wake up all civilians in the early 

hours of the morning. 44 This was a re-enactment of the acoustic symbol of the gunshots 

at Schlageter’s death, literally performing the “wake-up call” that would prompt 

both remembrance and the awakening of the nation. During the course of the morning, 

one hundred and eighty-five thousand uniformed participants marched through 

the streets, reordering them and sounding them out, amidst the cheers and participation 

of the crowds. These interactions reflect a ritual and sensory re-education of the 

people, achieving affirmative resonance in the singing as well as the rhythms of marching, 

enabling a symbolic territorial claim on the city that performatively rejected the 


earlier presence of French foreigners in this urban space. Moreover, postal authorities 

installed a telephone system with two hundred and fifty extensions around the city, 

and no expense was spared in providing loudspeakers for crowds and reporters. 45 

At ten a.m., all the marchers reached the Schlageter memorial. After the party 

leaders and special guests had entered this hierarchically divided space, a choir 

began to sing Franz Schubert’s hymn Heilig ist der Herr accompanied by one hundred 

musicians. Amidst this religious sentiment, two priests (catholic and protestant) 

mounted a risen platform, covered in swastika flags, from which they could each give 

a speech about Schlageter to the assembled masses, before the Niederländischen 

Dankgebet was played (Knauff 184). Just after eleven a.m., Prussian Interior Minister 

Hermann Göring gave a forty-five minute speech, broadcast across the whole country, 

where he cited the same acoustic symbol of the gun shots that had made such 

an impact at the premiere of Johst’s Schlageter play a few weeks previously: 

When the shots rang out ten years ago at dawn at this spot, they were heard 

through the German night and awakened the nation in her weakness and humiliation. 

In those days the memory of Schlageter inspired us and gave us hope. We refused to 

believe that his sacrifice had been in vain. Schlageter demonstrated in the way he died 

that the German spirit could not be destroyed. Schlageter, you can rest in peace. We 

have seen to it that you were honored here and not betrayed like your two million comrades. 

As long as there are Schlageters in Germany, the national will live. 46 

In this speech, the acoustic symbol and imagined sound of Schlageter’s death was 

again positioned as the spark reigniting the nation and its awakening, as the precondition 

for a new Volksgemeinschaft. Amidst multiple sounds and activations of 

affirmative resonance, Göring’s strategic use of the acoustic symbol of gunshots 

reflects a more general attempt to transform a deeply divided society, previously 

characterized as a “people of music,” into an “acoustic völkisch community” 

(Trommler 68). 

Once Göring’s speech ended, it was followed by a full two minutes of silence, 

which was observed across the whole country. Amidst the sounds of Ich hatt’ einen 

Kameraden (I once had a comrade), Göring and other party leaders descended to the 

empty lower area of the memorial to lay wreathes adorned with swastika flags (see 

image 3). At the end of the ceremony, the Düsseldorf Gauleiter (regional party leader) 

Florian gave a speech, before participants joined in singing both national anthems. 

After these ninety minutes of memorial rituals in Golzheim, the group of one hundred 

planes circled over the memorial site. Hitler Youth groups marched through the 

city streets, carrying flags and singing, before gathering for a lunch by the Rhine riverbank. 

From one p.m. onwards the uniformed SA and SS (Schutzstaffel) 47 groups 

reassembled and marched southwards through the city, saluting party leaders in the 

old city centre, before arriving for another assembly outside the Düsseldorf town 

theater. 48 After this gathering with its rituals and song, the seventy thousand 



uniformed SA and SS members returned to the northern banks of the Rhine, where 

they could buy food and alcohol outside the Düsseldorf sports stadium (Rheinstadion) 

(see image 4). The official party event beginning at five p.m. inside the stadium 

included a sports and horse-riding display, musical accompaniment and party 

speeches. For those at home, a Hörbericht (listener’s report) was broadcast nationally 

at the same time, with an hour-long earwitness account of the day’s event by a 

Siemens factory worker. 49 After this two-hour event, concluding again with the two 

national anthems, the SA and SS squadrons returned through the city for a number of 

concert events and smaller music performances scattered around various inner city 

locations and taverns. The conclusion to the festivities came in the late evening, with 

a concert of Prussian marches by one thousand musicians beginning at nine p.m. 

from the opposite banks of the Rhine (Oberkassel). At ten p.m., cannon shots were let 

off to announce a light display, with a giant reconstruction of the memorial cross with 

the text Schlageter lebt (Schlageter lives). 50 This visual and aural spectacle closed 

with aerial fireworks exploding over the heads of the spectators (see image 5). 

The commemorative festival in May 1933 was undoubtedly the high point in the 

Nazis’ use of Schlageter as a national symbol of heroism. Although Schlageter’s 

memorial site was incorporated into subsequent attempts to transform Düsseldorf’s 

topography, his mythology never regained the momentum evident in the decade 

between 1923 and 1933. Schlageter was an indispensable model for the new man 

deemed necessary by the Nazis for their anticipated Volksgemeinschaft. Indeed, with 

Schlageter the Nazi party was able to manipulate the recent humiliation of the French 

occupation as a means for inciting pledges of national loyalty. As I have demonstrated, 




in order to achieve this goal the Nazis kept the public in “a permanent state of excitement” 

in the early months of 1933 (Mosse 366). They invited popular participation in 

spectacles of national loyalty, which appropriated familiar elements from Christian rituals, 

traditional songs and music practice, through tourism, commodity consumption 

and memorialization. 

Ultimately, the resulting forms of suspense, sensory stimulation and vocal-corporeal 

participation offered to the public can be best understood as large-scale practices of 

affirmative resonance. The value of this concept is that it has opened up the interrelations 

between sensory overstimulation and discipline, for understanding the power and 

pleasure involved in rituals of “sonic dominance.” 51 Affirmative resonance, furthermore, 

has provided a way to account for the expanded geographical dimensions of 

large-scale rituals, from their geometrical organization of bodies to the use of sound to 

permeate and produce rhythm to urban spaces. In these large-scale Nazi rituals, there 

was a notable expansion of their reliance on forms of acoustic presence and acoustic 

symbols. The appeal to the auditory imagination, with the symbol of French gunshots, 

was reproduced through national radio broadcasts, theatre performance and published 

material. The significance of these imagined sounds to the nation’s “reawakening” was 

literally re-enacted during the Schlageter memorial festival, with a noisy reveille through 

the city streets, and reinforced with Hermann Göring’s speech for the massive crowds 

at the memorial site. 

In conclusion, the concept of affirmative resonance ultimately offers a number of 

critical aids for an historical investigation of sound. The most significant foundation 

for writing such a history is the recognition of the spatial, imaginative and intersubjective 

dimensions of sounds in cultural contexts. That is to say, sound is marked by 

its ability to reverberate in spaces, to travel and fill spaces, and reach beyond the 

field of vision. In response, the researcher is confronted with the sensory and embodied 

nature of historical experience. Attending to spatial qualities of sound, therefore, 

brings with it the realization that every history must also have a geography. In terms 

of the imagination, close study of song and musical practices reemphasizes the 

potential of sounds as a powerful mobilizing agent for emotions and physical reactions. 

Given that the affective qualities of sound and music have historically raised 

issues concerning political manipulation, it is not surprising that the researcher is 

drawn to questions of intersubjective relations. In order to account for both the individual 

and group relationships with sounds, it is essential to start with a model for 

individual patterns of listening and speaking as per Don Ihde’s concept of the auditory 

imagination. Such a model provides an important departure point for analyzing 

how sound can intervene in group dynamics and collective patterns of identity, in 

reconfiguring social bodies and reordering urban spaces. 


Notes 

1. Part of Schlageter’s appeal was his 

youthfulness, since he was twenty-eight at the 

time of his death. See Karl Radek, “Leo 

Schlageter: Der Wanderer ins Nichts.” Die Rote 

Fahne 26 June 1923, reprinted as “Leo 

Schlageter: The Wanderer in the Void,” in Kaes 

(312–14). 

2. Their official name was the 

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei 

(NSDAP), which translates as the National 

Socialist German Workers Party. 

3. See Fischer (2–3). Following Germany’s 

inability to meet the extensive financial 

reparations outlined in the Versailles Treaty of 

1919, French military troops occupied 

Düsseldorf, Duisburg and surrounding areas in 

1921. French and Belgian forces occupied the 

rest of the entire Ruhr-Rhine region in 1923, and 

it was only with significant international pressure 

and the “Dawes Plan” that the controversial 

occupation came to an end in mid 1925. 

4. “Von Schlageter-Denken zu Hitler-Tat.” 

Volksparole 29 May 1933, quoted in Koshar 

(181). 

5. For two specific analyses of Nazi visual 

propaganda, including leaflets, posters, 

streetlamps, flags and other symbols, see 

Herding and Mittig (1975) and Thöne (1979). A 

growing interest in sound during twentieth 

century Germany, mainly focused on film sound, 

can be found in recent publications by Lutz 

Koepnick (2002) and Erica Carter (2004), along 

with an edited volume by Nora M. Alter and Lutz 

Koepnick (2004). In the case of the Schlageter 

myth, two excellent sources are Fuhrmeister 

(2005) and Baird (1990), which focus primarily 

on visual-textual phenomena. 

6. Ihde divides “inner speech” up into two 

further subcategories of “thinking as language” 

and “thinking in language,” terms taken from 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of 

Perception (1962). 


7. This link made by McLuhan between listening 

and passivity has since been criticized by a 

number of sound theorists, including Leigh Eric 

Schmidt (2000) and Jonathan Sterne (2003). 

8. This concern with the politics of the body is 

most commonly associated with the work of 

historian Michel Foucault, who introduced the 

term “biopolitics” to account for a mode of 

government or a set of techniques that involve 

pervasive mechanisms of control over subjects’ 

bodies (Foucault History; Power). 

9. The term “affirmative resonance” was 

originally a phrase made in passing by media 

scholar Cornelia Epping-Jäger in a discussion 

about sound technology during Nazism, which 

she did not theorise in further detail (2004). 

10. See Webster’s Third New International 

Dictionary Unabridged of the English Language 

(1986) for the entries for resonance. 

11. The Nazis’ belief mass propaganda and 

mass psychology is most vigorously asserted in 

Hitler’s political manifesto Mein Kampf (1925), 

written while in prison during 1923. 

12. Stefan Grossmann, “Gegen die Redewut.” 

Vossische Zeitung 15 November 1918, quoted 

in Fritzsche (100). See also Nolan (1981) and 

Tobin (1985) for two accounts about Düsseldorf 

during World War I, with regards to mounting 

class tensions and subsequent revolutionary 

activities in the city streets. 

13. See the first section of Mein Kampf (1925), 

where Hitler also mentions Albert Leo Schlageter 

as an important hero for the Nazi movement. 

14. These greetings translate into English as 

“Freedom!” and “Hail Moscow!” 

15. Hanns Ludin, SA-marschierendes Volk 

(Munich 1939), quoted in Campbell (662). A 

number of propaganda slogans and campaigns 

emphasized the role of the SA marching 

columns for the Nazi’s desire for a new national 

spirit and a national identity based on male 

heroism.

16. Historian E.P. Thompson cites these 

practices as drawing on pre-existing practices 

of humiliation and blackmail from the early 

modern period known as Katzenmusik (524, 

531). See also Der Völkische Beobachter 

[supplement ‘Der SA-Mann’] 30/31 December 

1928, in Paul (140). 

17. See Hoffmann and Berchtold (1932). The 

propaganda film is sometimes referred to as 

“Hitler’s Flight over Germany” (1932). 

18. Der Völkische Beobachter 15 July 1932, 

quoted in Paul (198). 

19. In Currid’s engaging analysis of Schlager 

music, films and star-actors, he ultimately 

deduces that the multiple movements and 

cultural functions of the Schlager result in a 

politics that is “radically undecidable” and 

escapes clear cut distinctions between music 

as either resistance or domination (175). 

20. These special occasions included Adolf 

Hitler’s birthday, official party days, 1 May 

(National Day of Labor), and 9 November (a day 

of mourning party members who died in the 

1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich). 

21. F.H. Woweries, NS-Feierstunden: Ein 

Hilfsbuch für Parteistellen, SA, SS, HJ, NSBO. 

Mühlhausen, 1932 (21), quoted in Paul (130). 

22. “Die Fahne hoch!”, commemorating the 

dead Nazi party member Horst Wessel, became 

the second official national anthem in 1933. Its 

lyrics re-emphasize the “determined footsteps” 

of SA troops marching in file through the city 

streets, fighting for freedom, and remembering 

former party members. 

23. For a similar discussion in relation to 

Communist China in the 1930s and 1940s, 

see Hung (903–5). 

24. This Schlageter Memorial Association was 

right wing in orientation and was comprised 

mainly of members of the Nazi party. 

25. Otto Paust was an editor for Joseph 

Goebbels’s Berlin party newspaper Der Angriff. It 

is undoubtedly problematic to analyze the song 


lyrics translated into English, and without the 

sounds of the melody. However, the lyrics 

provide some insight into the mythologizing of 

Schlageter’s death and its rendering as a 

significant national event. 

26. The original German lyrics of Paust’s song 

“Das Lied vom ‘Verlorenen Haufen’ ” are 

as follows: 

1. Rhein, Ruhr und Pfalz. Und – 

Gefängnisnacht. / Urteil und Kerker! Verstört, 

verwacht – / Golzheimer Heide. Schlageters Tod. 

/ Leuchtende Lohe. – Morgenrot! / Weißt Du es 

noch? 

2. Des Dritten Reiches erster Soldat! / Dir gilt 

die Treue! Denn du warst Tat. / Du bist das 

Reich. Du bist Nation. / Bist Deutschlands 

Glaube, Volkes Sohn. 

This excerpt is from Otto Paust, “Deutsche 

Verse,” cited in full in Glombowski (443–44). I 

would like to thank Jay Baird providing me with 

this reference and English translation (see also 

Baird 13). 

27. This region is known as Rheinland-Pfalz in 

German, covering the areas around Koblenz, 

Mainz and Trier. 

28. The location of Schlageter’s death was the 

Golzheimer Heath, an empty area of land near 

the Nord-Friedhof (cemetery), and near the 

banks of the Rhine River in the northern part of 

Düsseldorf. 

29. The original German lyrics of the 

“Schlageter-Lied”: 

1. Bei dumpfen Trommelwirbel / zu Benrath an 

dem Rhein, / da ging ein blühend Leben / um 

jähen Tode ein. / Albert Schlageter, deutscher 

Held, / Franzosenwut hat dich gefällt, / Du 

starbst für Deutschlands Ehre. 

2. Man liess dich niederknien / Aus 

Niedertracht und Tücke, / Den Wunsch aufrecht 

zu sterben, / Wies man mit Hohn zurück. / Zwölf 

Schüsse krachten alsogleich, / Kameraden, wißt 

im deutschen Reich, / Hier fiel ein Offizier, ein 

deutscher Offizier. 

3. Mit schmerzzerrissem Herzen / Und 

stillverhaltner Wut, / Sah’n wir dein Leben enden 

/ Und fließen teures Blut. / Dein ungebroch’ner 


Mannesstolz / Blieb fest wie deutscher Eichen / 

Holz, im starken Heldentum. 

4. Deutscher Andreas Hofer, / Du Perle 

deutscher Treu, / Dein Glanz kann nie 

verblassen, / Wird immer werden neu. / All 

Deutschland schwört, trotz aller Not, / Zum Dank 

für den Mätyrertod: / Die Rache sie ist mein! 

Bundesarchiv (National Archives, Berlin) 

R/8038 “Schlageter-Gedächtnis-Museum” 12 

(267). 

30. Bundesarchiv (Berlin) R/8038 “Schlageter- 

Gedächtnis-Museum” (1–19). 

31. Among the items from the early 1920s 

sought by the team members, many of whom 

joined a committee for a permanent Schlageter 

Memorial Museum in 1934, included were 

flags, photos, badges, and witness reports. 

32. See correspondence between Chancellor 

Marx, Governor of the Rhine Province Dr Horion, 

and Committee members Dr Wilms-Posen and 

Constans Hilmersdorff. Bundesarchiv (Berlin) 

R43 I/834 Fiche II (47–57). Just prior to 

Schlageter festival in 1933, Hitler accepted the 

invitation to take on the role as 

“Schirmherrschaft des Ausschusses für das 

Schlageter-National-Denkmal” (Patron of the 

Committee for the Schlageter-National- 

Memorial). 

33. Rudolf Wolters, “Die Bauten des Dritten 

Reiches.” Deutscher Wille, Aufbau und Wehr – 

Jahrbuch. 1937. 138–48, quoted in Schäfers 

(119). 

34. See Stefanie Schäfers’ Vom Werkbund zum 

Vierjahresplan (2001) for a detailed 

examination of the Schaffendes Volk (Productive 

People) exhibition. Schäfer outlines tensions 

between various organizing parties, along with 

the economic, aesthetic and propaganda 

dimensions to the event. 

35. Those present in the Deutsche Theater 

(Berlin) included Propaganda Minister Joseph 

Goebbels, prominent propagandist Albert 

Rosenberg, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, and 

Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, along 

with writers Emil Strauss and Wilhelm Schäfer, 


and conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Max 

von Schillings (Rühle 61). 

36. Hans Johst was a former soldier and 

playwright, whose popularity with the Nazi party 

resulted in his appointment as the president of 

the Reich Chamber of Literature in 1935. The 

play is dominated by a conflict between 

generations, with the younger characters such 

as the young August, exclaiming that “we young 

people, who stand by Schlageter do not stand 

by him because he is the last soldier of the 

world war, but because he is the first soldier of 

the Third Reich!!!” See Johst (85), quoted in 

Mosse (118). 

37. Die freudlose Gasse is the title of G.W. 

Pabst’s 1925 film, which was part of the 

“street film” genre in this period. See Anthony 

Sutcliffe’s chapter “The Metropolis in the 

Cinema” (1984). 

38. Due to the large numbers of visitors 

registered to attend the event, Düsseldorf 

residents were asked to provide free 

accommodation, along with donations of food 

and tobacco goods from large companies in the 

local area (Weidenhaupt 480). 

39. Friedrich Bubenden, ed., Deutschland muss 

leben: Gesammelte Briefe von Albert Leo 

Schlageter (1934), quoted in Mosse (112–16). 

40. “Programm,” Werag (Westdeutschlands 

Heimat-Funkzeitschrift). 8:21 (21 May 1933): 

33. School principals were given guidelines to 

make a speech prior to the broadcast, which 

should be staged as a special celebration. 

41. See Schlageter File, Slg. Personen 3796, 

Sammlung Rehse, Bayerisches 

Hauptstaatsarchiv (Munich), cited in 

Baird (37). 

42. Inge Scholl, “To be part of a Movement!” 

(1961), quoted in Mosse (271). 

43. See Paul Rothmund, Albert Leo Schlageter 

1923–1983: Der erste Soldat des 3. Reiches? 

Der Wanderer ins Nichts? Eine typische deutsche

Verlegenheit? Ein Held? (1983: 1), in 

Fuhrmeister (6). 

44. Letter from Interior Minister Frick to 

Prussian Minister Hermann Göring, 8 May 1933. 

BArch R43 I/218 Fiche 6 (266). The letter 

includes a program with the official events 

planned for the Schlageter commemoration. 

45. “Die Schlageterfeiern in Düsseldorf: Das 

endgültige Programm,” Ratinger Allgemeine 

Zeitung. Friday 26 May 1933. 62: 122 (7); 

Memo to Oberbürgermeister – Propagandaamt 

[Lord Mayor – Propaganda Department], 26 May 

1933. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf III 739, 27. 

46. This quote was published a few days later 

in the newspaper Der Angriff, 29 May 1933, 

cited in Baird (37). 

47. The SS (Schutzstaffel) was the name given 

to the elite paramilitary group, which developed 

out of the SA during the 1920s, under the 

direction of Heinrich Himmler. 

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ABSTRACT 


“You Can’t Flow Over This”: 

Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic 

Illusion 

“You Can’t Flow Over This”: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion 

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written by the avant-garde 

Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a poem written and performed by 

Ursula Rucker. By using the aural to disrupt expectations set up for us by the visual, 

each text shatters the visual, and reveals something important about the kinds of 

silence identification in the visual requires. Though radically different in form from 

each other – Kaufman’s letter was written to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963, 

and Rucker’s poem appears on a 1995 rap album – both artists turn to the ear to 

subvert the eye, using sound to disrupt fantasies about race, gender, and power in 

the larger social scenes in which their texts originally appeared. 

Introduction 

… Once open the books, you have to face 

the underside of everything you’ve loved – 

the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag 

even the best voices have had to mumble through, 

the silence burying unwanted children – 

women, deviants, witnesses – in desert sand. 

[…] 

and the ghosts – their hands clasped for centuries – 

Marisa Parham 

“You Can’t Flow Over This”: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion | 87

of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake, 

centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves; 

and we still have to stare into this absence 

of men who would not, women who could not, speak 

to our life – this still unexcavated hole 

called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world. 

– Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-one love poems, V” 

… the colors of an earthquake are black, brown, and beige, on the Ellington 

scale, such sweet thunder, there is a silent beat in between the drums. 

– Bob Kaufman, “Letter to the Editor.” 

To be made apparent, sound requires amplitude and therefore, by necessity, the 

silencing of other elements in any given field. This does not mean that silence is the 

opposite of sound, for moments we might experience or conceptualize as silent in 

fact signify our unawareness of other kinds of sound. As the musician and essayist 

John Cage discovered in his well-known anechoic chamber experience, our very acts 

of living produce sounds of which we spend a lifetime unaware: in a space of 

absolute silence, one would hear the circulation of fluids and the passing of electrical 

currents through one’s own body. Much as “invisible” does not mean “absent,” 

“silence” at worst names a failure on the part of an observer to fully apprehend a 

presence, even as that presence gives texture to, makes possible, the apparent and 

audible. Never an absence, silence is the rest and the interval. Filling the space 

around every recognizable sound, it is powerful and generative; it is. Without it, as the 

Beat poet Bob Kaufman tells us, “there is no drum, no beat” (Kaufman 97). 1 

Yet even as we know that in music theory silence is easily conceptualized as 

sound’s constitutive obversion, we also know that, vis-à-vis the social, “silence” almost 

always denotes oppression and suppression. In this essay, I bring together two texts, 

a letter to the editor written by the avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The 

Unlocking,” a poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker. By using the aural to disrupt 

expectations set up for us by the visual, their texts shatter the visual, and reveal 

something important about the kinds of silence identification in the visual requires. In 

Kaufman’s letter this disruption occurs between the written text, literally the words on 

the page, and its sound, the transformation of the written in the act of reading. 

Nothing is what it at first seems, and Kaufman uses this disruption to move his letter 

past the mimetic and into the performative – making his words do what they say rather 

than say what they do. Rucker, meanwhile, uses sound to decouple a spoken narrative 

from the images that it creates for its listener. By doing so, Rucker allows for the emergence 

of a figure not only excluded from the dominant discourse in which she appears, 

but who may not exist outside of that discourse, simultaneously absent and at the 

88 | Marisa Parham


center of the narrative. Though radically different in form, each text turns to the ear to 

subvert the eye, using sound to disrupt fantasies about race, gender and power. 

I. Beats 

In a recent interview, the artist Michael Bowen offers some insight into how 

Kaufman’s “beat” also connotes a rhythmic violence: 

Beat was a police term for the route that the patrolmen were assigned to walk everyday 

they worked. It is ironic that beat patrolmen and beat artists existed in a horrible 

opposition to each other […] The cop on the beat and the beat on the street, that’s one 

way of describing the world I lived in with […] Kaufman in 1955’s San Francisco. 

(Bowen) 

As a black street performer and rights activist who was often the target of police violence 

and state oppression, Kaufman – supposedly the original beatnik, and named 

so for his frequent run-ins with police – was absolutely familiar with the kinds of violences 

through which one might be silenced. Indeed, the passage in the epigraph 

above is quoted from a “letter to the editor” Kaufman sent to the San Francisco 

Chronicle in 1963, after returning from jail to find he had been evicted from his home 

and blacklisted. 

There is something particularly compelling in Kaufman’s decision to post his letter 

to a city newspaper. As an artist, Kaufman was committed to extemporaneity; much of 

his poetry survives today as collected transcriptions of impromptu recordings and jots 

on napkins. This time, however, Kaufman made an exception. Having been served 

notice, Kaufman returned the favor in-kind, and in this way his “letter” finds as much 

meaning in its performance of itself, as a message to a public forum, as it does in its 

content. With his letter, Kaufman registers his mistreatment at the hands of state 

authority. Making state violence visible to the masses was a critical strategy for social 

change during the Civil Rights movement, but it is important that even as Kaufman follows 

a formal process important to democratic discourse – making one’s voice heard, 

demanding recognition of one’s violation – he nevertheless refuses to make his notice 

in any language familiar to processes of registration or documentation. 

There is a tension between its peripatetic interiority and its nonetheless declarative 

participation in public discourse, a discourse courted by virtue of the text’s 

status as a letter and also in its references to popular contemporary texts. His 

letter references Duke Ellington’s masterwork, “Black, Brown, and Beige,” resonates 

with e.e. cummings’s imagist poem “l(a… ” and names Allan Sillitoe’s 1958 The 

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. 2 Though vastly different in form and execution, 

all three texts work against perceived ideas of representation, each articulating 

representation as only possible in representations that are performed as presentations 

of the self per se. Yet even though each text might be understood as generated 

in contradistinction to any mainstream, each text nonetheless broadened the 


conceptual field in which it originally appeared, through that same resistance: 

Ellington’s work excavates an ignored African American history; cummings’s poem creates 

a picture of its own meaning; and the plot of Sillitoe’s text culminates in a statesponsored 

runner’s refusal to finish the race that will win him freedom from prison. 

All three texts reflect what Kaufman refers to in his letter as “oneliness”: 

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is due to the oneliness of the Long 

Distance Runner, that uniqueness that is the Long Distance Runner’s alone, and only 

his. The loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is the only reason for the Long 

Distance Runner’s existence. (Kaufman 96) 

In its use of sound, Kaufman’s letter offers a minimally penetrable interiority. In its 

first sentence, the heaviness of “loneliness” generates a regressive assimilation, as 

it seeps “loneliness” into “oneliness,” thus making it difficult not to sound oneliness 

as only-ness. This reinforces the graphic attachment of oneliness to loneliness, even 

while it sonically resonates with alone and only. “Uniqueness,” meanwhile, sonically 

and graphically references the previous terms in its suffix, but also snaps the tone, 

offering a center-point for the sentence’s chiastic structure, and thereby foregrounding 

the potentially mispronounced, but also now conceptually-enlarged oneliness. By 

leaking possible meanings across discrete words, sound accomplishes something in 

this paragraph that writing alone cannot. It brings a sense of the melancholy in 

Kaufman’s assertion, a sense that, even as the runner experiences oneliness – this 

unity of self – his peace is nonetheless haunted. 

The running that brings the runner to oneliness can never get the runner away 

from loneliness, which means that there is a disjuncture between the act’s accomplishment 

and its inauguration, insofar as oneliness is technically the opposite of 

being alone or only. However, out of this disjuncture emerges a new possibility for 

meaning and language. His later observation that “[t]he colors of an earthquake are 

black, brown, and beige,” speaks to this upheaval, “sweet thunder” though it may be. 

Out of the chasm emerge newly recognized possibilities for recognition, reception for 

the silent beat: 

That silent beat makes the drumbeat, it makes the drum, it makes the beat. Without 

it there is no drum, no beat. It is not the beat played by who is beating the drum. His is 

a noisy loud one, the silent beat is beaten by who is not beating on the drum, his silent 

beat drowns out all the noise, it comes before and after every beat, you hear it in beatween. 

(Kaufman 97) 

By the end of the letter, which might be read inductively, the beat emerges, infiltrating 

the surrounding language. Kaufman’s writing of between as “beatween” offers a 

revelation. Much as the colors of social upheaval would be brown, black, and beige, 

Kaufman’s ostensible neologism has not introduced anything that was not present 

before; he has only excavated a prior, albeit buried, reality. Kaufman’s letter displays 

an important ease of movement between sound and text as the graphic “beatween” 

90 | Marisa Parham


only makes the passage’s beat, its rhythm, more apparent. The beat, as Kaufman 

has it, is exactly what a between is, a space of meaning. As Amor Kohli has pointed 

out, “The ‘silent beat’ exists in the third space between the heard and not-heard; it 

is the ‘guerrilla action.’ It is also a constitutive element in the repertoire of the jazz 

musician, part of what Robert O’Meally calls ‘games of color and space’” (Kohli 

180). With his letter, Kaufman demonstrates how the silent and invisible might be 

understood as energizing the very systems of meaning from which they have been 

ostensibly (not) removed. 

II. Fronts 

In his lifetime, Kaufman experienced silence in the most empowering ways, in poetry 

and in his silent political protests, and also in its most sinister applications, from his 

repeated stints in solitary confinement to the relative silence surrounding his contributions 

to the Beat movement, jazz poetics, and as a critical ancestor to the spoken 

poetry movement. For the remainder of this essay, I turn to a listening of Ursula 

Rucker’s “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem that appears at the end of The Roots’ 

1995 rap album, Do You Want More??!?. Rucker has some important resonances with 

Kaufman, of whom she is an heir. But I particularly hear this resonance in her commitment 

to speaking experiences that would otherwise go unnamed, and also in her 

poem’s manipulation of the graphic and sonic to create the disruptions that make 

possible such moments of naming. 

At its release, Do You Want More??!? met with immense critical and a fair amount 

of commercial success, becoming a mainstay on college and independent station 

playlists. Its status then as an underground alternative project, and its status today 

as a rap classic, is mainly due to two innovations that blurred boundaries between 

rap music and other kinds of black performance – The Roots’ use of live instrumentation 

and Ursula Rucker’s spoken-word contribution to the album, and each of these 

choices made important cultural interventions. Rucker’s poems appear on several of 

The Roots’ albums. They are invariably about barely speakable acts – gang bangs, 

child sex abuse, incest – and her representations of such acts are graphic, some 

might even say excessive or pornographic, for instance her portrayal of an infant 

being raped. Cinematic, each poem tells a story in graphic detail, often through a 

strangely distant, yet also deeply intimate third-person narration. The eeriness of the 

narration comes out of a primary contrast between the formal cool of Rucker’s even 

and smooth delivery and the explicit and often gruesome details that make up the 

content of each poem. This explicitness also works to signal the listener away from 

the pornographic. As Suzanne Bost has argued, Rucker’s focus on the material 

details of exploitation removes “any pleasure out of the spectacle by rendering it 

hyper-real, disturbing audiences by forcing them to witness these shocking images in 

vivid detail” (Bost 15). 


“The Unlocking” begins with a skit, a telephone conversation between two men, on 

whom we are eavesdropping. Skits are common to rap albums, and by beginning her 

poem this way, Rucker lures her listeners into a certain mode of listening, asking them 

to expect business as usual: maybe a joke, maybe a rant, maybe a scene from a movie. 

And indeed, the skit that sets the scene for “The Unlocking” is made to sound like any 

other. Its diction and pacing are intentionally unremarkable; it’s just some dudes talking. 

Their voices are tired, if not vaguely bored, until the opportunity for sex – which here 

seems nothing more than something to do – revitalizes them. This vitalization is 

particularly striking in light of the absolute vagueness in which the subject of their 

conversation is cloaked: 

[phone dialed and rings] 

Friend: Hello? 

Caller: Yo who dis? 

Friend: Yo this [edited out] 

Caller: Yo whattup man? 

Friend: Yo whassup dude? 

Caller: This the Black Ill [muttering] you know what I’m sayin’ 

Like a black barred face on a newscast, the editing out of the friend’s name contributes 

to the skit’s reality-effect. The muttering around the Caller’s name, which is 

not edited out, elicits suspicion. The conversation continues: 

Friend: Oh whassup G? 

Caller: Y’know, yo 

Friend: What? 

Caller: We down in the studio yo 

Friend: Word? 

Caller: Yo we got a jawn 

Friend: Yo, is she live? 

Caller: Yeah she’s live 

Friend: Sup wit her? 

Caller: Some jawn I use to talk to … Sometimes I used to knock off 

Friend: Word? how she be swingin’? 

92 | Marisa Parham

Caller: Oh yeah she’s swingin’ like that? y’know it’s on! [laughter] 

Friend: Oh WORD? 

Caller: I called a couple other heads and shit y’know 

Friend: Aight, who else who else – who else widdit? 

Caller: [laughing] 

Friend: I mean she widdit LIKE THAT? 

Caller: Yeah you know! 

Friend: Ain’t no bullshit? 

Caller: The whole Reservoir Dog squad n shit, we gon’ be eight deep 

[…] 3 

It has become common for groups of friends or colleagues to refer to themselves with 

names taken from popular culture, in this instance Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent 1995 

Reservoir Dogs, which is revered in some hip-hop communities as sort of an ultimate film 

about men living lives of violence. Here, Rucker’s use of the film citation situates the 

recording studio, which is where the men in Rucker’s skit are meeting, as a homosocial 

space – a space referenced toward men and used to consolidate relationships between 

them. In Reservoir Dogs, the character’s homosociality is mediated by violence, and it is 

therefore not unfair to imagine that this violence will make an appearance in this text as 

well, despite the jocularity with which the skit begins. Again, it is important that this conversation 

sound patently normal, that it be no different than one you might hear in a skit 

common to any rap album. Such skits often skirt boundaries of playfulness and excess, 

but ultimately end in joke or non sequitur. In hindsight, I imagine that in my first hearing 

of this segment, being jaded and familiar with rap album conventions, I would have soldiered 

on, at best bemused, very likely annoyed, and, probably, barely listening. 

But then something might have changed, for at the end of the conversation, the 

“Like NOW?/Yeah come through now!” nags. The immediacy of the statement makes 

it suddenly more difficult, for me at least, to imagine when the joke will arrive. 

However, almost as soon as the suspicion sets in, I realize that I have been tricked, 

for what I am faced with is something altogether different. It is a poem, unexpected 

in its form and sound and delivered in a woman’s voice – the first female voice heard 

after almost two hours of rapping and talking: 

I the voyeur, 

Peer, 

as she begins her, 

Ritual. 



Paying sexual ties for few and untrue 

Words of admiration, 

Translation: 

Sucker ass 

lines 

of trash 

With the narrator’s referral to herself as “I, the voyeur,” Rucker immediately forefronts 

matters of viewing and performance in the poem. And by narrating the scene we ourselves 

are waiting to hear, waiting to “peer” into, the listener’s own voyeurism is also 

made apparent. The authority in her voice reinforces the sonic shift between the skit 

and the poem, drawing our attention to a silence that by necessity would have gone 

otherwise unamplified, and therefore unacknowledged. Once it is heard, however, we 

are asked to understand how such silences trace the underbelly of the kinds of 

power, particularly gender power, that rap often asks its audience to celebrate. As a 

sonic intervention, “The Unlocking” reminds the album’s audience of everything they 

don’t hear, on that particular album and in popular music in general. 

Rucker’s introduction of narration into the scene frames the sex act at the center 

of the narrative. This framing in turn sets up the narrator’s description of the sex act 

as a ritual, as a performance. Referring to the woman’s act as a ritual, further distances 

us from her, and we are not alone in this distance, for the men in the scene 

also never see her outside of her ritualized position, can never “quite see above/her 

mound.” Further, her silence in the text might be understood as analogous to others’ 

inability to see past her use to them: “a pound of flesh is all she was,/no name no 

face or even voice.” Spoken near the end of the poem, this line reinforces her silent 

effacement, which was first established for us during the opening skit, in its reference 

to her as a “jawn.” “Jawn,” a Philadelphia corruption of the more commonly 

used “joint,” is an absolutely generic and all purpose slang-term, used as easily for 

a pair of shoes as it would be for a random woman on the street. 

Through her use of a narrator, Rucker splits her listener’s attention between that 

narration and the scene being narrated, and a closer consideration of this split offers 

some insight into the poem’s dual allegiances to sound and image. Our “watching” 

of the unnamed woman, locked into her ritual of sex and degradation, is both a result 

of Rucker’s poetic style and also of the great prevalence to the portrayal of such 

scenes in rap music and in American popular culture in general. Accordingly, “watching” 

becomes the best term for our observation of the poem’s action because the 

poem generates meaning via its evocation of other such episodes of watching female 

bodies in sexual action. What makes the scene harrowing is not the men’s bluster – 

their Reservoir Dog self-aggrandizement and the hyper-sexualized nature of their 

gang-bang party – it is that this scene is absolutely generic. (We might think back 

94 | Marisa Parham

here to the boredom in the men’s conversation at the beginning of Rucker’s text.) The 

terms of the scene precede the scene, thus revealing alongside its material violence 

the possibility that women’s lives have no meaning outside of that violence: 

Bend over bitch, you know this is what you were born for; 

to dig those soft and lotioned knees into the floor – 

and take it in 

that sweetly spread ass 

like a real pro whore. 


There is an incongruity here between Rucker’s description of the woman’s “soft and 

lotioned knees,” which connotes attention to the self and care for the body, and the 

cruelty of the speaker’s demands on that body. Further, his command, that she take 

it like “a real pro whore,” might be read to suggest that she is not actually a whore. 

This is hinted in several ways throughout the poem, and is supported especially in 

the poem’s opening claim that she trades sex for words (not money); in the later revelation 

that she had previously been in love with one of the men; and also in the fact 

that the caller in the skit refers to her as a girl he “used to talk to,” “talk to” being 

slang for dating (and itself in juxtaposition to “knock off,” which merely suggests 

casual sex). 

The possibility that the woman performs this ritual/service for love or “admiration” 

changes the dynamics of consent in this scenario and thus brings into question 

the skit’s insistence that she is a “swinger,” that she is down “LIKE THAT” (my 

emphasis). Early in the poem, then, we are introduced into violence, a violence we are 

made to understand is cloaked from its perpetrators: 

Her subsequent screams seemed to praise 

Sent messages of pleasure and pain to his fuck-tainted brain 

“Fuck-tainted” signifies the blindness and deafness of the perpetrator. It could also, 

however, be understood as signifying the men’s weakness and delusion – though it is 

vitally important to understand that this second interpretation is only made possible 

by the narrator’s presence. Her ability to speak about their act renders their fuck 

impotent because it reveals as a front the narrative frame they have built-up around 

that fuck. 

This invalidation is a function both of the content of her critique and also of the 

sonic impact of her female voice. In this sense, the narrator not only peers in on the 

scene, but, more importantly she is soon revealed as a peer to the woman at the center 

of her narration. Further, because our gaze is aligned with that of the men, and 

because that gaze has been revealed as blind – insofar as the listener knows that 


the men cannot hear Rucker’s voice – we must therefore join them in their unwitting 

role reversal. Unlike them, however, we see ourselves being watched, even as we, 

fuck-tainted, are powerless. Where the men only hear silence, in the sense that they 

are caught up in the acoustic illusion by which they only hear their own fantasies in 

her screams, where they have silence we, the listeners, have – hear – critique. As a 

condition of our growing consciousness of our role in the scene, we are allowed a 

new perspective on the scenario: 

But her screams masked laughs at his dumb ass 

As he quicker comes, 

then Third and Fourth One 

just as dumb 

Invite themselves to join in 

“Just as dumb”: by this point the listener will also come to realize that the music is 

specifically accompanying the narrator’s perspective, as shifts in the musical track 

join the narrator in her mockery of the men, at times offering shadows of movie 

sound effects that emphasize the narrator’s commentary. The effect of this alignment 

is to further invalidate any possibility for the audience to hear the scenario as 

being that which the men imagine it to be. As the listener is moved more fully into the 

aural, they are left in the visual. Again, this is not to say that the men do not hear anything, 

but rather that what they hear are sounds of themselves vis-à-vis their own fantasy 

of the scene in which they are participating. Throughout the poem we hear 

echoes of the scene as the men hear it, as we would hear if we were not privy to the 

narration. Faint and deeply backgrounded, these sounds of moaning, groaning, and 

laughter are all sounds we would expect to hear, if our experience of the scene had 

been otherwise. 

Caught up in the visual fantasy of sexual violence and its meaning, “fuck-tainted,” 

the men are deaf, however, to what is really happening. This ignorance also renders 

them effectively dumb, as Rucker recuperates her ersatz victim by making it clear 

that she has been released from any emotional relationship to the men’s words: 

So one goes North, the other South 

To sanctified places where in-house spirits 

will later wash away all traces, 

of their ill-spoken words and complacent faces 

Much as the woman’s body will easily wash away any trace of the men’s arrival, of 

their “ill-spoken words,” and their “lewd, aggrandized sexual endeavors,” the narrative 

has clearly turned. The fact of the eight men, initially menacing in their sheer 

96 | Marisa Parham


quantity, have been now reduced to a series of jokes. By the time the next man, number 

five, approaches, the frame has completely slipped away: 

but suddenly, he, – stops mid-thrust. 

[pager rings/narration pauses for a beat] 

Seems she nameless to cuz, 

got his stuff in a death cunt clutch 

He fast falls from the force of her tight pussy punch 

Just like the rest of that sorry ass bunch 

Now here comes Six ready to add his inactive shit to the mix 

Here, the ringing of the pager, which echoes the ringing phone at the beginning of the 

skit, breaks a narrative frame already giving way under the weight of the narrator’s 

growing sarcasm. 

Having now fully enlisted the sympathies of the audience, Rucker/the narrator 

asks us to join in on the joke, as each man’s approach is made more comical than 

the last. This begins in the stanza above with the almost comic-book sensibility of the 

woman’s genital counterattack, and continues into the next encounter with the narrator’s 

continued evisceration of each man’s self-avowed sexual prowess: 

So he proceeds to poke and prod 

with clumsy finger and wack sex slinger 

“Condoms make me last longer,” 

Wrong. 

‘Cause her, motions of snatch, however detached, from the situation 

cause his pre pre PRE-ejaculation 

Here, there is also a shift in the back track, as we faintly hear a man coming to 

orgasm quickly and without control. After this last set of sounds, this track further 

recedes, not to re-emerge until the end of the poem. This audible marker of the narrator’s 

growing authority also further works to improve our vision of the woman having 

sex, to consolidate our sense of her power over the men. As the narration gains 

momentum through its doubled assonance (“snatch”/“detached;” “situation”/ 

“ejaculation”), the stanza’s comic energy is released in the description of the weakened 

man’s failure to complete his act over her. 

The acceleration brought on by this rhythm, and the humor it reinforces, also 

breaks down some of the distance between the narrator and the scene she is narrating, 

which is particularly interesting in relation to the narrator’s insistence on the 

detachment of the woman having sex. Speaking of this detachment is a dangerous 

move, for much of the narrative hinges on the woman not in fact being a whore. But 


Rucker is careful to signal other ways of understanding this moment. The most likely 

alternative is made audible in the lessening formality of her narrator’s diction: in 

the stanza above we hear it in the “‘Cause her motions,” and in the following one 

we hear it in the “she just wastin’” (my emphases). These moments briefly bring the 

narration closer to gossip or shit-talking – a woman’s blues remedy to the men’s selfaggrandizement: 

It seems she just wastin’ 

good pussy and time on dudes like Number Seven 

who ain’t learned their lesson 

By giving the woman agency over a part of her, along with her mouth, that has otherwise 

been taken over in the narrative as a space of sexual domination, the reference 

here to “good pussy” begins the work of recuperating any suspicion about the previously 

noted detachment. Like her time, there is a sense here that her sex is hers to 

give. Rucker further develops this sensibility in the next lines, which articulate the 

woman as divine, powerful, and self-possessed: 

He wants to enter the flesh, divine, 

by dropping a kind of semi-sweet line 

“Your honey hole so fine and mile deep; I’m gonna leap 

into you like an ocean do you right and make your head spin” 

So he jumped in and then, 

he drowned 

Got lost and found in her tart canal 

The poem approaches surreality in its graphic and ribald humor, made more striking 

in its contrast to the scenes of degradation with which the poem begins. 

By the end of Reservoir Dogs, each of the men is revealed as fundamentally inept, 

and it is their ineptitude that seals their violent deaths. One cannot help but wonder 

if this crossed Rucker’s mind as she wrote the violent end to her poem, when the 

woman, now armed, makes literal the power her narrator has been exercizing over the 

men the entire time. The previously silent and potentially defiled lips part, and the power 

of her speech act is as much figured in the cool and style of her violence as it is in 

the gun itself: 

98 | Marisa Parham 

So poised, she rises 

Phoenix from the flame 

Finally bored with their feeble fuck games 

She smooth reaches behind her and takes straight aim


at eight shriveled up cocks with a fully loaded glock 

Parts lips, not expressly made for milking dicks 

and then, she speaks: 

“Your shrieks of horror bring me bliss I must admit 

The thought that I could shred your tips with eight quick flips 

excites me, 

see y’all fuck with the pussy, but I fuck with your minds 

Lack of soul and respect is the crime 

This … was a set up … 

now tell me what – what’s my name?” 

[gun cocks] 

An exercise in cool, Rucker’s poem ends with two references, one visual and one 

sonic. The reach behind visually references Pam Grier at the end of the movie Foxy 

Brown, when Foxy returns to avenge her boyfriend’s death. In the film, Foxy poses as 

a prostitute to infiltrate the villain’s stronghold. At the end, she enters their domain, 

seemingly unarmed. When a fight erupts, she reaches back into her Afro and pulls 

out a hidden gun, persevering over the pimp and drug lord. The poem’s second reference 

is in the woman’s final line, “now tell me what – what’s my name?” The line 

references one of hip-hop’s most common and well-known strategies for self-assertion 

over narratives and the listeners thereof. The question brings its speaker to the 

center of any narrative, and as well dares anyone to speak in the same narrative. 

The question is always rhetorical; if one were unsure about answering, the cocking of 

the gun would confirm silence as a choice. 


Notes 

1. In “ ‘A Hard Rain,’ Looking to Bob Kaufman,” 

Aldon Lynn Nielsen has a nice piece that reads 

Kaufman’s “silent beat” against Miles Davis’ 

“In a Silent Way,” noting how the “occasional 

silences” of Davis’ drummer, Tony Williams, on 

“It’s about That Time,” “set the stage for the 

fuller use of his drum set that comes later in 

the piece, while at the same time providing a 

jazz musician’s rhetorical underscoring of the 

composition’s title; the piece is about that time. 

Kaufman’s silent beat that comes before and 

after every beat asserts itself in the spaces 

between the words of his letter, as his periods 

of silence and speaking presence punctuated 

Bibliography 

Bost, Suzanne. “‘Be deceived if ya wanna be 

foolish’: (Re)constructing Body, Genre, and 

Gender in Feminist Rap.”Postmodern Culture 

12.1 (2001). 

Bowen, Michael. “Bob Kaufman the Beat Saint 

of San Francisco, Narrated to R.W. Bruch.” Ed. 

R.W. Bruch. Stockholm Sweden 2006. 

 

Bruch.” Ed. R.W. Bruch. Stockholm Sweden. 

2006. . 

cummings, e. e. “l (a…).” Selected Poems. Ed. 

Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright, 1994. 

Ellington, Duke, and Mahalia Jackson. Black, 

Brown and Beige. Columbia, 1958. 

Foxy Brown (USA: Jack E. Hill 1974). 

100 | Marisa Parham 

the life of San Francisco through the decades, 

as the silence surrounding him punctuates 

Beat histories even now” (Nielsen 137–38). 

2. Sillitoe’s text was also released as a Free 

Cinema movement film in 1962. It is unclear 

which is being referenced in Kaufman’s letter. 

3. Lines are my transcription. “Friend” and 

“Caller” are my designations. Brackets 

throughout mark my editorial comments on the 

aural text. 

Kaufman, Bob. “[Letter to the Editor].” Cranial 

Guitar: Selected Poems. Ed. Gerald Nicosia. 

Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House P, 1996. 

Kohli, Amor. “Saxophones and Smothered 

Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for 

Redemption.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 165–82. 

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. “‘A Hard Rain,’ Looking to 

Bob Kaufman.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 135–45. 

RESERVOIR DOGS (USA: Quention Tarantino 1993). 

Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “Twenty One Love 

Poems.” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: 

Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism. Eds. 

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. 

New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. 

Rucker, Ursula. “The Unlocking.” The Roots – Do 

You Want More?!!!??! Geffen Records, 1995. 

Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long- 

Distance Runner. New York: Knopf, 1960.

Incantations: Gender and 

Identity

ABSTRACT 


Reciting: The Voice of the 

Other 

Mahmut Mutman 

Reciting: The Voice of the Other 

The voice seems to have a unique place in Islam and especially in the Qur’anic recitation. 

Through a discussion of Levinas’s concept of God, and Althusser’s theory of interpellation, 

it is argued that the monotheistic religious experience has to do with a hearing 

of the voice of the other, which involves a struggle between an inaudible noise or voice 

and its control in a rational sentence. Further, since the Qur’an’s first command is 

“recite” and reciting is a fundamental method of learning the sacred text, the event of 

hearing gains a different dimension in Islam. As the Moroccan psychoanalyst Abdelkebir 

Khatibi shows, the prophet Muhammad’s sacrifice of his own voice or signature, creates 

a singular idiom in which a lost writing or voice encrypts the sacred text. The noise of a 

lost voice continues to haunt and encrypt the sacred word. I posit this voice as feminine 

and question the patriarchal foundations of the Islamic and monotheistic narratives. 

Introduction 

The last two decades witnessed a rapidly growing literature on religion and the religious 

in the humanities. With only a few exceptions, the usual reference for religion 

is either Christianity or, more infrequently, Judaism. There is a consistent pattern, 

which makes the Judaeo-Christian tradition the instance or the site of an analysis of 

the religious. Such a pattern demonstrates that we are living in an intellectual and 

political culture that could be described as Eurocentric. This is further reinforced by 

the marginalization of other religions, including Islam, in the departments of so-called 

Reciting: The voice of the Other | 103

area studies – a specialization that requires the learning of languages. I do not have 

to remind one of the political world in which we live today, a world in which two Muslim 

countries are under occupation and Islam is other-ed in ways that resemble the anti- 

Semitic aggression of the 1930s. It is rather sad to see that political intelligence as 

well as scholarly learning is still fascinated with the so-called “universal form of the 

subject” that is found in Christianity. 1 

If we are speaking of questions of sound, voice, or noise today, it is difficult not to 

hear the distant and noisy voice of Islam. Although this voice is brought nearer to us 

in the prime time news as the event that interrupts our normality, it is also distant for 

the same reason, as a sign of disturbing otherness. Bearded and armed men in 

strange garb, women under seclusion, visions of the desert and dust, bombs and 

ruins… In the face of these familiarly strange images, which must be called “strategic” 

in Michel de Certeau’s sense (35–36), one is tempted to render the voice of 

Islam intelligibly audible. But does this temptation not belong to the same media, 

which, in its scheduling and production of “rated” audiences, produces informative 

documentaries involving native voices as well as the prime time news, and also to 

the higher education system with its benevolent area studies departments and 

research institutes? It is time to remind ourselves of Edward Said’s fine warning that 

orientalism will not blow away once the truth about it is understood (6). Speaking of 

audibility, that which is audible is so because it has a proper form, free of noise. But 

what if we find in the very heart of the so-called true and proper Islam, of that which 

is proper to Islam, a constant preoccupation with and therefore an inescapable failure 

of audibility itself? A lesson for the subject, perhaps. 

The Primal Word 

As a revealed religion, Islam itself begins with Muhammad’s hearing of the voice of 

the other, the angel Gabriel who gave a command: “Read, in the name of your Lord!” 

(Surah, 96, Verse 1) 2 The first meaning of the Arabic word “iqra” is “read.” It also means 

“recite” and it is often translated as to “read,” to “recite” or sometimes to “proclaim.” 

I suggest that we hear the word as to “read/recite” in order to be able to link this primal 

scene of Islam with the Islamic practice of learning the Qur’an by reciting and chanting 

it. The proper word for the latter practice is “tajweed” (“recitation”). Reciting or reading 

the Qur’an is an essential aspect of the pedagogy of the Qur’an course, which 

produces the Muslim subject. 

Although the command refers the addressee to a text in the making, can it also be 

heard as an instance of Islam’s acceptance of previous religious monotheisms and of 

the Abrahamic tradition in general, the voice of the Other as One and the Same? 3 In 

the linguistic register, this is an example of performative contradiction. The command 

implies a text that is both there and is yet going to be produced; it refers to an uncanny 

“before” that is going to be performed in the future. In the historical register, the text 

104 | Mahmut Mutman


signified by the command is not just in the past, but it will have to be invented. But it 

is also true that, having many references to the previous texts of Old and New 

Testament, the Qur’an places itself firmly in the biblical grand narrative. Interestingly, 

in spite of its unconditional acceptance of Abrahamic narrative, something like the 

kind of conflictual exchange between Judaism’s “Law” and Christianity’s “Grace,” that 

is, something like Islam’s differential place vis-à-vis the other revealed religions, has 

never been granted to the last religion in the historical narrative of ethical monotheism. 

It is as if its word of revelation had no value in the history and economy of revelation, 

as if it did not read or did not even know how to read the biblical narrative. 

In the beginning then, a reading as reciting, a re-citing, a repetition or doubling, not 

one but two words or voices: the one who commands and another who reads. Attending 

to the imperative of this command, I suggest that we read/recite it as referring to an 

uncanny “before” which is demanded to be performed and given shape in the future as 

a reading or book. It is a pure command, which recites itself as one recites it. 

Levinas: Event and Transcendence 

How are we going to read or hear this command, the voice of the Other? Emmanuel 

Levinas’s philosophy has become a model in the interpretation of the revelation of the 

Other. Rather than offering a detailed presentation of Levinas’s readings of Descartes’s 

Third Meditation (Totality and Infinity, 48–52) or his analyses of the revelation or placing 

of the Other in the Same (God, Death and Time, 121–224), I would like to offer a 

brief critical account of his approach through Lyotard’s attentive reading in his 

Differend (110–18). Lyotard’s reading emphasizes that what is at stake in Levinas’s 

argument is an announcement or address which is violent, traumatic and expropriating 

in character. Its precise nature is that it expels the self from the instance of 

addressor to that of addressee. The dispossessed self will then try to take hold of 

itself by forming another sentence which enables it to frame and overcome the dispossession. 

It will re-gain the position of the sender so that it will be able to legitimize 

(or refuse) the disrupting command of the other. But the second sentence 

cannot put an end to the prior event of dispossession which has a force to prescribe 

prescriptions; it is only an attempt to master it, and in mastering it, it forgets what 

Levinas calls the transcendence of the Other. It is cognitive and descriptive, articulating 

a truth, prescription described, whereas the first one has a pure proscriptive 

force, taking hold of the self prior to the possibility of description. The first sentence, 

which Levinas calls ethical, immediately creates an obligation. It is this strange, prior 

ethical obligation that is forgotten in the second cognitive and descriptive sentence. 

The voice of the other is heard before it is listened to. It is something that happens 

to the self or the subject. But, if the subject transforms itself from being an 

addressee to an addressor in the face of a violent expropriation, what leads us to 

assume that there is a voice addressing or interpellating me in a sentence? Is it not 


the self’s attempt to produce a cognitive mastery, which has to take the form of a 

sentence, and clear the prior noise by giving the violent force of event a description, 

attributing it to a subject as Other and turning it into a command or law? 

In the trajectory of Levinas’s thought, it is possible to follow a movement from the 

alterity of what he called the “there is” in his early work on the human face and on 

the voice of the Other in his later works. This is important because, in early Levinas, 

the “there is” (the pure event of existing that is left after everything is reverted into 

nothing) makes itself felt through a feeling of the “world in pieces” or “a world turned 

upside down” (Existence and Existents 21), that is clearly an overturning event. 

Further, what makes itself felt in this way is audible for Levinas. But this is a strange 

audibility, quite out of ordinary indeed. The “there is” is not only “the impersonal field 

of forces of existing” (Time and the Other 46), which “no longer composed a world” 

(Existence and Existents 59) but also it is “a rumbling silence,” “something resembling 

what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness 

were full, as if the silence were noise,” […] “a noise returning after every 

negation of this noise,” and an unstoppable music (Ethics and Infinity 48, 49). 

In Levinas’s later work however, this overturning event, the dispossessing force of 

the event of existing, is given meaning and intelligibility by a concept of the transcendence 

of the Other. 4 This is Levinas’ criticism of ontology in favor of ethics as primary 

philosophy. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s follows Descartes’s demonstration 

of the transcendence of the infinite with respect to the I, while this is at the same 

time related with the notion of the face of the Other in conversation. The face 

“bring[s] us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung (sense giving)” (Totality 

and Infinity 50). In his later series of the lectures, God, Death and Time, Levinas’s 

search for a God outside of what Heidegger calls onto-theology is indeed a search for 

“a new model of intelligibility” (137). The placing of the idea of the infinite in us is 

called “heteronomy,” “inspiration,” or “prophecy which is not some kind of genius but 

the very spirituality of the spirit” (142). He emphasizes that the meaning and intelligibility 

of the transcendence of the Other is of a unique kind. It is before cognition or 

knowledge (211); and it is not that of a content, or of the “Said” of discourse, but of 

“Saying”: escaping both objectification and dialogue, God is “a third person or Illeity” 

whose “command, to which, as a subject, I am subjected” and which “comes from 

the understanding that I hear in my Saying alone” (203 – my emphasis). Levinas further 

argues that the word “God” is an excessive utterance that prohibits itself and 

does not allow its meaning to be conceived in terms of presence or being. This is why 

its thematization in a cognitive and descriptive sentence cannot erase its proscriptive 

force, as Lyotard underlines. Yet such a prohitibion, i.e. this sense of a God prohibiting 

its own being, is still tied to meaning and intelligibility by Levinas. If the Other 

is incommensurable in Levinas’s philosophy, Lacoue-Labarthe is quite right in describing 

this as the idea of a “vertical incommensurability” (“Talks” 30). In so far as the 

106 | Mahmut Mutman


voice of God is understood in its transcendence, it must have intelligible form. With 

this passage from the “there is” to the Other as God, what is at stake now is no 

longer simply an overturning and expropriating event which decomposes the world; 

on the contrary, it is the promise or word of order, even if delayed or prohibited. One 

hears and does not hear a “rumbling silence,” but how can one miss a command? 

Are we then supposed to say that, contrary to such an approach, the originary 

expropriating event is not linguistic, that it should have nothing to do with language? 

Rather than taking a quick decision, I am reminded of Althusser’s reading of Spinoza’s 

theory of prophecy: “[…] these incredible prophets” Althusser writes, are “men who 

climb the mountain at the summons of the Lord but who only understand in the thunder 

crash and lightning flash some partially incomprehensible words” (10). For 

Althusser it is the community who tells them what they have heard, and all understand 

except “the imbecile Daniel” (who represents resistance to ideology as internal to it). 

As a volunteering imbecile, I cannot not hear that the event of “interpellation,” the socalled 

voice of the other, is never without a good deal of noise which the hearers or 

readers are bound to clear up. Can we think of the citationary structure of monotheism 

as noise, between thunder crash and incomprehensible words, supposedly in the 

uncanny and undecidable passage between nature and language? Citation, recitation, 

quote or mention are perhaps indissociable from noise. And the question has always 

been: how to avoid it? It is in this sense that the self tries to master the violent event 

of the hearing of the other in a cognitive and descriptive sentence. 

This mastery has to do with the composition of a form, that is supposed to clear 

up the reciting throat. Its articulation can be found in the following account by everyone’s 

sophisticated orientalist Louis Massignon, who is, unlike Althusser, faithfully 

committed to the originary purity of the voice and vision: 

The experience of inspiration begins in Islam with the “internal upheavals” felt by 

Muhammad at the beginning of his prophetic mission. According to Aisha, the prophet 

of Islam first had a vision of isolated, luminuous letters (several examples are cited at 

the head of certain chapters in the Qur’an) and simultaneously an audition of isolated 

sounds; the letters corresponded to the sounds, as with the child learning to spell. Then 

the prophet, having learned to spell, was enabled to recite inspired sentences. They 

were “breathed” into him by the Spirit, Ruh, a vague word which can designate the 

angel as well as God or the Prophet himself. (74–75, my emphasis) 

“Internal upheavals,” i.e. the opening of an unknown, noisy and destabilizing 

“before” in the event of hearing is immediately lost in such confident belief in the perfect 

correspondance between letter and sound, in the clarity of meaning as vision 

and the child as the metaphor of an innocent beginning. Recitation is conceived 

within a restricted economy of mimesis, that is to say, as recitation of a pure and 

clear originary form, of an audible or readable sentence, that has to forget the violence 

of hearing, its strangely obligatory and interpellative force. 


Haunting: The Lost Book 

As an alternative to Massignon, I follow Gayatri Spivak’s advice and offer the 

Morrocan psychoanalyst and writer Abdelkebir Khatibi’s fascinating reading of 

Muhammad’s biography in his essay “Frontiers.” 5 Khatibi’s problem is Freud’s dismissal 

of Islam as an “abbreviated repetition” of Judaism, an imitation, which lacks 

a “murder” in Moses the Man and the Monotheistic Religion. According to Khatibi, 

Freud, who was a professional outsider, showed that there is a borrowing of names 

in the origin: the founder of Judaism and of the monotheistic law, Moses, was an outsider, 

an Egyptian. 6 However, in discarding Islam as a mere repetition of Judaism, 

Freud turned it into a frontier of his theorization. Khatibi’s aim is to use the singular 

adventure of Islam as a “frontier position” by turning a psychoanalytic account of 

Islamic imaginary into a problem for psychoanalytic narrative. 

Developing an original psychoanalytic account, which draws upon the prophet’s 

biography (just like Freud did for Moses), Khatibi asks how Muhammad the orphan, 

the one without proper family romance, was to maintain the proper name. As the revelation 

in the form of the letter was illegible to Muhammad (though legible to his wife 

Khadija), he had to sacrifice his signature, “gave it as offering to Allah” (17). 7 The message 

arrives through the figure of an apparition who speaks, ordering Muhammad to 

recite it, to read it without understanding it. Khatibi shows that there are two voices 

who are unified, according to a symmetrical and circular logic, to transmit the same 

message. Allah the addressor is the other voice of Muhammad, whereas the addressee 

is Muhammad the prophet as recognized by witnesses. Muhammad occupies sometimes 

one place sometimes the other. (The apparition is the voice of a created text.) 

Identifying himself with the message of the Book written by no one, Muhammad is 

inhabited by it and becomes the Book, which he can neither read nor write. Khatibi 

emphasizes that, since there is the illegible as soon as there is writing, Muhammad 

sacrifices his signature by attributing the Book to the Other – an unusual murder. 

Khatibi calls the sacrificed book “the lost book.” In Muhammad’s unconditional subjection 

to the letter, to its unity and transcendence, another letter is hidden. Following 

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of cryptonymy (The Wolf-Man’s Magic 

Word, The Shell), Spivak interprets Khatibi’s analysis as “transform(ing) the historical 

pathology of Islam into a negative cryptonymy – the encrypting of the sacrificed signature 

as something that cannot be avowed” (“Psychoanalysis” 54–55). The result 

of the sacrifice would be, as Spivak emphasizes, “the consolidation of the difference 

at the origin of monotheisms” (55). In Khatibi’s words, “the unicity of Allah and of the 

Arabic language marks this frontier, in the Islamic imaginary, as the founding signature, 

the emblem” (17). 

Depending on our prior discussion, we might say that Muhammad’s mastery takes 

the form of a circular address, which is structurally under threat of separation. The 

power of Khatibi’s reading is in its opening of the illegible pages of the lost book. 

108 | Mahmut Mutman


Recitation here is not learning to spell as in Massignon, but rather the unification of 

two voices that remain separate in imitative repetition, even though it seems to obey 

the circular logic of communication or address. What Khatibi calls the lost book or 

Spivak the encrypted signature, is like Levinas’s “noise returning after every negation 

of this noise,” an uncanny “before” or past haunting and discontinuing language. 

Recitation is circular, hermeneutic, and dialogical on the institutional and pedagogical 

level where it works as a power relationship between the imam and the student 

in the Qur’an course. The technique of learning is the same as that of the 

Ancient Greeks: the breaking up of utterances into memorizable, imitable and manageable 

units, which give form to the voice as the “Gestalt” of the audible. As recitation 

is also chanting, an Islamic typography as phonography stamps, marks and 

seals the voice in the letter: “Move not thy tongue concerning the Qur’an to make 

haste therewith. It is for Us to collect it and to promulgate it: But when We have promulgated 

it, follow thou its recital (as promulgated)” (Surah 75, Verses 16–18). It is 

the recitation manual, which controls and tames the tongue. But, as an instance of 

mimesis, recitation cannot be reduced to a mere effect of such techniques of governing, 

shaping and disciplining the voice, since, as we learn from Jacques Derrida, 

“imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless 

it is in some way at fault or rather in default” (Dissemination 139). The noise of the 

event, of the lost writing continues to haunt and encrypt the sacred word of the self. 

What makes a language what it is and is not, this flow of voices and silences, always in 

plural, is also irreducibly singular, as it includes all kinds of “intonation, elocution, tone, 

inflections, melisma, rythm, even timbre (or what Barthes calls ‘grain’)” (Lacoue- 

Labarthe, Typography 59). In this second sense, recitation is indeed what Jacques 

Derrida would call an “infrastructure”, i.e. a structure of generalized writing: “the 

irreducible complexity within which one can only shape or shift the play of presence 

or absence: that within which metaphysics can be produced but which metaphysics 

cannot think” (Of Grammatology 167). There is no hermeneutic/dialogical circle without 

this “infrastructural” process; for instance, the play of interpretation is usually 

based on the “proper” recitation of a certain word. 

The generalized recitation cannot be artificially separated from recitation in the 

narrow, pedagogical sense. Their positive conflation is a permanent enabling of the 

social text. Speaking of the voice in the context of mimesis, Lacoue-Labarthe 

reminds that “the voice, the lexis concern not only psyche, desire […] but equally an 

investment that is social, historical, cultural, aesthetic – in short ethical, in the strict 

sense of the word ethos” (Typography 160). It is the social condition, the suffering of 

the world as it is known and lived, which throws the poor, the oppressed, the alienated 

and the submitted (“muslim” in Arabic) into the beyond, into “the soul of a soulless 

world” in Marx’s well-known phrase. There a language is finally found, it seems: 

the word is fixed, the tongue is bound, in a beyond that is sanctified by the letter of 


the sacred text. The genealogical transformation of alterity into identity can not dissolve 

the singular passing of the voices of the submitted, each of whom should be 

hiding or crypting the wound of a broken letter/voice in submission to the letter. What 

is commanded in and by this transformation or translation should survive the command 

and should maintain a silent echo, vibration or resonance, which somehow 

departs from it: sounds of an unspoken, unknown language. I imagine that, in every 

Qur’an course, there must be children of the kind Deleuze and Guattari mention in a 

different context, those who are “skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the 

sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself” (Kafka 

21), in a playful “recitation which strips them of their identity” (The Logic 3). 

Reciting: Spectres 

That which survives in resonance is ghostly, spectral. Is recitation not also spectralization 

or ghost-calling? Following Jacques Derrida’s insight (Specters 62–63), I would 

like to argue that maintaining a certain noise, a haunted voice is an ethical thinking 

of the eventfulness of the event. In her essay on Derrida’s concept of the spectre, 

Gayatri Spivak discusses Assia Djebar’s novel, Far From Madina, and describes it as 

an instance of ghost-calling or spectralization (“Ghostwriting”). Djebar reads Muslim 

chroniclers of the first three centuries of Islam who write about the Prophet’s lifetime 

(Ibn Hisham, Ibn Sa’d, Tabari) and finds the names of thirty-three women on the margins 

of these texts. To apply Benjamin’s well-known expression, “reading what was 

never written” (Benjamin 336), she creates a world for each of these women by questioning 

what happened and providing alternative interpretations and possible, though 

unactualized, paths of development of events. I should like to expand the sense of 

reciting here, to one of its oldest meanings as narrating. Since Djebar herself took 

the Qur’an course as a child (as we already learned from L’amour la fantasia), her 

reciting of the Islamic narrative in Far from Madina can also be described as an echo 

or resonance: by vibrating women’s words and names around themselves, she 

touches a future in the past. As Spivak explains in another essay on Ovid’s story of 

Narcissus and Echo, like Echo who repeats but with a difference (to Narcissus’s 

question “why do you fly from me?” Echo replies “fly from me”), Djebar turns her 

weakness into the deconstructive power of differing from the utterance she is subjected 

to recite (Spivak, “Echo”). In Spivak’s words, her re-citing “opens up a liminary 

time into a counterfactual possible world” (“Ghostwriting” 79). 

Especially with the prophet’s youngest daughter Fatima, we read Djebar’s “counterfactual 

narrative” at its strongest. Literally interpreting the prophet’s saying (“From 

us, the prophets, no one shall inherit! What has been given to us, is given as a gift!” 

[Djebar 67–68]), the new Islamic rule refuses Fatima’s share of inheritance. Djebar 

turns her into an “Islamic Antigone” who challenges the Muslim polis. Spivak emphasizes 

Djebar’s struggle “to reconfigure the past, to imagine the ancestors as ghosts” 

110 | Mahmut Mutman


(“Ghostwriting” 81). Djebar imagines that Fatima might have unconsciously wished to 

be a boy: “To be both her father’s Daughter (for the affection) and his Son (for the 

continuity)” (49). This is why, she muses, Fatima must have married Ali, her father’s 

adopted son, which was almost marrying her own self and thus drawing closer to the 

impossible right of inheritance. But then she stops and asks if this is “to form too 

free an idea of Fatima” (Djebar 49). Spivak underlines Djebar’s cautious use of imagination: 

“the ghost named Fatima has no more than an anticipatable reality” (81). 

Djebar carefully conducts the “gender-deconstructive force” of her imagination to 

open “a fissure in what is merely history, and the ghost can dance in the fault” 

(Spivak, “Ghostwriting” 82). If Djebar does not merely let her imagination go without 

setting it limits while continuing to exercise it, what is the result she might be wary 

of? I would like to further explore the status of what Spivak calls “the radical counterfactual 

future past”. 

This is a concept with a long history in the analytic tradition. 8 The first counterfactual 

definition was actually given by Hume, even though it was due to a confusion. 

He failed to distinguish a regular definition of cause (“an object followed by another”) 

from a counterfactual one (“if the first object had not been, the second never had 

existed”). If analytic empiricist philosophy had to spend a serious effort in order to 

manage the ineluctable reference to unactualized possibilities, this was mainly in the 

context of the question of causation. 9 A significant part of this effort has the aim of 

controlling a form of thinking that is not based on a simple, stable and homogenous 

reference. Imagination gets dangerously close to rational thought by multiplying the 

reference in terms of other worlds and unactualized possibilities. In so far as this 

multiplicity of universes is countable, the relationship between them would have to 

be one of continuity (for example, we have counted thirty three women). But it is also 

one of discontinuity at another level, for “the world in which Fatima raises an objection 

to the Islamic rule following her father’s death” is counterfactualizing a narrative 

that is already regarded as stable and homogenous (that is “the world in which 

Fatima does not raise an objection to the Islamic rule following her father’s death”). 

Following our concept of recitation as differing echo, we can read Djebar’s strategy as 

subjecting the narrative form to the uncanny force of discontinuity. This is not merely 

discontinuing the narrative in the sense of simply giving it up or denying it and telling 

another narrative, but it is a recitation that, to make a neologism, “de-cite”s what it 

recites. Gaps in what happened, in the facts of history, open up a future. 

In the preface, Djebar writes that she used her power of interpretation (“ijtihad”) 

in the Islamic tradition, and she is not necessarily unfaithful to the way narratives are 

generally told or recited. For instance, Far from Madina opens with the death of 

Muhammad: a problem, or a disruption in the normal course of life as the narrative 

rule of beginning. The first sentence reads: “He is dead. He is not dead” (Djebar 3). 

Thus, even there, in the beginning, which announces the disrupting event, there is 


suspense, an oscillation which gives us a discontinuous sense of time. But the narrative 

does not follow a regular pattern of unfolding of a conflict and its resolution. If 

it did so, it would have to be the story of finding an appropriate successor to the prophet, 

and it would have to find a political model in the stories of these ghost women. 

As Spivak warns, Djebar’s “rereading of a past for a future – a future anterior – […] 

is not a formula for a future present. The ghost dance cannot succeed as a blueprint” 

(“Ghostwriting” 79). If Fatima is a “model,” then the model is spectralized and the 

stories are multiplied. Various beginnings are woven into the apparently single grand 

story of Islam, as if its disappearing ends are disseminated all over the desert. It is 

as if the past moved by leaving gaps, discontinuously, going backward and forward 

and then backward… The novel ends by going back to the very beginning of the 

monotheistic narrative, to the other woman in the beginning, Hagar. Women’s stories 

are regularly interrupted by “a voice” (and nothing guarantees that it is the same 

voice). Others, the “rawiya” (woman reciters or story-tellers) intervene; there is a 

“pause” before the last part. Most important of all is the spectral status of all the 

characters and voices in the novel. It is the discontinuous nature of Djebar’s narrative 

that produces an overall effect of a multiplication of ghosts, of voices. 

The representational economy of recitative mimesis keeps producing the form of 

a sentence, vision or narrative. I would like to call it an “onto-typology” that finds its 

ultimate paradigm in the contemporary fundamentalist urge to preserve the letter in its 

unity and clarity, in the imprint of its stamping force on the surface of the body, of the 

throat. By re-opening the gate of “ijtihad” Djebar opens our ears to the vibrating and 

differing echo of the receptive surface. Her re-citing and re-counting (by “de-citing”) 

asks if it can make the “aphonie” of these stifled voices reverberate in our ears, and 

if especially the tympan of our ears can accommodate such bare audibility of a rumbling 

silence, of a noise returning, resonating after every negation of this noise. 

Rather than referring to a mere deviation from a given route, she takes us back to a 

future implied in the ghostly subjunctive, the contingent verb in the origin (“if she 

were […] ”), in the womb of a narrative where every newborn child is born into a spectral 

crowd of voices. What we need to attend to here is that Djebar’s narrative strategy 

does not assume a mere lack of origin but brings up the spectral and cryptic 

status of the originary event and of the very event of origination of stories. It is the 

haunting noise of this spectrality that is to be controlled and given form in the continuity 

and consistency of the sentence and vision as understood by Massignon. Such 

is the complicity of orientalism and fundamentalism. Djebar’s novel does not offer an 

alternative history, another factualisation or actualisation, but, while keeping the narrative 

form on the one hand, most delicately undoes it on the other. Otherwise, as 

Spivak warns, the work of imagination would turn into its opposite: the re-installation 

of a pure origin. Djebar does not finally read the lost book of monotheism; she only 

moves in its gaps for a future to come rather than the future present. 

112 | Mahmut Mutman

I am reminded here of Khatibi’s insistence on the prophet’s first wife Khadija’s 

importance as the first scribe of the Qur’an. Before this displacement of the scene of 

revelation, one cannot not ask: in between voice and transcription, what was the 

message Muhammad lost in order to state another, to the wife who read the sign of 

election on his and her bodies? If this is unsayable, it is perhaps not merely 

repressed. It is the ever written secret with which the Muslim Man/Subject can only 

negotiate by attending to the echo of his recitation. 

Khatibi also writes that the three social figures Muhammad had to fight were the 

seer (the soothsayer), the possessed and the poet – the first at least a female figure. 

Most important of all, I am reminded of what Lacoue-Labarthe writes, speaking 

of the dangers of mimetic narrative according to Plato: “[…] mythical or mythopoetic 

contents, or, quite outright, “old wives’ tales” … are all the more formidable and powerful 

(which must be translated as: their mimetic power is all the stronger) for the fact 

that they are without author, anonymous, and spoken, that is to say, recited, in 

nobody’s name” (“Talks” 32, the first emphasis mine). Are women merely the 

medium, the reciter or the scribe? 

Dual Words 

If it is not a question of merely affirming plurality, but of discontinuing the continuous, 

then how should this very discontinuity be maintained or reproduced anew? The problem 

returns. If Fatima is the voice of contention, of interruption, then Aisha, the 

prophet’s young wife, is the voice of recollection, of the taking-care, the survival of 

memory. They are like the “dual words” in Arabic language, or the dual voice, the two 

sides of recitation: maintaining and interrupting, same and other. Djebar calls these 

women “the daughters of Hagar” (273–79). We are now called to recite the grand 

monotheistic narrative itself, its very beginning. In the Abrahamic narrative, Hagar is 

Abraham’s handmaid who was exiled and went as far as Mecca (and in the Qur’anic 

version Abraham follows her). Djebar’s narrative ends by returning to this exiled 

woman in the beginning of the grand monotheistic narrative. In her version, Hagar is 

driven out and driven mad in her search for water for her son Ishmael (Abraham’s 

other child, the future father of the Arab nation), dancing, wandering back and forth 

between the two hills where the Ka’ba, the center of Islam, would be built later. 

Djebar’s passage depends on a beautiful play on the words Hegira (emigration), hajra 

(sunstroke) and Hajjar (Hagar’s archaic pronounciation) – a reciting, a return of what 

crypt, what noise? In the ending scene of the novel, a voice calls all believers: 

All believers, men and women alike, once a year, 

or at least once in a lifetime, 

daughters of Hagar and sons of Ishmael, join together, 

to re-enact the scene of Hagar’s madness 



Hagar’s madness is the noise, which keeps passing through the voice of the 

Abrahamic grand narrative, the revealed religions of ethical monotheism. Islam’s socalled 

historical pathology is also of this lineage. It can be read otherwise, in terms 

of a singular loss of singularity, a loss which remains open to a re-marking of the 

alterity in, as well as of, its inheritance. 

114 | Mahmut Mutman

Notes 

1. This is particularly valid for Zˇizˇek (2001, 

2003). For the recent literature on religion, see 

Asad (1993, 2003); Badiou (2003); Zˇizˇek 

(2001, 2003); De Vries: (1999, 2002, 2005); 

Derrida (1995, 2002); Henry (2002); Vattimo 

(1999). With the two exceptions of Asad and 

Derrida, in all of these works, the reference is 

Christianity. 

2. I am using three different translations of the 

Qur’an by Yusuf Ali, Pickthal and Shakir. 

Although this is narrated in Surah 96 in the 

Qur’an, we know that it is Muhammad’s first 

encounter with the angel and the first message 

he received from him. 

3. The well-known orientalist Catholic thinker 

Louis Massignon was strongly influenced by 

Islam’s acceptance of the whole Abrahamic 

tradition and wanted to convince both 

Christianity and Islam to reconsider themselves 

in a new Abrahamic narrative, in his writings as 

well as in his well-known project of Badaliya. 

Massignon was an administrator of French 

colonialism in the Middle East and later a 

supporter of Algerian national liberation. 

4. For instance, in his interview with Philippe 

Nemo, Levinas says that this tendency was 

already in his early work: “I distrust the 

compromised word ‘love,’ but the responsibility 

for the Other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me, 

as early as that time, to stop the anonymous 

and senseless rumbling of being. It is in the 

form of such a relation that the deliverance from 

the ‘there is’ appeared to me. Since that 

compelled my recognition and was clarified in my 

mind, I have hardly spoken again in my books of 

the ‘there is’ for itself. but the shadow of the 

‘there is,’ and of non-sense still appeared to me 

necessary for the test of dis-inter-estedness” 

(Ethics and Infinity 52). It is not clear however 


how the shadow of the ‘there is’ and of nonsense 

are necessary for the test of the social 

relationship. It is precisely this kind of question 

that I am posing here. 

5. I thank Burcu Yalim for her translation of 

this essay. 

6. In his most recent work, late Edward Said 

offered an insightful reading of Freud’s 

relationship to the non-European: Freud and the 

Non-European. 

7. When Massignon referred to the second 

wife Aisha’s account in the above citation, he 

was actually referring to Aisha as the later 

narrator, the verbal chronicler of Islam. Khatibi 

refers to Khadija as one of the first witnesses. 

8. A continental equivalent is Leibniz’s 

notion of the “incompossible,” which is 

extensively discussed in the works of 

Gilles Deleuze (1989, 130; 1990, 169–80; 

1993, 59–75; 1994, 47–48). The concept of 

the incompossible signifies a world, which is 

in contradiction with the compossible or 

existing world, but not contradictory in itself. 

Hence “an Adam who did not sin” (or “a 

Fatima who resisted”) is perfectly possible 

but it is not possible at the same with “an 

Adam who sinned” (or “a Fatima who did not 

resist”), hence it is an incompossible. 

Deleuze emphasizes the possibility of a 

narrative in which incompossibles can exist 

together. In our reading, this would have 

to be a narrative that works discontinuously, 

by interrupting itself. 

9. David Lewis’s pioneering analysis of 

counterfactuals based on possible world 

semantics is regarded as the most important 

contribution (1973). 


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2003. 


ABSTRACT 


Disturbing Noises – Haunting 

Sounds: Don DeLillo’s 

The Body Artist 


Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s 

The Body Artist 

Autistic, childlike and genderless Mr. Tuttle seems to be gifted with glossolalia, since 

he speaks in other people’s voices. Or he might be a ghost. While Don DeLillo’s 

novella The Body Artist (2001) tells the story of its protagonist Lauren’s traumatization 

and subsequent regaining of subjectivity, this article develops a reading of Mr. 

Tuttle as Lauren’s “sonic symptom.” As a projection of her psyche, the “sonic symptom” 

is the first step Lauren takes on the way to healing herself after her husband’s 

unexpected suicide. Her second step back to agency takes the shape of a seemingly 

obsessive-compulsive interaction with the computerized voice on an answering 

machine. The repeated calling, hanging up, calling back, hanging up without leaving 

a mess/age – this article contends, assisted by Sarah Kofman, Jacques Lacan, Kaja 

Silverman and Slavoj Zˇizˇek – is a mediated, up-dated and – most importantly – aural 

version of Freud’s predominantly visually organized fort/da-game. 

Introduction 

Dealing with Don DeLillo’s novella The Body Artist (2001), I would like to explore how 

voice – in variously gendered and technically mediated forms – helps to (re)constitute 

psychic identity during a process of mourning. 1 DeLillo’s third person narrative tells the 

story of body artist Lauren Hartke, who is the book’s protagonist and its focalizer. Since 

the reader is, most of the time, directly dependent on her perceptions, Lauren’s observations, 

impressions and thoughts are a filter, which cannot be avoided and thus must 

Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist | 119

not be ignored in analysis. The plot is mainly set in an old house in the middle of 

nowhere, at a coast some distance from New York, which has been rented for a holiday. 

Lauren spends a few months there – first with her husband Rey, then without him, but in 

the company of an obscure childlike stranger, who, after a while, vanishes just as mysteriously 

as he had appeared. Two insertions, which mirror each other, as far as position 

is concerned, interrupt the plot. The first of these, located between chapters one and 

two, is an anonymous obituary for Lauren’s husband Rey, who – as it turns out to the 

reader’s as well as to the protagonist’s complete surprise – has killed himself. The second 

insertion, located between chapters six and seven, is signed by Mariella Chapman, 

who is a writer and, moreover, Lauren’s best friend. Her text is a cross between an artist’s 

interview and a review of Lauren’s latest performance called Body Time, the piece she 

works on while staying on in the old house after Rey’s death. From a narratological point 

of view, Mariella’s text stands out, since it is the only section that allows the reader a 

glance at Lauren from the outside. On the level of the plot, three major events shape the 

course of this carefully constructed novella. As the obituary informs the reader, Rey 

shoots himself in his first wife’s New York apartment directly after the opening breakfast 

scene with Lauren. The second event takes place at the end of chapter two, when Mr. 

Tuttle, who is perhaps the second main character, is introduced. The third event is the 

performance of Body Time, of which we learn indirectly, in Mariella’s article. 

Using the sentence modifier “perhaps” seems to be inevitable when describing this 

text. This is a result of the two levels on which The Body Artist operates. It offers two 

paths of interpretation, which may, respectively or simultaneously, be opened in the 

reading process. It may, on one hand, be read as a “realistic” text with Lauren and 

Mr. Tuttle as its two main characters. On the other hand, it may be read as a modern 

ghost story, with Lauren as the only protagonist and the inexplicably appearing and disappearing 

Mr. Tuttle as a kind of specter or, to use the psychoanalytic term, a symptom 

created by Lauren’s mind. I shall, first, briefly outline the “realistic” reading, concentrating 

on Mr. Tuttle’s and Lauren’s own vocal sound effects. Second, I shall develop a 

reading of Mr. Tuttle as a sonic symptom of Lauren’s traumatized psyche, using concepts 

by Sigmund Freud, Sarah Kofman, Kaja Silverman, Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Jacques 

Lacan as the cornerstones of my argument. The Body Artist, in my view, keeps oscillating 

between its “realistic” and its “ghost story” aspect. Since the novella itself refuses 

to be reduced to merely one of these, to clearly decide for one interpretation at the cost 

of the other, would lead to a loss. My aim is, therefore, to offer a reading of The Body 

Artist as a “fantastic” 2 text, which not only contains both sides, but also carries the 

notion of oscillation between them, refusing to opt for only one correct interpretation. 

Noise – Voice – Chant 

If one opts for the “realistic” line of interpretation, the plot unfolds in the following way: 

After Rey’s suicide Lauren discovers a mysterious, seemingly autistic stranger whose 

120 | Sylvia Mieszkowski


presence in the house seems to have been announced by a peculiar sound, “the noise.” 

Having nick-named the stranger Mr. Tuttle, Lauren finds out that this childlike man is able 

to (re)produce her own, and even dead Rey’s voice. She tries to get Mr. Tuttle to “do Rey” 

(71) in front of a tape recorder, while starting to work through her loss. She does so by 

setting up a new performance piece about which the reader learns more in the second 

insertion, Mariella’s review. During Body Time, Lauren uses Mr. Tuttle’s tape-recorded 

voice while impersonating different characters, and while changing her body accordingly. 

Beginning with her voice, Lauren transforms from undisputed, if implicit, femininity to 

ambiguous, almost genderless masculinity. Even before we learn any details about the 

performance, Mr. Tuttle vanishes as suddenly and inexplicably as he had appeared, leaving 

Lauren alone in the “house full of echoes” (Gorra 21). 

The novella’s “tone” as well as its “tonus,” its tension, are set in the scene of 

Lauren’s and Rey’s last ever conversation. During this dialogue “the noise,” which 

may be read as an index to Mr. Tuttle’s as yet unknown presence in the house, is 

mentioned for the first time: 

“Weren’t you going to tell me something?” 

He said, “What?” […] 

“You said something. I don’t know. The house.” 

“It’s not interesting. Forget it.” 

“I don’t want to forget it.” 

“It’s not interesting. Let me put it another way. It’s boring.” 

“Tell me anyway.” 

“It’s too early. It’s an effort. It’s boring.” 

“You’re sitting there talking. Tell me,” she said. […] 

“It’s an effort. It’s like what. It’s like pushing a boulder.” 

“You’re sitting there talking.” […] “You said the house. Nothing about the 

house is boring. I like the house.” 

“You like everything. You love everything. You’re my happy home. […]” 

“Just tell me. Takes only a second,” she said, knowing absolutely what it 

was. […] “Just tell me okay. Because I know anyway.” 

He said, “What?” […] 

“I know anyway. So tell me.” 

“You know. Then fine. I don’t have to tell you.” […] 

She said, “The noise.” 

He looked at her. He looked. Then he gave her the great smile […]. 

“The noises in the walls. Yes. You’ve read my mind.” 

“It was one noise. It was one noise,” she said. “And it wasn’t in the walls.” 

“One noise. Okay. I haven’t heard it lately. This is what I wanted to say. It’s 

gone. Finished. End of conversation.” 


“True. Except I heard it yesterday, I think.” 

“Then it’s not gone. Good. I’m happy for you.” 

“It’s an old house. There’s always a noise. But this is different. Not those 

damn scampering animals we hear at night. Or the house settling. I don’t 

know,” she said, not wanting to sound concerned. “Like there’s something.” […] 

“Good. I’m glad,” he said “You need the company.” (18) 

This dialogue, always teetering on the brink of failure, exhibits the futility, even the 

impossibility of dialogue. The role that sound plays in The Body Artist is always tied 

up with the way communication does or does not work. Described as a sound that is 

recurring, random, undifferentiated and difficult to locate, “the noise,” contrary to 

what one might expect, does not disturb or interrupt conversation, but rather, by providing 

a topic, brings it into being – even if it fails. 3 

When Lauren discovers Mr. Tuttle, it turns out that, having been announced by “the 

noise,” he also seems to “produce noise” rather than “make sense.” This has to do 

with his unusual relation to language. For a start, Mr. Tuttle refuses to make use of 

its denotative function and thus seems unable to use it for the purpose of straightforward 

communication. Lauren describes him as “impaired in matters of articulation 

and comprehension” (97), as “a retarded man sadly gifted in certain special areas, 

such as memory retention and mimicry, a man who’d been concealed in a large 

house, listening” (100). Mr. Tuttle produces a particularly rich, poetic form of language. 

Rhythmically organized and characterized by rhyme and repetition, it forms an 

important part of the novella’s “phonotext.” 4 For Lauren this kind of language is 

“singing” or “chant,” the reviewer Stephen Amidon calls it “truncated, babbling 

speech” (53). Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, one could describe it as the “egocentric 

discourse of the child,” which shows a lack of reciprocity: 

The child, in this discourse, which may be tape-recorded, does not speak for himself, 

as one says. No doubt, he does not address the other, if one uses here the theoretical 

distinction of the I and the you. But there must be others there […] – they [the children] 

don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak, if you’ll pardon the expression, à la 

cantonade. 5 

This is what Mr. Tuttle sounds like: 

Being here has come to me. I am with the moment, I will leave the moment. Chair, table, 

wall, hall, all for the moment, in the moment. It has come to me. Here and near. From the 

moment I am gone, am left, am leaving, I will leave the moment from the moment. […] 

Coming and going, I am leaving, I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall 

all will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have 

seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me. (74) 

Although Mr. Tuttle’s sentences do not instantly yield their meaning they are far from being 

completely devoid of it, as is implied by critic Philip Nel when he refers to Mr. Tuttle’s chant 



as “pure speech” (746). As David Cowart points out, “DeLillo often flirts with the 

Wordsworthian conceit of the child as bridge between one world and the next, and he has 

commented more than once, in interviews, on his sense that infantile babbling is structured” 

(205). The chant may lack the one clear denotation, but instead of being nonsense, 

these phrases carry multiple connotations and offer a wealth of meaning. The 

isotopic use of “leaving,” for example, mirrors Lauren’s process of mourning her husband’s 

death. What causes Lauren’s (and the reader’s) problems of understanding is not 

that there is no message, but rather that the sending of several messages simultaneously 

results in what information theory calls “noise.” 6 

Some of Mr. Tuttle’s sentences signal a breakdown of conventional communication. 

The circular structure of sentences like “Say some words to say some words” 

(55), for instance, is set against the linearity and teleology we expect of non-literary, 

everyday language. The same is true for the frequent tautologies that make Adam 

Begley describe Mr. Tuttle as talking “like Gertrude Stein on a bad day” (12). Although 

Mr. Tuttle’s words are, of course, difficult to understand and never limited to one 

meaning, they may be analyzed and interpreted. Most of his sentences are the result 

of two operations which Freud diagnoses as the major forces at work in our 

dreams – namely displacement and condensation –, and which Lacan describes as 

“the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier,” as “the two aspects 

that generate the signified,” as the “determining effects for the institution of the subject” 

– namely metonymy and metaphor (Lacan, Écrits 285). An example for phonetically 

organized displacement/metonymy would be the principle behind a chain of 

signifiers like: wall, hall, all, here, near, here, where, see, be. By semantically organized 

condensation/metaphor I refer to the compression of various meanings into one 

phrase. The recurring formula “It is not able” (34/66) for example, reverberates with 

at least three possible translations: it combines a statement of individual inability (in 

the sense of “I am not able”) with a statement of general impossibility (in the sense 

of “It is not possible”) and the assessment of fundamental meaninglessness (in the 

sense of “It is pointless”). Another example of condensation would be the phrase 

“Talk to me. I am talking.” Structurally, its tautological circularity opposes the teleological 

linearity, which characterizes every-day exchange of information. As far as content 

is concerned, this one phrase incorporates sentences like “talk to me I’m 

listening” or “You asked me to talk to you, so I am talking” or “I am talking to you, 

why don’t you talk to me.” 

The second element, that makes Mr. Tuttle’s manner of speech peculiar, is that he 

does not always use the same voice, but sometimes speaks in the voices of other 

characters. His ability to reproduce these voices, however, is not limited to their sonic 

profile, or to what Jonathan Sterne calls “the voice strictly speaking” (Sterne 122). 7 

When Mr. Tuttle talks in foreign tongues, he also speaks the words that belong to the 

voices he uses. Thus, like a “human tape recorder” (Cowart 203), he reproduces 


parts of Lauren’s lines and then, even more disturbingly, parts of dead Rey’s lines in 

their respective voices: 

She sat at the table and watched him and then she knew completely in the first electric 

exchange because the voice, the voices were not his. ‘But we don’t need it now this 

minute. I’ll get it when I go. Ajax. That’s the stuff. There’s nothing to scour right now.’ She 

listened and it was her. Who the hell else. These things she’d said. […] This is what she’d 

said to him before he got in the car and drove, if only she’d known, all the way to New York. 

[…] It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey’s voice all right, it was her husband’s 

tonal soul, but she didn’t think the man was remembering. It is happening now. (86–87) 

Mr. Tuttle does not stop at re-enacting what has been spoken as if it was in the present. 

He goes far beyond what any mechanical device for recording and replaying 

voices could possibly do. I am referring to the third peculiar element, the genuinely 

“fantastic” aspect of Mr. Tuttle, who seems to have a special relationship with time. 

But contrary to a tape recorder – which would be limited to replaying what has been 

said in the past – Mr. Tuttle produces words that have not yet been spoken. Lauren 

describes this as his ability to paradoxically “remember the future.” 8 The three chapters 

grouped around the novella’s core relate how Lauren, fascinated by Mr. Tuttle’s 

“chant,” tries to get him to speak into a tiny Dictaphone: 

The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to 

follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement. And 

some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this is the 

point, this is the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling 

upward in your skull. (75) 

This language is described as so overpowering in its sound that it disables vision and 

thus – by making “blind” – induces an even more intense way of listening: a form of 

listening that lies beyond concentration and borders on the dissolution of self or consciousness. 

Tom Paulin claims for sound to have “all sorts of ontological meanings 

for us. It is to do with our dwelling in the world, with our being” (Paulin 36). If it is true 

that sounds are intimately connected to “being-in-the-world,” then it should be possible 

to read the sounds that Mr. Tuttle produces as indicators of his ontological status. 

Regardless of whether one opts for an interpretation that treats Mr. Tuttle as a 

realistic character or, as I shall do in the next section, as a product of Lauren’s psyche, 

the novella presents him as occupying a highly unstable position in both time 

and space, which is largely an effect of his phonetically displaced, metonymically gliding, 

and as a result, semantically condensed language. 

Voice – Gender – Loss 

As indicated above, there is another way to read DeLillo’s text than the “realistic” 

interpretation I have just offered. This second reading does not accept Mr. Tuttle as 

a character on the same level as Rey or Lauren or Mariella, but claims that he is a 



“ghost,” a product of Lauren’s traumatized psyche. In order to make this reading 

plausible, I shall first demonstrate how the novella withholds all definitive proof of Mr. 

Tuttle’s actual existence. Secondly, I shall highlight the moments that point towards 

Lauren’s traumatization. 

The Body Artist has a very withdrawn extradiegetic-heterodiegetic third-person narrator 

who leaves the reader almost entirely dependent on the focalizer. Nobody, apart 

from Lauren, ever sees this nameless stranger she calls Mr. Tuttle. 9 The “noise” in the 

house is heard by Rey as well, but although a connection between this disturbing sound 

and Mr. Tuttle is suggested, there is no actual proof that Mr. Tuttle does really cause it. 

It could well have other sources – the text leaves it open. Apart from the two inserted 

passages, the reader does not have access to any information that has not first been 

filtered through Lauren’s consciousness. But Lauren, and the novella makes this quite 

clear, is a totally unreliable focalizer. From the very beginning, she is shown to have a 

lively imagination, she empathizes with people she reads about in newspaper articles 

and imagines characters and details about their lives. One day, she “knows all about” 

a man she drives past in a car – only it turns out that this “man” is nothing but a pile 

of painting tools she has mistaken for a person. 10 Moreover, Lauren is a perception 

junkie, who not only observes, it seems, in a very detailed manner at all times, but who 

simultaneously reflects on how insufficient even concentrated perception is: 

She noticed how water from the tap turned opaque in seconds. It ran silvery and 

clear and then in seconds turned opaque and how curious it seemed that in all these 

months and all these times in which she’d run water from the kitchen tap she’d never 

noticed how the water ran clear at first and then went not murky exactly but opaque, 

or maybe it had not happened before or maybe she’d noticed and forgotten. (18) 

Lauren is forever “noticing” the world around her in a “curious” way. But as the quotation 

shows, she becomes frequently aware that she “had never noticed” some 

things before which nevertheless surrounded her all the time. Her attempts to 

describe to herself what she sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels are impressive in 

their search for precision. Yet at the same time she often overshoots the mark, has 

to revise or correct or even take back what she thinks she has perceived: “The birds 

broke off the feeder in a wing-whir that was all b’s and r’s, the letter b followed by a 

series of vibrato r’s. But that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t anything like it” (17). After 

Rey’s death she not only doubts the precision of her perception, or the adequacy of 

her description, or the reliability of her memory, but even her physical ability to see 

properly: “She decided to find an optometrist because she thought she’d seen something 

a number of times, or once or twice, out of the corner of her right eye, or an ophthalmologist, 

but knew she wouldn’t bother” (76). 

But if Lauren is an unreliable focalizer, because the reader – and even she – cannot 

trust her senses, then the only “proof” that seems to remain of Mr. Tuttle’s existence, 

are the recordings of his voice which Lauren integrates into her performance piece. As 


eaders we learn from Mariella Chapman’s text, the second insertion in the novella, that 

the recordings form part of Body Time. During the interview Lauren suddenly speaks in 

a voice, which Mariella recognizes as identical with the recorded voice used on stage. I 

shall come back to this scene, but in preparation, would like to look at the one in which 

Lauren experiments with her voice for the first time: 

For a while she stopped answering the phone, as she’d done intermittently since the 

first days back, and when she began to pick it up again, she used another voice. […] At 

first the voice she used on the telephone was nobody’s, a generic neutered human, but 

then she started using his. It was his voice, a dry piping sound, hollow-bodied, like a bird 

humming on her tongue. (101) 

The voice transmitted over the phone line becomes the medium through which the 

speaker’s gendered identity is assigned by the listener. Lauren’s “normal” implicitly 

female voice (curiously enough, the reader is never given any description of its sonic 

quality before it changes) becomes first “another voice,” a disembodied voice, 

“nobody’s” (literally no body’s) voice. Then it becomes “a generic neutered human” 

voice (human, but genderless), before it is described by a male pronoun: “his,” “his 

voice.” Despite being grammatically marked as masculine, this sound lacks all characteristics 

traditionally associated with a “male” voice. Instead, its attributes connote 

air-filled lightness, frailty, fragility, and thus project a de-gendered, 11 then an 

ambiguously re-gendered identity, which later on in the performance will be supported 

by the change apparent in the rest of Lauren’s body. Apart from transporting these 

qualities, the humming bird simile, once more, brings together the notions of movement 

and sound. In a passage already quoted above, the “b’s and r’s, the letter b followed 

by a series of vibrato r’s” (17) caused by a flock of birds already introduced this 

connection on the phonological level. Here, it is taken up again on the semantic level. 

Now the vibration of the single imaginary humming bird’s wings corresponds to the 

vibration of Lauren’s vocal cords. By being “like a bird humming on her tongue” (not 

in the back of her throat, where the vocal chords are located), the simile also points 

towards an element of artificiality in this voice. It is a product made by the body 

artist, by an artist’s body. 

Just how able Lauren’s body is “to do things other bodies could not,” (105) becomes 

clearer when her visible transformation follows the audible change of her voice. Again, 

the first step is one of erasure; not of specific timbre, this time, but of color: 

This was her work, to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and 

to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance. She had a face 

cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself. She cut off some, then 

more of the hair on her head. It was crude work that became nearly brutal when she 

bleached out the color. In the mirror she wanted to see someone who is classically 

unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bed of familiar effect, a spook in the 

night static of every public toilet. (84) 



This passage is not as explicit about the fact that this erasure is also a process of 

deleting a markedly feminine gender identity, which finds its pars pro toto in Lauren’s 

hair that is cut off and bleached of its “natural chestnut luster” (103). Feminist criticism 

has shown that the traditionally feminine position within a patriarchal framework 

is staged as the object of the (male) gaze. 12 Underlying Lauren’s transformation 

is the refusal to be passively staged in order to be seen. Instead, she actively stages 

herself to be – and herein lies the radical quality – “someone who is classically 

unseen,” to be “looked through” rather than looked at. 13 The narrator’s description 

quoted above is complemented later on by Mariella’s who picks up on the “shocking 

transformation,” describing how Lauren “is not pale-skinned so much as colorless, 

bloodless and ageless” (103). The text does not add “genderless,” but instead comments 

on the effect Lauren’s erasure of gender markers produces. She has transformed 

herself into a screen, which allows projections of different genders: 

Hartke’s piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage, gesturing 

in the stylized manner of Noh drama, and it ends seventy-five minutes later with a 

naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something. I saw two 

of the three performances and I have no idea how Hartke alters her body and voice. 

(105) 

During her interview with Mariella, Lauren’s own experimentation with voice, which this 

time it is not mediated by a possibly distorting phone line, reaches a climax. Mariella 

identifies the voice Lauren uses as the one that is associated by the reader with 

Mr. Tuttle: “Then she does something that makes me freeze in my seat. She switches 

to another voice. It is his voice, the naked man’s, spooky as a woodwind in your closet. 

Not taped but live. Not lip-sync’ed but real” (109). Again, the notion of “switching” suggests 

artificiality, even technology, which is further supported by the simile which 

likens the voice to the uncanny (“spooky”), muffled and out of place (“in your closet”) 

sound of an instrument (“woodwind”). On the other hand, the artificiality is counterbalanced 

by the immediacy of the “live” performance. The quotation continues: 

I can almost believe she is equipped with male genitals, as in the piece, prosthetic, 

of course, and maybe an Ace bandage in flesh-tone to bleep out her breasts, with a 

sprinkle of chest-hair pasted on. Or she has trained her upper body to deflate and her 

lower body to sprout. Don’t put it past her. (109) 

Lauren’s de-gendering and re-gendering, which remains explicable as an artificially 

produced effect on stage (prosthetic, Ace bandage in flesh-tone, chest-hair pasted 

on), becomes uncanny in the restaurant. And it is the sonic, rather than the optical 

dimension that is responsible for this. As the sound effect changes from lip-syncing 

to live, the imagination of a visible gender-transformation follows the audible. There 

is no visible maleness on Lauren’s body, only visible lack of femininity. But there is 

an audible quality that makes Mariella imagine Lauren with male genitals. Gender in 

DeLillo’s novella is first and foremost staged as a sound-effect. 


Mr. Tuttle as a symptom 

At first, the tapes used on stage seem to indicate that Mr. Tuttle must really exist, 

since his voice was recorded on the Dictaphone. According to the realistic or mimetic 

reading, Lauren, the body artist, has apparently taught herself to reproduce the 

sounds produced by his voice box. This is not implausible, since we learn that 

Lauren’s body has been “taught […] to do things that other bodies could not” (105). 

But a closer look reveals that the passages which mention the tapes, do not constitute 

any proof of Mr. Tuttle’s existence. It is, for example, important to note that the 

voice’s identification as “the naked man’s” is Mariella’s, and that Mariella has never 

seen or heard Mr. Tuttle. She only knows him as a character Lauren changes into during 

her performance. 

The tapes, I would like to argue, do not only fail to provide evidence for Mr. Tuttle’s 

existence, but, quite to the contrary, they actually produce uncertainty about his status. 

They do so, because at the very moment when Lauren reproduces Mr. Tuttle’s 

voice in the restaurant, the tape presumably produced during Lauren’s sessions with 

Mr. Tuttle and then used on stage loses all possible evidential value. Another interpretation 

now emerges. If Lauren can speak “live” in the voice that was heard as a 

recording during the performance, it is perfectly possible that the voice on the tape 

is and has always been produced by Lauren herself. But if that is so, the recording 

changes status: it is then no longer a piece of circumstantial evidence for Mr. Tuttle’s 

existence as a human being, but for his existence as a symptom created by Lauren’s 

psyche with a voice produced by Lauren’s own vocal apparatus. 

Having pointed out, 1) how Lauren is installed as an unreliable narrator, 2) how 

proof for Mr. Tuttle’s existence is withheld by the text, and having suggested that 3) 

Mr. Tuttle is not a real person, but a figment of Lauren’s imagination, and 4) that “his” 

voice (including “his” imitation of Lauren’s and Rey’s voices) is actually produced by 

her voice-box, other questions arise. Why does Lauren’s psyche produce this symptom? 

To which of her needs does Mr. Tuttle’s existence provide the answer? What triggers 

this striking psychic reaction? In order to answer these, I would like to point 

towards two passages – one towards the end of the novella and the other on its very 

last page. The first of these deals with Lauren’s attitude as a mourner, with her way 

of experiencing loss and grief following Rey’s death: 

Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? […] Why 

shouldn’t his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why 

should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? 

Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him 

within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you. 

(116, my emphasis) 

The emphasized sentence is important, because it signals a need and, subsequently, 

a (psychic) activity on Lauren’s part. The need is to keep Rey present, the activity is 



“to place him within reach” despite his demise – by reproducing his voice, his “tonal 

soul” (87). Thus, Mr. Tuttle is the construction that allows Lauren to have what she 

needs for psychic stability: Rey’s presence in absence. 

The second passage that I would like to bring to attention provides an answer to 

the question where the energy for producing such a striking symptom as Mr. Tuttle 

comes from. The very last page of the text reveals a prior death in Lauren’s life, 

which, up to this point, has remained concealed by Rey’s suicide. Suddenly, completely 

out of the blue, the reader is informed that: “Her mother died when she was 

nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her” (124). These three sentences 

provide the only information on the death of Lauren’s mother. It is remarkable that 

Lauren, who is usually staged as the one who perceives and describes what she perceives 

in obsessive detail, lacks the ability to verbalize an event as important as her 

mother’s death and its effects on her. She is almost completely at a loss for words 

and the few words she does use seem to be someone else’s: “It wasn’t her fault. It 

had nothing to do with her.” Lauren seems to have no direct access to her memories 

of her mother’s death. And it is this complete lack of access that defines her as traumatized 

in Freud’s sense. So Rey’s death covers up another death. The experience of 

loss caused by his suicide calls back a previous, possibly even greater loss that was 

also sudden, unexpected, and which rendered Lauren powerless too. 

Laura Di Prete takes up this surprising reference to the protagonist’s dead mother 

as well. For her reading of Mr. Tuttle she introduces Nicolas Abraham’s concept of the 

“phantom” as a “metapsychological construct ‘meant to objectify, even under the 

guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment 

of some part of a love object’s live’ ” by which, she adds, “Abraham 

addresses the phenomenon of secrets, silences, and traumas of others buried within 

the self.” 14 According to Di Prete, the reference to Lauren’s mother’s death 

[…] hints at once at an early trauma not completely worked through and the possibility 

of transgenerationally transmitted secrets, conflicts, and traumas within the 

mother. The silence around the death of her mother seems to frame the other more 

central silence around the death of her husband. (Di Prete 92) 

While I fully agree with her first conclusion (early trauma not worked through), and to 

a large extent with the third (link to husband’s death), I have difficulty assenting to the 

second (mother’s trauma transgenerationally transmitted to Lauren). One reason for 

this is that the text does not offer any information at all about the mother’s possible 

trauma which she may have passed on to her daughter, since the three sentences 

quoted above, are all the information the text provides. The second, more important 

reason has to do with Abraham’s concept of the “phantom” itself. Admittedly, it seems 

very useful for analyzing The Body Artist, especially because Abraham provides a link 

to Mr. Tuttle’s speaking in others’ voices by claiming that “it [the phantom] works like 

a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography” (Abraham 


173, Di Prete 89). But Di Prete’s otherwise inspired reading ignores one point 

Abraham is quite explicit about: “Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an 

object of love, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would 

be the case with melancholics or with all those who carry a tomb in themselves” 

(Abraham 171–72). Mr. Tuttle, however – and Di Prete herself agrees15 – does seem 

to be related to the loss of an object of love (Rey), or rather the loss of two objects of 

love (Rey, Lauren’s mother), and he does seem to be an effect of as yet unsuccessful 

mourning, albeit one, which enables Lauren to leave melancholia behind and enter 

mourning. Thus, rather than follow her reading of Mr. Tuttle as a “phantom,” I would 

like to suggest an interpretation of him as a sonic symptom, a manifestation of a 

process of overcoming an individual, rather than succumbing to a transgenerational 

trauma. 

The more useful point of theoretical reference Di Prete introduces in her article is 

the link between traumatic haunting and the uncanny voice that Cathy Caruth provides 

in the introduction to Unclaimed Experience. Going back to the third chapter of 

“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Caruth reminds us that Freud picks Tasso’s 

story of Tancred16 as his model for “a compulsion to repeat which overrides the 

pleasure principle” (Freud, Beyond 22) and proceeds to base her trauma theory on 

Freud’s reading of this tale: 

Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so 

trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but 

rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not 

known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on. (Caruth 3–4) 

Forging a link between Caruth’s trauma theory and The Body Artist is a brilliant move 

by Di Prete. I fully agree to both the proposed parallels17 between the medieval knight 

who kills/wounds his beloved twice and the contemporary woman that loses the person 

closest to her twice, and the diagnosis of the novella’s emphasis “on the internal 

nature of this conflict, on the presence in Lauren’s psyche of a foreclosed knowledge, 

internal, yet unassimilated” (Di Prete 91). Using the same material, I would like to 

draw another conclusion. 

If one goes back to Caruth’s introduction, it does indeed read as if it had been written 

with the novella in mind. For the nine-year-old Lauren, her mother’s death is the 

“wound that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore 

not available to consciousness until,” in Rey’s death, “it finally imposes itself 

again,” and the trauma “returns to haunt the survivor later on” through Mr. Tuttle 

(Caruth 4). In first coming across the sentences “Her mother died when she was 

nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her,” (124) mainly the last two 

phrases seem remarkable. They sound like the remaining impressions of something 

someone back then might have told the nine-year-old girl by way of consolation: “It 

isn’t your fault. It has nothing to do with you.” Although the text refuses to disclose, 



whether the mother died of illness, had an accident or committed suicide, we learn 

of Lauren’s justified or unjustified sense of guilt/responsibility, precisely through its 

seemingly unnecessary negation. Whether there was a choice/action/desire 

involved on young Lauren’s part to get rid of her mother or not, whether there was the 

possibility of the wrong choice, the wrong or refused action, a desire necessarily 

denied by the super-ego leading to guilt or not, remains a secret. Both options, 

though, couple Lauren’s mother’s death closely with Rey’s death – because they 

occur suddenly, because they are unforeseen, and because they provoke a strong 

affective reaction in Lauren, who is left by both in a position of total powerlessness, 

asking herself whether it really “was not her fault.” Caruth, however, reminds us that 

Freud chooses a narrative as a paradigm for his concept of “the compulsion to 

repeat,” where the hero does, albeit unwittingly, kill/hurt his beloved. If it makes 

sense to link The Body Artist to Tasso’s story, the latter provides a better tool in arguing 

for an unwitting involvement of Lauren’s than for making a case for transgenerationally 

transferred trauma when it comes to explaining why the mother’s death is 

mentioned on the novella’s last page. 

As early as 1893 Sigmund Freud suggested “hysterical patients suffer from 

incompletely abreacted psychical traumas.” 18 Taking her cues from Freud and Lacan, 

Elisabeth Bronfen has convincingly argued in The Knotted Subject that every hysteric 

is a traumatized character who mainly communicates her trauma. If one wanted to 

describe what happens to Lauren in psychoanalytic terms, Rey’s death is an event 

that repeats the actual traumatic event that has not been properly abreacted. It is 

from this prior death that Rey’s suicide derives a traumatic force so great it necessitates 

a psychic reaction as drastic as the fantasmatic creation of Mr. Tuttle. It is 

tempting to turn Bronfen’s thesis around and reason that since Lauren is traumatized, 

and since in creating Mr. Tuttle she also communicates her trauma, she must 

be a hysteric. 

But before one even has the chance to build an argument on this inversion, 

DeLillo’s text itself suggests this very interpretation, and instantly undermines it ironically. 

Just before the three sentences about her mother’s death, Lauren’s thoughts are 

given as: “Maybe it was all an erotic reverie. The whole thing was a city built for a dirty 

thought. She was a sexual hysteric, ha. Not that she believed it” (124). I cannot tackle 

the question here, whether the ironic gesture constitutes one of those “false leads” 

which, according to Bronfen, are amongst the most prominent characteristics of the 

hysterics’ tales in Freud’s case histories. The question, for whose gaze this “false 

lead” – if it is one – may have been laid out, remains to be explored in another context. 

What is interesting, though, is that, triggered by Mr. Tuttle’s sudden disappearance, 

Lauren herself is trying to interpret him in a way that only seems to make sense 

if she does no longer believe him to be a person. David Cowart attributes Mr. Tuttle’s 

disappearance partly to his having “fulfilled his function as a heteroclite muse” (204) 


for the body artist, which is to inspire her to produce Body Time. While sharing the view 

that Mr. Tuttle vanishes because he has fulfilled a specific function, I suspect it to be 

one of healing rather than one of inspiration; or, perhaps, one of healing through inspiration 

to produce art as a way of working through. Certainly, the dissolution of the 

symptom seems to point to the success of Lauren’s work of mourning: “She stood a 

while […] and felt the emptiness around her. That’s when she rocked down to the floor, 

backed against the doorpost. She went twisting down, slowly, almost thoughtfully, and 

opened her mouth, oh, in a moan that remained unsounded” (123). At first, this 

“unsounded moan” may seem surprising. After all, one might expect that successful 

mourning might be linked to a “finding of voice.” Here, however, the opposite is the 

case. The text couples the symptom with the voice, with noise, and with sound, while 

the symptom’s dissolution goes hand in hand with emptiness and silence. But maybe 

what the novella stages here, is less an inability to articulate than the freedom from 

the need to give voice, to keep r/evocalizing Rey’s voice. 

Radio – Dictaphone – Answering Machine 

Media play an important role in many of Don DeLillo’s books. The Body Artist is no 

exception here: the newspaper, the telephone, the computer and the radio are all 

introduced on the first few pages. Later on, the internet, the webcam, the answering 

machine and the Dictaphone – all of which form part of the performance Body Time – 

complete the spectrum. Each of the three main characters has a special relationship 

with one sonic medium. Curiously, it is not so much through the content communicated, 

but mainly by being switched on and off that the radio, the Dictaphone and the 

answering machine feature prominently in the text. 

During the breakfast scene alone, the radio is mentioned sixteen times. Rey 

switches it on, searches for a station, criticizes the program, switches it off, on, off 

again and – after Lauren has switched it on once more – off. Being in control of the 

medium, and thus of the establishment and/or breaking off of this stream of sound 

from the outside world, seems to be more important to Rey than the content of the 

information communicated. After Rey’s death, a similar game of control takes place 

between Mr. Tuttle, Lauren and Rey’s Dictaphone. Mr. Tuttle is the one who mainly 

keeps switching it off, while Lauren patiently switches it on again and again, in order 

to record his voice while he is “doing Rey.” The important question now seems to be 

who of the two is in control of the medium. 

There is an important difference between these two scenes, which has to do with what 

the respective media do to sound. The radio is a broadcasting device, and controlling it 

means being able to initiate/regulate/end a stream of incoming sound. The Dictaphone, 

in contrast, is a recording and playing-back device. It cannot produce anything that has 

not been fed to it before, but it is able to both receive and emanate sounds. Since it has 

these two different functions, there are also two different kinds of control related to 



switching the medium on and off. Switching off the playing-back function is similar to 

switching off the radio, since it puts an end to emanating sound. It is also different, however, 

since in contrast to the radio’s sounds, the Dictaphone’s sounds may be already 

known and they are repeatable. Thus, switching off the playing-back function means putting 

an end to having to listen to what one already knows. Switching off the recording function, 

which is what Mr. Tuttle keeps doing, has another implication, namely the refusal to 

have uttered sounds made available for their uncanny repetition as sonic “ghosts.” 

Lauren’s sonic medium is the answering machine, to be more precise, her friend 

Mariella’s answering machine. As the plot progresses, acoustic repetition – not only 

on the level of the plot, but also on the text’s performative level – gains importance. 

This becomes most obvious in Lauren’s relation to the answering machine. The synthetic 

voice’s audio-Lego – “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / tone” – fascinates 

her almost as much as Mr. Tuttle’s chant: 

The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but 

deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How 

strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up 

and called back. One voice for each word. […] She hung up and called back. (67) 

[….] 

She called Mariella and got the machine. She listened to the recording and hung up 

and then called again and hung up. She called several times over the next day and a 

half and listened to the recorded voice and did not leave a message. When she called 

again and Mariella answered, she put down the phone, softly, and stood completely 

still. (70–71) 

I would like to suggest that this passage may be read as a sonic variant of Freud’s 

fort/da-game. Although we are not looking at a male child whose mother is temporarily 

absent, but at a grown woman who is trying to come to grips with a permanent 

loss, there are essential parallels between the two scenarios. In “Beyond the 

pleasure principle” Freud describes witnessing one of his grandsons at the age of 

eighteen months: 

This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small 

objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the 

bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. 

As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o,” accompanied by an 

expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account 

were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the 

German word “fort” [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use 

he made of any of his toys was to play “gone” with them. One day I made an observation 

which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around 

it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at 

its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully 


throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time 

uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its 

reappearance with a joyful “da” [there]. This, then, was the complete game: disappearance 

and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly 

as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to 

the second act. 

In a footnote he adds: 

One day the child’s mother had been away for several hours and on her return was 

met with the words “Baby o-o-o-o!” which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned 

out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of 

making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which 

did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirrorimage 

“gone.” (Freud, Beyond 14–15) 

Freud himself offers two readings of this scene: first, he interprets it as the child’s 

attempt to free himself of the passive role which only permits him to suffer from his 

mother’s abandonment. By symbolizing the loss and willingly repeating it in his game 

he gains agency, ensuring at least that he is in control as to when the abandonment 

takes place. In his second interpretation, Freud emphasizes that the game is a manifestation 

of the child’s defiance of the mother who abandoned him. According to this 

reading, the child takes his revenge on the mother via her substitute, by doing to it 

what had been done to him (Freud, Beyond 15). In both cases the reel functions as 

the mother’s representative. 

Sarah Kofman provides an interpretation of this scene that is useful for analyzing 

Lauren’s repetitive game with Mariella’s answering machine within the framework of 

Freud’s fort/da-game. In Kofman’s words the alternation of calling and putting down 

the receiver is Lauren’s “symbolic invention that allows […] to master this absence 

through an affective discharge […]” (Kofman 77). Within this model, the synthetic 

voice on the answering machine is a substitute for Mariella. But within Lauren’s psychic 

economy, Mariella herself is only a substitute for Lauren’s object of desire, dead 

Rey. Of course, one could follow this chain of supplementary objects even further and 

argue that, according to psychoanalytic theory, Rey too is nothing but yet another substitute 

for Lauren’s first object of desire, namely her mother. The absence overcome 

by Lauren’s game with the answering machine is not, then, Mariella’s absence, but 

really Rey’s or Lauren’s mother’s absence, or even the fundamental lack which constitutes 

the subject. After Rey’s death there is neither “sobbing [n]or shrieking” (Kofman 

77), these two being the alternative ways of discharging affect, according to Kofman. 

Instead, Lauren’s “symbolic invention makes possible the structuring of [her] fantasy 

regarding [the mother’s] presence and absence” (Kofman 77). Jacques Lacan’s mirror 

stage is comparable to Freud’s fort/da-game insofar as both visually organized scenarios 

are central to their author’s theories of how subject constitution works. Taking 



a look at Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s interpretation of the fort/da-game, might help 

to understand what is going on between Lauren and the answering machine, which I 

suggest to read as an aurally organized model of subject (re)constitution. Instead of 

tackling Lacan’s own take straight away, however, I shall approach it, for reasons of 

clarity, via a detour of two contemporary readings of Lacan: one by the Slovenian critic 

and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zˇizˇek and the other by the American film scholar Kaja 

Silverman. 

For Freud the toy/reel represents the mother. Lacan, as we shall see, takes a different 

view. For him “[t]he reel is not the mother […] – it is a small part of the subject 

that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained” (Lacan, 

Tuché 62). Slavoj Zˇizˇek offers some assistance, when it comes to understanding 

what Lacan means by this. He suggests an interpretation according to which the reel 

is “that which Lacan called a ‘biceptor’; it is neither part of the child nor is it part of 

the mother, it is between the two, the excluded intersection of the two conditions.” 19 

If we make use of this model to understand the DeLillo-scene, Lauren is the subject, 

Mariella/Rey/Lauren’s mother are in the object position, and the answering machine 

is the equivalent of the reel, and thus, a biceptor, which is neither entirely part of the 

caller-subject nor of the called-object, but forms a kind of interface between them. 

Having established this parallel, however, it needs to be modified as well, because 

the answering machine is an 1) updated, 2) virtualized, 3) multiply inverted, and 4) 

more complex kind of biceptor than Freud’s reel. 

The scene described by Freud already tells the story of a mediated relation (the reel 

is the medium between child and mother). DeLillo’s scene is technologically updated, 

since Lauren and the answering machine are connected by a phone line, and not by a 

string. It is made virtual because the person called by phone, even if she picks it up, 

will never be physically present (in contrast to the mother in Freud’s scene). The scene 

is also inverted in three ways. Firstly, there is an inversion of the relation between 

silence and voice. In Freud’s scene, the subject makes a sound – the famous “o-o-o-o” 

and the object, the reel, is silent. By contrast, in DeLillo’s scene Lauren, the subject, 

is silent and the biceptor makes a sound: “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / 

tone.” The second instance of inversion concerns the quality of these sounds. Freud 

describes a deficient signifier: o-o-o-o is a not-yet-perfectly-formed word. In contrast, 

DeLillo’s scene offers a hyper-artificial sound, a computer generated voice characterized 

by gaps and discontinuities. The third inversion consists in the obliteration of the 

game’s “fort”-element, which I shall look at in more detail later on. DeLillo’s model is 

more complex, because the game he describes has two levels. When Lauren calls 

Mariella’s number, she is trying to create a situation of presence-in-absence. This is 

true for all phone-calls, of course. Generally, the person called is not in the same 

room. Absence is therefore a condition. If the person called picks up, the call creates 

a situation of (at least vocal and mental) presence-in-absence. So Lauren’s phone call 


is the attempt to create a “da” within the situation of a fundamental “fort.” When she 

puts down the receiver again, she re-establishes the fundamental “fort” or – perhaps 

this is the better parallel – she makes herself disappear, much as Freud’s grandson 

did by crouching underneath the mirror. The important difference between the two is 

that the boy makes his image disappear while Lauren makes her voice disappear. 

Having already taken care to remove her visual appearance from the world (by shutting 

herself up in the remote house), the deletion of her voice, of her sonic presence, so to 

speak, is, seems as the next step. 

This is the first level of DeLillo’s fort/da. Within the virtual “da” of the answering 

machine, however, there is a second level. Systems-theory provides us with a useful 

term for describing precisely this phenomenon: it is a “re-entry.” Once the distinction 

between “fort” and “da” has been established, the same distinction returns within 

the distinguished elements. When an answering machine springs into action, its 

automatic voice usually delivers two messages. First, a “fort”-message, as in: “you 

have dialed the number of so-and-so who is currently unable to take your call.” This 

“fort” is then followed by the second message, an offer for communication delayed 

in time, a “da”-within-the-“fort”-message: “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / 

tone”. The question “fort or da?,” thus, re-enters within the “fort” option and adds a 

second level, a fort/da-game within the first one. 

DeLillo obliterates the first part of the double message we expect from an answering 

machine. There is no “you have dialed the number of Mariella Chapman, who is 

currently unable to take your call.” In other words: although Mariella is not “da,” there 

is no “fort” in the message. All that readers are presented with is a virtual “da”-message. 

This obliteration of the game’s “fort”-half is DeLillo’s third inversion of Freud’s scene. 

Freud’s account is very clear that he first observes how the child goes “o-o-o-o.” Only 

later does he discover that the “da”-part makes the game complete. So while Freud 

first reduces the game to its “fort”-part – the “first act, which was repeated untiringly 

as a game in itself” – DeLillo seems to reduce the game to its “da”-part. 

Having dealt with Slavoj Zˇizˇek–’s interpretation of the reel as a “biceptor,” it is 

worth taking a look at a second critic who comments on Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s 

scenario and focuses more on sound. Kaja Silverman stresses the fort/da-game’s 

phonemic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Freud’s scenario. As a matter of fact, 

Freud himself mentions this already, but leaves it to Lacan to point it out as 

important: 

Lacan emphasizes the phonemic opposition between the “o” and “a” in the words 

uttered by the child. He sees that formal opposition as ushering in a conceptual one, 

and in the process creating a self-enclosed signifying system. […] These signifying 

alliances function to exclude altogether both the speaker’s lost complement, represented 

in the game by the toy, and the hostile and erotic drives which find expression 

in the actions of throwing away and recovering that toy. (Silverman 170) 



Although in DeLillo’s version it is not the subject who does the talking, but rather the 

biceptor – in this case the answering machine – I would like to pick up two points made 

by Silverman. Firstly, the notion of the “lost complement” – represented in the game 

by the toy – explains why Lauren has no interest in talking to Mariella herself. When 

Mariella actually does pick up the phone one day, Lauren “put down the phone, softly, 

and stood completely still” (71). The lost complement is not Mariella – it is Rey, and 

behind Rey, Lauren’s mother. Secondly, it is worth noting that, for Lacan, the Freudian 

scene is about the child’s entry into the system of language. By opposing the signifier 

“fort” with “da,” it forms the first of those oppositional pairs – like “o” vs. “a,” or 

absence vs. presence or activity vs. passivity – that, for Lacan, govern language and 

structure the subject’s psyche. It is important to remember that the phonetic, the 

sonic dimension is not merely an appendix to the fort/da-game, but a core characteristic 

of the whole model. One of the major psychoanalytic models focusing on subject 

formation, that is, may said to be fundamentally aurally structured. After Rey’s death 

Lauren has to enter the symbolic order again to regain her subject status, and the 

aural fort/da-game may be read as the signifier the text chooses for this process. 

Answering machines are technological devices that deconstruct the binary opposition 

of presence vs. absence. This is what Mariella’s answering machine has in 

common with the psychic construction Mr. Tuttle that allows Lauren to guarantee 

Rey’s “presence-in-absence.” In order to illustrate this thesis, I would now like to take 

a look at Lacan’s text proper. In the chapter “Tuché and Automaton,” which forms part 

of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, he comments on Freud’s 

fort/da-game. According to Lacan, Freud’s point, namely the fact that the child copes 

with his mother’s absence by ascribing himself an active role within the game, is only 

of secondary importance. Instead, Lacan suggests, the fort/da-game is actually 

about the vanishing of the subject rather than about the mother’s absence: 

For the game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the mother’s absence 

has created on the frontier of his domain […], namely, a ditch […]. The reel is not the 

mother […] – it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still 

remaining his, still retained. […] It is with this object that the child leaps the frontiers 

of his domain, transformed [from a ditch] into a well, and begins the incantation. 

(Lacan, Tuché 62). 

DeLillo sketches a scenario, where Rey’s death creates “ditches” around Lauren. 

Signifiers of these ditches between the dead and the living may be found on the 

phonemic level of the only message delivered by the answering machine, namely the 

“brief but deep dimensions” that separate the syllables of “Please / leave / a mess / 

age / after / the / tone.” The time after Rey’s death is truly a “mess-age” for Lauren, 

but with Mr. Tuttle, her psychic biceptor, she manages to “leap the frontiers” of her 

domain or the “ditch” that separates her from her dead husband, to “transform it into 

a well” of productivity that results in her performance piece, and to “begin,” as Lacan 


writes, “the incantation.” Here, my argument comes full circle. According to the thesis 

that it is Lauren herself who produces Mr. Tuttle’s different voices, “the incantation” 

she begins, not only mirrors his “chant,” but is actually identical with it. 

For Lacan, the fort/da-game is about “the repetition of the mother’s departure as 

a cause of a Spaltung [splitting] in the subject – overcome by the alternating game, 

fort-da, which is a here or there, and whose aim, in its alternation, is simply that of 

being the fort of a da, and the da of a fort.” (Lacan, Tuché 63) Mr. Tuttle not only 

bridges the ditch, but is himself also a manifestation of the ditch. His phrase “nothing 

comes between me” gives away that he is not to be read as a subject, since for 

Lacan it is precisely by the split that the subject is constituted (74). Instead, he is the 

subject’s symptom, which is simultaneously a split-off part of the subject and the 

splitting itself. By the loss of her love object (Rey), which then triggers the trauma 

caused by the loss of the prime love object (the mother), Lauren has been thrown into 

a state of lost subjectivity that finds its signifier in the sound of the “chant.” 20 After 

Rey’s death, she needs Mr. Tuttle in order to re-constitute herself as a subject. Just 

as the technological biceptor guarantees a form of “da” within the fundamental 

“fort” by its “Please / leave / a mess / age / after / the / tone,” the psychic biceptor 

Mr. Tuttle guarantees Rey’s presence within the fundamental absence of death. At 

the same time, however, Mr. Tuttle also makes possible the contact between the 

grown-up Lauren and her traumatized nine-year-old self. A fundamental “fort,” caused 

by death, has to be supplemented by a fantasmatic “da,” and Lauren’s speaking 

through/in/as her own symptom in other voices is a strategy of fantasmatic selfempowerment 

in order to regain subjectivity. 

Conclusion: Gender – De-Gendering – Empowerment 

In the context of Lauren’s attempt to regain her subject status, gendering plays an 

important part. At first glance, Mr. Tuttle’s masculinity may seem to be at odds with 

an interpretation that proposes to read him as Lauren’s symptom. But, of course, projections 

of the psyche do not have to have the same gender as the body that houses 

the psyche which produces them. 

As Judith Butler points out, Freud somewhat revises the strict opposition he had 

proposed between mourning and melancholia in the article bearing this very title in 

1915, when he publishes “The Ego and The Id” in 1923: “Freud suggests that the 

internalizing strategy of melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning, but may 

be the only way in which the ego can survive the loss of its essential emotional ties to 

others” (Butler 58). Based on the assumption that internalization is not only a characteristic 

of melancholia, but also of mourning, one could argue that since Lauren is 

internalizing a male lost object, the fact that the symptom she produces is ‘male’ as 

well makes perfect sense. Moreover, I would like to suggest that the gender difference 

between the protagonist and her symptom does not only form an integral part of her 



self-empowerment, but that gender itself, as I shall try to show, might be seen as a 

fort/da-game. In other words, the fact that the female protagonist produces a male 

symptom does not disturb my reading, but supports it. 

One answer to the question why the novella presents such an un-masculine male 

as a way out of Lauren’s helpless position is provided by Mr. Tuttle’s status. As I have 

argued, the predominant purpose of this symptom is to provide present in absence. 

Since the recently lost love object (Rey) is male, this may account for Mr. Tuttle’s masculine 

gender. But Mr. Tuttle does not only provide a connection with a lost object, but 

also with a lost subject. The symptom’s second purpose, as I have shown, is to free 

Lauren of her melancholy and start a process of mourning in order to regain her subject 

status. This subject status has been lost before, at Lauren’s mother’s traumatizing 

death, and then regained to make up Lauren’s grown-up self. Confronted with 

Rey’s death, Lauren reacts by going back to the point from whence she once already 

successfully constructed her subjectivity. As a biceptor Mr. Tuttle has to be read as a 

“small part of” Lauren that “detaches itself from” her “while still remaining” (Lacan, 

Tuché 62–63) hers. This may account for Mr. Tuttle’s childish appearance, since he 

in part also represents this, Lauren’s younger self. 

By claiming a male voice during her phase of transition, Lauren breaks free of her 

old position in the symbolic order that is powerless because it is female. Following 

this logic, one might expect that Lauren, in the interest of empowerment, might strive 

for the very opposite of a female/powerless position, namely a male/powerful position 

like the one Rey occupies, for example, in short: a phallic one. But Rey, as we 

know, is dead. Phallic as his position in the symbolic order might be, it has not 

enabled him to survive. Having been through a first crisis after her mother’s death, 

Lauren, by choosing Rey as her sexual partner, turns to the phallic position for stabilization. 

But Rey, in killing himself, not only proves that this position is no guarantee 

for survival, he also plunges Lauren into the next crisis of subjectivity. From this, as I 

have tried to show, Lauren manages to extract herself with the help of her symptom 

Mr. Tuttle. It seems only logical that she should now choose a third option, an 

ambiguous, precariously male, childlike, almost non-gendered position – both in Mr. 

Tuttle and in the transformation of her own body for the performance, which has been 

described as a product of “de-gendering.” 

The de-gendered, childlike body, however, is probably the least remarkable of Mr. 

Tuttle’s features. What makes him interesting for an analysis of sound, after all, is his 

ability to speak in different voices. And it is precisely this, I would argue, which, 

despite his unmanly appearance, puts him in possession of the phallus. 21 Bearing in 

mind Lacan’s emphasis on the strict distinction between the organ (penis) and the 

signifier of power22 that structures the symbolic order (phallus), one could say that 

the unmanly Mr. Tuttle’s position is much more phallic than that of the manly Rey. 

After all, Mr. Tuttle’s voice overcomes that to which Rey’s ostentatious masculinity 


submits: death. One could even say that the manly man’s death seems to be the condition 

for the unmanly character to unfold its power and demonstrate its possession 

of the phallus. If, as suggested above, Mr. Tuttle’s voice is really produced by Lauren’s 

voice box, then she who, due to her gender, has not been provided with a phallus by 

the symbolic order, manages against all odds – namely via creating her phallic symptom 

– to gain access to it. It is predominantly in this sense that Mr. Tuttle forms part 

of the female subject’s fantasmatic form of self-authorization via the appropriation, 

the incorporation, and projection of voices. 

Borrowing Freud’s terms once more, one could reformulate the role gender plays 

in The Body Artist as yet another aspect of the fort/da-game. Since around 1800 the 

system of gender-difference, which Thomas Laqueur calls the two-sex-model, is 

designed as a dichotomy which marks everything that does not willingly fit into one 

of its two opposing categories as scandalous: you are supposed to be either female 

or male. It is not difficult to see the similarity to the underlying structure of the 

fort/da-game Freud described at the end of the 19th century: the reel is either “fort” 

or it is “da,” a third position does not form part of the system, tertium non datur. 

Indeed, the parallel between Freud’s theory of gender-difference and the fort/dagame 

is striking: the little boy has a “narcissistic interest” in the “da” of his penis, 

the little girl “has seen it and knows that she is without it [“fort”] and wants to have 

it” (Freud, Psychical Consequences 250; 252). But, as Freud explains, the status of 

“da” for the little boy is far from stable. Being confronted with what he reads as the 

little girl’s fundamental lack, her genital “fort,” he becomes anxiously aware that his 

own genital “da” cannot be taken for granted. Since there obviously are “mutilated” 

creatures whose penis is “fort,” there is no guarantee, that his penis will remain 

“da.” It is “not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon 

him,” Freud writes, “that the observation becomes important” to the little boy (Freud, 

Psychical Consequences 252). The “normal” male reaction to this supposed danger 

of the irreversible transformation of a “da” into a fundamental “fort” is the dissolution 

of the Oedipus complex, which is “literally smashed to pieces by the shock of 

threatened castration” (Freud, Psychical Consequences 257). 

Given the organization of the symbolic order as described by Lacan, the access to 

power, too, is determined by a fort/da-game, in this case the absence or presence of 

the phallus. As far as gender is concerned, this access is an asymmetric one, since 

the phallic position is coded as “male.” Admittedly, The Body Artist does not attempt 

to design an alternative to this symbolic order. Lauren’s empowerment remains organized 

around the phallus. What the text does do, however, is to demonstrate again that 

to remain within this asymmetric structure does not necessarily mean that all men are 

in possession of the phallus or that no woman can be. Despite Rey’s undoubted masculinity 

(penis: “da”), he is shown as a character who fails and decides to end all 

future decisions by killing himself (phallus: “fort”). Lauren, by contrast, despite her 



femininity (penis: “fort”), finds a way to empowerment (phallus: “da”). She substitutes 

her “fundamental lack” by a fantasmatic vocal phallus and thus manages to regain the 

very subject status that Rey’s suicide endangered. 

At the beginning of this article, I described the language Mr. Tuttle produces as a 

sound-effect of displacement and condensation. These principles may also be seen 

at work when it comes to the construction of the sonic symptom itself. Mr. Tuttle is a 

mix of characters of different genders whose voices are reproduced in metonymically 

gliding and semantically condensed language. As I have pointed out in the introduction, 

there are two ways to read the text: one that accepts Mr. Tuttle as a realistic 

character, and another, which opts for reading Mr. Tuttle as a kind of ghost or psychic 

symptom. I hope to have demonstrated how psychoanalytic theory unlocks the potential 

of the second reading, but it would, nevertheless, curtail the novella’s richness of 

meaning, if one limited one’s interpretation to this dimension. Just as the almost 

genderless, childlike Mr. Tuttle and Lauren’s own de-gendered body insist on hovering 

in a sphere of gender ambiguity, the text should be allowed to remain in the realm of 

the genuinely fantastic which, by definition, resists ultimate clarification and is characterized 

by irreducible oscillation between contradictory readings. 

While the answering machine functions as a technological biceptor, and while Mr. 

Tuttle functions as a psychological biceptor, DeLillo’s novella itself may be called a 

kind of literary answering machine. As readers, we know that no one will “pick up” 

when, in reading a text, we search for meaning. Having gone through poststructuralist 

theory, we don’t even desire to be offered an answer from the other “end of the line.” 

But in offering an interpretation, we may hopefully leave a “mess/age” after the tone. 


Notes 

1. The thoughts and theses I present in this 

article form part of a book project on sound 

and the fantastic, which currently bears the 

working title More than Meets the Ear: 

Semiotics of Sound in Fantastic Literature. All 

quotations from DeLillo’s novella are given in 

round brackets in the text and taken from the 

following edition: DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. 

New York: Picador, 2001. 

2. I am using the term “fantastic” in Todorov’s 

and Lachmann’s sense. Building on Tzvetan 

Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as that which 

causes “a hesitation” (25) in the reader, an 

inability to decide whether a witnessed event is 

natural or supernatural, Lachmann speaks of the 

fantastic text’s “Unschlüssigkeitsstruktur,” its 

underlying “structure of undicidibility” (94). 

First quote from: Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: 

A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Second quote from: 

Lachmann, Renate. Erzählte Phantastik: Zu 

Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik 

phantastischer Texte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. 

3. One might describe “the noise” in the 

breakfast scene as that particular type of 

“parasite” that Michel Serres describes as the 

equally inevitable and productive third between 

any communicating two. Serres, Michel. The 

Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 

4. I am using the term in the sense of Stewart, 

Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the 

Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 

5. As a footnote informs the reader, “à la 

cantonade” means “to nobody in particular.” 

Both quotes from: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar: 

Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of 

Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Allain Miller. New 

York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998, 208. 

6. There is a lucid description of “noises” in 

some other DeLillo-novels which has been 

inspired by information theory to be found in: 

Picicci, Annibale. Noise Culture: Kultur und 

Ästhetik des Rauschens in der 

Informationsgesellschaft am Beispiel von Thomas 

142 | Sylvia Mieszkowski 

Pynchon und Don DeLillo. Berlin: Berliner 

Beiträge zur Amerikanistik, 2001. 

7. Sterne refers here to the French doctor 

Matthieu-François-Régis Buisson, who 

distinguishes three forms of voice: the “voice 

strictly speaking” – meaning its physiological 

function – the singing voice and the speaking 

voice. 

8. “There is a story, a flow of consciousness 

and possibility. The future comes into being. 

But not for him […] Past and present and future 

are not amenities of language. Time unfolds 

into the seams of being. It passes through you, 

making and shaping. But not if you are him. 

This is a man who remembers the future. […] 

He violates the limits of the human” (100). 

9. This act of naming is, perhaps, the best 

example for the reader’s dependence on Lauren. 

We never get to learn the third main character’s 

“real” name, and although it is made clear, that 

Mr. Tuttle is nothing but a nickname, the text 

offers no alternative to calling him what Lauren 

calls him. Moreover, by consistently referring to 

him by that, the nickname becomes his name 

and one tends to, but must not forget that this 

is entirely due to Lauren. 

10. “She was in town, driving down a hilly 

street of frame houses, and saw a man sitting 

on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and 

shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced blondish 

man, lounging. She felt that […] she saw him 

complete. His life flew open to her in her 

passing glance. A lazy and manipulative man, in 

real estate, in Fairview condos by a mosquito 

lake. She knew him. She saw into him. He was 

there, divorced and drink-haunted, emotionally 

distant from his kids, his sons, two sons, in 

school blazers, in the barest blink. A voice 

recited the news on the radio. When the car 

moved past the house, in a pull of the full 

second, she understood she was not looking at 

a seated man, but at a paint can placed on a 

board that was balanced between two chairs. 

The white and yellow can was his face, the 

board was his arms and the mind and heart of 

the man were in the air somewhere, already

lost in the voice of the news reader on the 

radio.” (70) 

11. The de-gendering of voice is completed in 

DeLillo’s text not on the plot-level, but on the 

level of narration. Two passages, written in the 

present tense and in the extremely rare secondperson 

narrative voice, address both Lauren 

and the reader (of which ever gender), inviting 

identification. The first of these forms part of 

the breakfast scene (19), the second starts off 

chapter six (89). 

12. The discussion that I refer to is extensive 

but, for those interested, two texts provide a 

useful starting point: Mulvey, Laura. “Visual 

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative, 

apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader. 

New York: Columbia UP, 1986 and Silverman, 

Kaja. Threshold of the Visible World. New York: 


13. David Copenhafer’s article in this volume 

explores the role voice, in this case Louis 

Armstrong’s, can play when invisibility is 

produced by a racist environment. 

14. Di Prete, 88–98. The quote within the 

quote is taken from: Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes 

on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s 

Metapsychology.” The Shell and the Kernel: 

Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas T. Rand. 

Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1994. 

171–76, here: 171. 

15. “I believe that Mr. Tuttle’s ventriloquism 

objectifies a profound split in Lauren, a division 

directly linked to the traumatic loss of her 

husband” (Di Prete 91). 

16. Tancred kills his beloved Clorinda when 

she is disguised as an enemy knight and, after 

her burial, wounds her again, by slashing a tree 

that is imprisoning her soul with his sword. 

17. “Like the voice of Clorinda reminding 

Tancred of having killed her, that of Mr. Tuttle, 

as it mimics a dead man’s words and gestures, 

renews and compulsively repeats in Lauren’s 

psyche the trauma of an inevitable loss” (Di 

Prete 91). 


18. “Thus, if for any reason there can be no 

reaction to a psychical trauma, it retains its 

original affect, and when someone cannot get 

rid of the increase in stimulation by ‘abreacting’ 

it, we have the possibility of the event in 

question remaining a psychical trauma. […] A 

healthy man […] always succeeds in achieving 

the result that the affect which was originally 

strong in his memory eventually loses intensity 

and that finally the recollection, having lost its 

affect, falls a victim to forgetfulness and the 

process of wearing-away. Now we have found 

that in hysterical patients there are nothing but 

impressions which have not lost their affect 

and whose memory has remained vivid. It 

follows, therefore, that these memories in 

hysterical patients, which have become 

pathogenic, occupy an exceptional position as 

regards the wearing-away process; and 

observation shows that, in the case of all the 

events that have become determinants of 

hysterical phenomena, we are dealing with 

psychical traumas which have not been 

completely abreacted, or completely dealt with. 

Thus we may assert that hysterical patients 

suffer from incompletely abreacted psychical 

traumas.” Freud, Sigmund. “The Mechanism of 

Hysterical Phenomena (1893).” The Standard 

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of 

Sigmund Freud. Vol. III. Ed. James Strachey. 

London: The Hogarth Press, 1962. 25–39, 

here: 37–38. 

19. This is my translation of the German 

version of Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. “Jenseits des Fort-Da- 

Prinzips”, in: 15 Feb 2006 �http:// 

www.freitag.de/ 2002/22/02221101.php�. 

The article was originally published in Freitag. 

Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitschrift 22 (24 May 

2002). Zˇizˇek refers here to the unpublished 

manuscript of Lacan’s Seminar X: Anxiety 

(1962–3) held on 14 Nov 1962 and translated 

by Cormac Gallagher. 

20. While mourning is described by Freud as 

the renewed beginning of ego formation, 

melancholia is characterized by the loss of 

those features that mark off the subject 

through incorporation of the love object. Freud, 

Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia (1917 

[1915]).” The Standard Edition of the Complete 

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIV. 


Ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth 

Press, 1957. 237–58. 

21. Coding the voice as phallic is no invention 

of the early 21st century, and the idea to locate 

the phallic voice in a body, whose deeply 

ambiguous gender irritates the dichotomous 

system of gender difference, is not new either. 

One fin de siècle text that does both is Vernon 

Lee’s “The Wicked Voice,” which portrays the 

effects of a castrato singer’s phallic voice on 

the imagination of a male protagonist, his 

sense of identity and understanding of his own 

masculinity. For an analysis that focuses on the 

phallic voice and gender see: Mieszkowski, 

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php>. 


ABSTRACT 


Corporeal Voices, Sexual 

Differentiations: New 

Materialist Perspectives on 

Music, Singing and Subjectivity 

Milla Tiainen 

Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on 

Music, Singing and Subjectivity 

Many of today’s cultural theorists have suggested that the analysis of sounds in general 

and music in particular would bring important new perspectives into the study of 

subjectivity. Especially, they have stressed the relevance of “the sonic” for examining 

two major aspects of subject formation: first, how our subjectivity is materially 

embedded, and second, how it emerges through inextricable interconnections with 

the surrounding reality. My article explores these possibilities by intersecting music 

scholarship with so-called new materialist feminist insights. More precisely, I focus 

on the questions of subjectivity, corporeal materiality and the multiplicity of sexual 

differences, as they unfold in relation to singers’ live processes of sound production 

in the context of opera. Theoretically, the article draws on the work of Rosi Braidotti, 

Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze, as well as on current critical opera studies. 

Introduction 

The realm of the sonic, understood as a versatile field of phenomena, would seem to 

attract ever-growing interest among today’s cultural analysts in many disciplinary 

strands. To list some threads of this tendency, soundscape scholars explore, firstly, 

sonic (micro-) worlds in relation to cultural belonging and memory: peoples’ sense of 

place, themselves and the social dynamics of their surroundings (Järviluoma and 

Wagstaff). Secondly, film theory of recent decades has witnessed the emergence of 

Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations | 147

stances that challenge the previous dominance of the visual in studying cinema, 

investigating the effectiveness of auditory elements and their interaction with visual 

layers in cinematic narration and perception (Silverman; Chion; Kassabian; Joe and 

Theresa; Pisters 175–215). Furthermore, musical and other aural presences in contemporary 

audiovisual culture on a broader scale, like in television, music videos and 

computer games, receive increasing scholarly attention (Mundy; Vernallis). 

Interestingly, new possibilities for thought that could be opened up by “the sonic” 

are currently being probed also in the more philosophical quarters of cultural theory. 

Of the array of topics discussed in such frameworks, the one concerning us here is 

the ever so pressing question of subjectivity. More precisely, of relevance are the 

debates that focus on the social, corporeal-material and sexed1 constitution of subjects. 

At least some theorists who work with these issues have seen great potential 

in attempts to refigure subjectivity in relation to sonic phenomena. Above all, they 

have stressed the novel perspectives such explorations would provide on certain central 

aspects of subject formation. Namely, how our subjectivity is always materially 

embedded, and how its emergence occurs through inextricable interconnections with 

the surrounding reality, thereby making that which is outside us and inside us constantly 

pass into each other. The latter aspect is emphasized by philosopher Christine 

Battersby in her study The Phenomenal Woman. She states that “if we want to rethink 

identity in ways that do not rest upon an oppositional relation between “self” and 

“other,” then it is useful to think more about the way identity is established and maintained 

in the aural field” (Battersby 178). Specific traits informing this field include, 

according to Battersby, spatiotemporal fluidity and processuality and accordingly, 

leaky, oscillating borders between subjects and the so-called outside world. 

Also, feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti has pondered upon the potentials offered by 

the sonic for refiguring subjectivity. She, too, relates these potentials to ideas of the 

subject as a dynamic and open entity: a palpably material but at the same time metamorphic 

configuration, which emerges in immanent connections with its environment 

(Braidotti, Metamorphoses 153–57). For Braidotti, sounds or “the acoustic regime” 

(155) are, to begin with, less codified by power than visual practices. This is because 

different techniques of visualization, along with notions of sight, looking, and the 

gaze have escorted the modern ideal of a unified, self- and world-regulating subject; 

the very construction which theories of multifarious subjectivity seek to dismantle. Sonic 

and acoustic registers, on the other hand, feature only marginally if at all in the historically 

long-term models of subject, power and knowledge. Therefore, they could help 

generate new, possibly subversive ways of thinking. When writing about music, Braidotti 

summarizes her insights on the forces and processes sounds can propel in subjectivity – 

supposedly both in terms of production and of perception, although she is not explicit 

on that point. Braidotti contends, “music can express affectivity, immanence and dissolution 

of boundaries. […] It makes audible the irreducibility of in-between spaces, 

148 | Milla Tiainen


polyphonic hybridization, multiple sonic interferences.” (Metamorphoses 157). A moment 

earlier, referring to the experimental art of Laurie Anderson and Stelarc, she stresses 

the elemental relations between sounds and corporeality by pointing out, how “the 

sheer materiality of the human body and its fleshy contents (lungs, nerves, brains, 

intestines, etc.) are as many sound-making, acoustic chambers” (157). 

Battersby’s and Braidotti’s suggestions for a “sonic turn” in cultural theoretical 

accounts of subjectivity are appealing. I share their excitement about the ways 

sounds would redirect such investigations. However, the formulations of these theorists 

remain rather sketchy as such. In order to be sharpened and developed they 

would have to be brought into closer contact with actual sound events and concrete 

analyses of sonic practices. Encounters would thus be needed between sounds, their 

frameworks, the specific questions each sonic sphere provokes, and cultural theoretical 

redefinitions of subjectivity. 

The present article aims at inducing some such encounters. These are carried out 

in the context of Western operatic music. More precisely, my examination will focus 

on singers’ live processes of sound production in the contemporary realm of opera. 

The impulses behind this exploration are deeply trans-disciplinary, relating to the theoretical 

views quoted above. Firstly, my aim is to show how the study of music-making 

in the particular settings of opera can contribute to notions of materially 

embedded, yet multiple and changing subjectivity. I interrogate how these notions 

might be rendered more concrete, more usable, when related with live instances of 

musical production. In disciplinary terms, the direction of this inquiry is from music 

scholarship to cultural theory and analysis. I wish to demonstrate that even such a 

supposedly traditional musical-cultural sphere as opera may offer new, possibly radical 

insights into current theories of subjectivity. Moreover, in that process opera may 

come out as not so conservative a realm of culture after all. 

Secondly, the direction of my investigation is also from cultural theory and analysis 

to musicology. By utilizing Braidotti’s ideas amongst others, I attempt to renew 

musicological understandings of how subjectivity may arise in relation to music. 

Thus, philosophical modes of thought intervene in their turn in the established agendas 

of music research, effecting possible transformations in them. Throughout the 

article, the main concepts on which my argumentation rests are subjectivity, corporeality/the 

body and sexual difference. This is both because I believe these axes, or 

their intersections, have a central place in singers’ music-making, and because of 

the essential role of these concepts in today’s cultural theoretical discussions at 

large. The concept of space adds a notable dimension to my inquiry. Basically, it will 

be used in what follows in two ways: first, with reference to singing bodies as material 

aggregates of variables that are however not only spatial but also temporal; and 

second, with reference to opera culture as a field, an open-ended space, for continuous 

production of sexual differences. 


To clarify further the theoretical impulses of the article, they could be summarized 

into the concept of “new materialism” (De Landa). The term embraces such currently 

emerging forms of thought – evolving in the humanities mainly in cultural and feminist 

studies – which aim at offering alternatives to the now dominating paradigms of 

cultural theory: social constructivism, the critique of representation, and psychoanalytic 

criticism. It is impossible to discuss the scope and background of these 

attempts in any great detail here. Therefore only those new materialist ideas that are 

most relevant to the present article are introduced. 2 

New Materialism, in this article, is about reconsidering the significance and ontological 

status of materiality in our analyses of culture, power and subjectivity. It is of 

course undeniable that we can only refer to the material world, e.g. bodies, through 

discourse and representation – an argument endlessly reiterated by social constructivists. 

Still, new materialist thinkers claim that, taken to its extreme, this stance 

runs the risk of forcing a situation in which the material dimensions of life are 

reduced to nothing more than an inert ground waiting for the active arrangements of 

our representations. What new materialist thinkers want to insist is, that linguisticsemiotic 

operations are not everything there is; not even for humanistic analyses of 

culture. Hence, it would be vital to see concepts and signs as one register of existence 

and to conceive, for example bodies, as another: as a positively different3 domain of processes, which encounters and merges with symbolic activities among 

other things, but cannot be ontologically submitted to them. (Colebrook From Radical 

Representations; Bray and Colebrook 55–58.) This realization is, I think, very fruitful 

when the goal is to theorize live music and subjectivity as material and sexed. 

A second, related notion this article commits to is, that it would be important to 

approach all “worldly” phenomena as multiple and assembled. Such a perspective of 

multiplicity would map for example bodies and differences between subjects as 

mobile configurations. In these, body movements, corporeal intensity levels, concepts, 

exchanges with other subjects (both physical-affective and symbolic), and connections 

to broader surroundings intermingle, creating situation-bound 

constellations that can be then called embodiments or sexes. Eventually, this would 

mean an analysis of the varying micro layers of subjectivity, sex, and the body. My 

article takes steps towards such an analysis. 

Besides being rooted in cultural theory and musicology, this endeavor is also feminist. 

Thus, my article addresses music from a new materialist feminist perspective. 

This implies that the category “sex” receives special attention throughout the article. 

A critical attitude towards social constructivist stances, with too heavy a reliance on 

theories of signification, informs new materialist feminist approaches as new materialism 

overall. It is to this that my use of the term “sex” instead of that of “gender” 

relates. Namely, the choice of utilizing that concept designates my commitment to 

theories of sexual difference. These theorizations take as their starting point that 

150 | Milla Tiainen


differences between masculine and feminine subjects are formed, not only at discursive 

but simultaneously at material (and subconscious) levels. 

Theories of sexual difference presume, then, a dynamic and reciprocal relationship 

between corporeal processes and other, e.g. conceptual practices. In other 

words, bodies are not without their “own” corporeal traits and forces that make them 

sexed. While these forces include physiological, even genetic variables, in the end 

sexual difference theorists see corporeality as an inextricable mixture of physicality, 

social constitution, and symbolic (re)definition. Such an emphasis differs decisively 

from social constructivist approaches, represented for example by philosopher Judith 

Butler, which stress, above all, the grip of discourse–power systems on bodies; their 

ability to endow the bodies with gendered attributes. 

Since theories of sexual difference conceive of bodies as multi-faceted in all their 

materiality, they provide a path to studying the micro layers of sex and subjectivity. 

Hence, from a feminist viewpoint, my ultimate aim is to argue that bodies, and sexed 

potentials of being a subject, are far more varied and complex than the macro binary 

of man–woman would lead us to believe. If the multiplicity of sexual differences were 

embraced, then spaces could be created for the experience and recognition of microfemininities 

and micro-masculinities; such forms of difference that would question 

the hierarchical and simplified man-woman dichotomy, preferring the (ideal) category 

of “Man” (Grosz “A Thousand Tiny Sexes”). 

The specific theoretical tools of this article stem from the work of two thinkers of 

sexual difference: Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. In addition, I draw on the 

insights of the feminist scholar Claire Colebrook and philosopher Gilles Deleuze (as 

well as the latter’s writings with Félix Guattari). All these theorists can be characterized 

as advocates of new materialism, and the first three are also new materialist feminists 

who elaborate on Deleuze’s thought, each in their singular ways. These philosophers’ 

claims are linked to current musicological stances when possible, especially those 

coming from opera studies. As for the methodological commitments and analytical data 

of the article, they relate to a fieldwork process I carried out in the years 2003–05 

among singing students at Sibelius-Academy, Finland. 4 The field material contains 

observations on and recordings of the students’ music-making processes, as well as 

interviews with them and their teachers and directors. Although this material will only 

be referred to rather than analyzed at length, it provides an indispensable point of 

departure for the whole new materialist approach. Without observing singers’ musical 

situations in the “field,” the exploration of subjectivity, corporeality and sexual difference 

as it is conducted here would have been impossible. 

The paths of thought opened up by new materialism are exemplified by two modes 

of conceptualization and their usability in connection with actual musical moments. 

These are 1) sexed singing bodies/subjects as open materiality; and 2) sexed performing 

bodies/subjects as assemblages, leading to the notion of a thousand tiny 


sexes. Both of the conceptualizations come principally from Grosz, who in her turn 

elaborates on Deleuze and his part-time co-thinker Guattari. Also Braidotti and 

Colebrook’s views are deployed with regard to both themes. Experimentation with 

these concepts forms the main section of the article. 

However, before testing the analytical force of the concepts, I seek to offer a critical 

commentary on how body, subjectivity, and gender/sex emerged as major topics 

in music scholarship in the first place. I ask with what theoretical and methodological 

strategies have been tracked so far? In particular, my aim is to interrogate where 

the limitations of these existent approaches lie – their obvious strengths notwithstanding 

– from the perspective of new materialism. The question immediately following 

from this is what novel and valuable ideas new materialist thinking might bring 

to the study of corporeality, sex, and subjectivity in diverse musical-cultural settings? 

The previous musicological takes on these issues are reviewed rather provisionally. 

Nonetheless, I think this survey is necessary to provide a background and pave the 

way for the new materialist approach. The question I wish to highlight above all is: 

what are the epistemological and ontological stakes in either ignoring or taking into 

account the live character of music in the analyses of its corporeal, sexed, and subject-related 

unfolding? 

A Shift in Music Scholarship: From Self-referential Texts to Representational 

Sounds 

After the turn of the 1990s the field of musicology, which refers here mainly to the 

study of Western art music, underwent a series of changes in terms of focus, methods 

and research politics. To put it bluntly, these changes have ensued from the 

arrival of post-structuralist impulses into the discipline – a process that has challenged 

such previous tenets of musicology as structuralist models of study and positivistic 

historiography. These paradigm shifts have resulted in a number of voices 

questioning the former traditions of music theory and analysis. 5 The debates in question 

have emerged eminently from within Anglo-American “new” and “critical” musicology 

quarters, including such branches as feminist and cultural musicology (McClary; 

Kramer Music as Cultural and Classical Music; Solie; Cook, and Tsou; Clayton et al). 

It is these discussions I shall concentrate on in the following. 6 

What the critical voices of new musicology have suggested is that music analysis 

shifts its focus from examining musical phenomena as self-referential structural entities 

to studying them as productions of culture with rich linkages to other socio-cultural 

realms. This demand has been aimed above all at such formalist paradigms as 

Schenker analysis (viable from the early 20th century on) and set theory (from the 

1950s on), which are today practiced primarily in the U.S., but also all over Europe. 

Many new musicologists have claimed that the methods these research traditions provide, 

treat music more or less as sealed and autonomous “texts” (Cusick Feminist 

152 | Milla Tiainen


Theory; Gender). 7 According to them, the formalist models of analysis are informed by 

a belief that the structural-stylistic processes of music have their own exclusive logic 

and hierarchies, such as surface-depth-organizations (Fink). These unfold and can be 

investigated without any considerable links to other layers or broader frameworks of 

culture. As a consequence of this emphasis, new musicologists argue, the notion of 

musical meaning has been too limited in formalist music analytical traditions. If music 

has been thought of as carrying meaning at all, its nature has been restricted to the 

emphatically musical, that is, a signifying content rising from within the sonic structures 

themselves. Judged on the basis of these remarks, the music analytical 

approaches under discussion have abstracted music from the socio-culturally signifying 

and material forces that necessarily inform its existence. 

The advocates of new musicology have succeeded in questioning the previous 

epistemological and ontological premises of musicology in general and formalist 

music analysis in particular. While the debates are still under way, a large amount of 

today’s researchers support a view, according to which (even) art music is about 

much more than just innate codifications. Like other arts, music’s stylistic and 

expressive conventions, too, are nowadays addressed from various angles as systems 

of cultural representation, sites of identity production, and results of sociopolitical 

power struggles. The actualization of music’s cultural potentials is theorized 

as occurring in its encounters with the listeners, from which context-bound musical 

“meanings” are claimed to emerge (Kramer Musical Meaning 7–8). Moreover, factors 

that were formerly often deemed extra-musical, such as discourses around music, 

are now believed to affect its constitution. 

When aiming to analyze subjectivity, corporeality and gender/sexual difference 

from a new materialist feminist perspective, it is useful to consider previous 

approaches to music’s corporeal, sexual and subject-related dimensions with a threepart 

model which combines 1) textual and discursive approaches, 2) score-anchored 

approaches, and 3) psychoanalytic approaches. 

The model is my construction on the basis of the different emphases and methods 

that already inform music scholarship as regards the issues of the body, subject 

and sex. Although inevitably a simplification, I nevertheless believe it to offer a way 

of assessing the benefits and limits of these different research strategies. The first 

category encompasses studies that focus on how music is rendered meaningful by 

other than sonic – usually linguistic – means. I call their strategies accordingly textual 

and discursive approaches. These include, for example, studies which examine, from 

a critical feminist viewpoint, how female opera singers have been represented and 

thus constructed in terms of gender, voice, embodiment and sexuality; ultimately, 

subjectivity in different kinds of cultural texts. Both the ways novelists and biographers 

have described the singers, and the interpretations of these texts by reading 

audiences have been of interest for such studies (Dunn and Jones; Leonardi, and 


Pope 48–174). Also analyses on gendered narratives of music, for example, in opera 

libretti, may be included into this category. 8 

The model’s second category is called score-anchored representational 

approaches. These studies also profess the view that the so-called “politics of representation” 

informs practically all music. Thus, they engage in exploring and critiquing 

the manners in which music constructs gender(s), subject and power positions, and 

references to embodiment through practices of representation. Contrary to the textual-discursive 

ones, score-anchored approaches claim to concentrate on music’s 

“own,” i.e. sonic representational techniques. They make use of established music 

analytical methods9 to construct score-based interpretations and blend detailed findings 

in musical texture with post-structural theorizations of subjectivity. 10 In light of 

these studies, subjectivity, gender/sex and the body exist in music through the structural-stylistic 

conventions with which they are musically represented; symbolized and 

signified with sound formulas (McClary; Välimäki, Smart “Ulterior Motives”; Abbate 

“Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”; In Search of Opera). 

Both the textual-discursive and score-anchored approaches have introduced 

invaluable models of analysis into music scholarship. However, assessed from a new 

materialist angle they are not entirely without problems. Actually, one may argue that 

while committing themselves in principle to “embodied criticism” (Abbate Music 506) 

that explores music’s worldly, socio-political materiality, these research strategies 

end up partly sustaining the notions of music as a textual phenomenon. The studies 

on music-related discourses do this along “classical” social constructivist lines, as 

demonstrated e.g. in the work of the identity theorist Stuart Hall (Representation) or 

feminist philosopher Judith Butler (Bodies that Matter). In other words, textualdiscursive 

approaches examine how music acquires cultural existence through linguistic 

operations that make it signify. This stance bypasses music’s equally powerful, 

material modalities of existence, such as its emergence with/as musicians’ body 

movements in live situations of sound making. Score-anchored approaches identify 

music with those of its features that can be (re)constructed on the basis of notational 

symbols – another textual source. Just as textual-discursive approaches, score-anchored 

analyses, too, largely ignore music’s infinitely varying, socially and materially embedded 

modes of emergence. 11 

How to grasp the materiality of music, then, with its alleged ties to the body, sexual 

differences, and subjectivity? The third category of the currently used model 

seems to give more attention than the two previous ones to music’s corporeality, 

along with its links to the bodily nature of subject formation. Investigatory strategies 

that fall into this category which I call psychoanalytic approaches. They have been 

developed both by psychoanalytic music enthusiasts and psychoanalytically oriented 

musicologists (Poizat; Schwarz; Välimäki). These studies mostly follow theoretical 

premises set out by Lacan and Kristeva, although they refer to Freud and other major 

154 | Milla Tiainen

psychoanalysts as well. Analyses of this type posit a link between music’s bodily 

aspects12 and the primeval, pre-symbolic phase of human subjectivity. The musical 

reminiscences of this phase – which takes place before the subject’s language acquisition 

– are argued to include such qualities as noises from a singer’s throat or high 

screams of female operatic voices. Indeed, opera and, lately, other vocal cultures 

enjoy a privileged status in these studies. Music’s material “tremors” are claimed to 

invoke flashes of the pre-symbolic stage in the (listening) subject. At this stage, the 

subject was still dominated by corporeal impulses, instinctive desires, and a blissful 

sense of union with the world, above all: the mother. Music’s materiality is thus 

understood as a momentary bridge to a lost realm of subjectivity, which can never be 

regained in full. 

Psychoanalytical approaches to music clearly appreciate its material dimensions. 

However, if one reassesses these studies from a new materialist perspective, they 

seem to position the category of the body somewhat problematically, since they tend 

to essentialize its materiality. 13 Music’s bodily properties are thus rendered more or 

less a-historical: “unpolluted” by cultural processes of subject formation. Psychoanalytic 

notions of music also repeat certain conceptions of sexual difference that are familiar 

from the history of Western thought. By claiming that female voices are considered 

particularly powerful evokers of pre-symbolic flashbacks, women become equated 

with the realm of the pre-symbolic, and thus with nature, instincts, and the body 

more than men who are especially in Lacan’s scheme firmly tied to the laws of the 

symbolic. 14 


New materialist feminist thought challenges both of these tendencies in psychoanalytic 

theorizations, a-historicity on the one hand and reinforcement of binary sexual 

differences on the other. 15 But which genuinely new viewpoints could new 

materialism offer so as to broaden the insights enabled by the three modes of 

approach above? What would it mean to take the corporeal materiality of subjectivity 

seriously, without either over-textualizing it or (re-) essentializing the body? How could 

such a re-examination be carried out with regard to live musical situations? It is now 

time to explore with some operatic examples, how new materialist thinking might be 

able to answer these questions and theoretical challenges. 

Differential Sonorous Subjects: Forces of Open Bodies 

If one wanted to describe how new materialist (feminist) thought conceives of subjectivity, 

the body, and sexual difference, in a single phrase, “positive difference” 

would be a good one to pick. Basically, this expression implies that in examining cultural 

phenomena, or other events of reality, new materialist thought leans on an 

ontology of processes instead of one of essences. Hence, in the (Deleuzian) new 

materialist scheme, “difference” does not refer principally to differences between 

entities that are supposedly preformed, such as men and women. It is not used in 


the negative sense of “different from something/somebody,” but rather in the positive 

sense of “incessantly different in and of itself.” All phenomena16 are thought of 

as mobile, transformative and open-ended: internally multiple and differentiating, 

although always in interconnection with other forces of the world. (Deleuze Difference 

137–45; Deleuze and Guattari 3–25, 232–309; Braidotti Metamorphoses 3–6, 

11–64; De Landa; Colebrook Understanding Deleuze 15–18, 27–43.) 

In feminist re-examinations of corporeality these movements of differentiation 

have been conceptualized for example as open materiality, a term coined by Elizabeth 

Grosz. In her book Volatile Bodies she introduces (191) the term by insisting that the 

body is: 

an open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities which 

may be developed, yet whose development will necessarily hinder or induce other 

developments and other trajectories. These are not individually chosen, nor are they 

amenable to will or intentionality; they are more like bodily styles, habits, practices […]. 

Grosz’ definition foregrounds two aspects. Firstly, bodies are indeed constellations 

of change and mutation; of the future. Different physical capacities – such as abilities 

to produce vocal and bodily movements that are deemed appropriate in operatic 

culture – are continuously under construction in unpredictable ways. They may, or may 

not, evolve through new physical exercises and mental techniques, or in connection 

to a new space (in music e.g. acoustics) and novel co-participants. Simultaneously, 

these evolvements, which are always partly surprising, create styles and habits, 

“specificities of the body” as Grosz also calls them, which orientate the future potentials 

of those same bodies (x–xi, 138–44, 155–59). Secondly, the stylistic trajectories 

of bodies, while open to experimentation, are not born from within individual 

subjects conceived as neat physio-psychical entities. Rather, they arise pre- and 

supra-individually; in cultural networks of action that are both concretely social (subjects 

merging and emerging with others) and collectively formed by their very nature. 

Grosz’s visions of open materiality provide useful tools to analyze my findings 

amongst singing students. Singing lessons, for example, are a complex practice of 

bodily openness. They consist of constant experiments with or “tunings” of singers’ 

bodies so that they would utter certain vocal pitches, volumes, durations, and other 

expressive qualities. The experiments vary endlessly, since the muscular impulses 

and kinaesthetic energies bodies must produce are always singular. They depend, on 

one hand, on the specific musical effects that are sought at each moment. On the 

other hand, they depend, at least as importantly, on the bodily subjects who produce 

those effects, with their divergent histories, layered habits and even instant-to-instant 

inner differentiations. 

This type of situation-bound and body-specific dynamism became evident for 

example in the singing lessons of a female student with a high soprano voice. During 

one lesson, she and her teacher launched continuously new conceptualizations and 

156 | Milla Tiainen


physical “tricks” of voice production. The goal was to test and mould the student’s 

bodily capacities, so that she would be able to utter very high tones in a relaxed, corporeally 

unhindered manner. The emerging conceptualizations stretched from “a 

mother eagle that spreads its wings” to “an amazed, relaxed body earthed on the 

ground”. (FN, Sl [MS]: 1 Dec 2004.) These speech figures may sound imaginative, 

even ridiculous. However, their effects on the singer in that lesson demonstrated 

both how concepts directly inform and animate bodies, not just defining them in a 

limited linguistic sense, and how bodies can “talk back” to these forms of address. 

Namely, sometimes the conceptualizations invented by the teacher, and the singer 

herself, inspired an immediate change in her sound production. At other points, 

numerous instructions had to be tried before the student’s body and voice agreed to 

act and react along the desired stylistic lines. Hence, what the talking back of the 

body refers to here is that the corporeal actions of a subject do not necessarily comply 

with the conceptual impulses aimed at them, at least not in the intended ways. 

Rather, bodies have their “own,” ultimately non-controllable modes of connecting to 

and elaborating on conceptual actions. In that sense, the encounters between language 

use and corporeality in the student’s lesson might be described as reciprocal. 

These field observations seem to confirm Claire Colebrook’s remark on the material 

activeness of bodies, stating that “while the body may only be referred to through 

discourse or representation, it possesses a force and being that marks the very character 

of representation” (“From Radical” 77). This conclusion relates to one of the 

central claims of new materialist thinking in general. (Corporeal) materiality is not an 

effect of discourse; it enters into mutual relations with discursive acts, being 

affected by them and affecting them back, but there remains an essential “gap of 

non-resemblance” (Massumi “Introduction” xix) between these registers of reality. 

Bodies are thus “open” and through that openness, constantly changing in two complementary 

senses. First, their actions are not self-sufficient but instead, become 

modified by e.g. conceptual forces. Second, however, bodies retain their distinctive 

and ever-evolving “force and being” which cannot be determined by the discourses 

with which they intermingle – their open nature is also openness in and of itself. 

Singing is one of the activities that beautifully demonstrate the open materiality of 

culturally embedded human bodies. With regard to sexual difference, the concept of 

open materiality is fascinating and politically important in that it stresses the susceptibility 

to differentiation of the sexed features of bodies. If these features stem 

from the bodies’ heterogeneous histories and mobile, supra-individual encounters 

with words and other bodies, we cannot ever know in advance, what a “female” or 

“male” body can perform and become (Gatens). 

As for the question of subject formation, my field observations revealed that even 

though bodies in opera culture result from minute disciplinary techniques à la 

Foucault, they are also sites of rich sensations. Operatic bodies consist of multiple 


sensorial and temporal processes, and being a singing subject requires a good dose 

of experimental spirit: embodied open-mindedness from which new bodily capacities, 

experiences, even pleasures may ensue. The same female student, for example, 

stated in her lesson that now and then the uttering of a loud high note seemed to 

send so intensive an adrenaline “shot” through her body that it felt almost difficult to 

proceed to the following vocal lines (Gatens). 

Any body that remains open in its abilities and sensations – materializations – can 

be thought of as spatial. A singing body in particular is clearly a spatial configuration 

from the start. As Braidotti observes in the citation quoted above, (human) corporeality 

as such consists of a bunch of sound-making and acoustic “chambers,” including 

brains and intestines (Metamorphoses 157). In operatic practices many of these bodily 

chambers are put to work in highly elaborate ways: for instance lungs, cheekbones, 

and the whole area around ribs are variably considered and activated as part of voice 

production. Thus, it could be said that subjects who sing opera are among other 

things corporeal aggregates of spaces that vibrate and lend themselves to subtle 

modification. The considerable differences which exist and develop between these 

spatial(ized) subjects are due to sexed voice types, as well as individual singularities 

of bodies. The spatiality of operatic bodies is also, even primarily, open. Through the 

stream of voice they create, these corporealities become audible and sensible to others. 

At the same time the bodies sense and merge with the space – both physicalacoustic 

and social – which surrounds them. To paraphrase Moira Gatens (63), singing 

bodies are composed, de-composed and re-composed by their outsides. Interestingly 

enough, one of the most repeated instructions in “classical” voice training, including 

the lessons I observed, is the request to “open up” bodily during the acts of singing. 

Singers are, in other words, encouraged to open up to the acoustic space they are in, 

to the air that has to be sucked into the body in order to utter sounds, and so forth. 

As open materiality the spatial character of vocal bodies is hence comprised of continuous 

foldings-in of physical and affective particles17 and simultaneously, unfoldingsout 

of sonic-bodily forces (Braidotti “How to endure” 182–84; Metamorphoses 

145–46). Singing bodies are spatial formations that exist, emerge and change in time. 

Operatic Assemblages of Sex 

Closely related to the idea of open materiality is that of bodies, and sexes, as assemblages. 

This notion’s new materialist feminist potentials can be explored with Grosz. 

In her article “A Thousand Tiny Sexes” she assesses some of Deleuze’s/Guattari’s 

thoughts – such as re-theorizations of subjectivity – for feminist cultural analysis. In 

her view, especially their conceptions of the body can be useful for feminists, since 

Deleuze/Guattari make a serious effort to challenge models of Western thought 

which persistently promote the binary polarizations of mind/body, nature/culture, 

subject/object, and interior/exterior (1446). 

158 | Milla Tiainen


By way of introduction Grosz lists, quite breathtakingly, how Deleuze and Guattari 

discuss the body “as a discontinuous, non-totalized series of processes, organs, 

flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities, and durations” 

(1446). She continues that, in their thinking, human bodies, or bodily subjects, 

form linkages not only with other bodies, but also with non-human animate and inanimate 

surroundings, such as material tools or institutional spaces (1446–47). 

Bodies intersect, then, with social and semiotic practices, technological environments, 

alimentary supplies, musical sounds and vibrations, and so forth. They form 

machinic connections with a varying wealth of other components. Hence, they act 

always already as parts of broader supra-individual, even supra-human assemblages 

in addition to being themselves constantly assembled and reassembled. 

When linked to singers’ practices, the idea of assemblages opens up fresh theoretical 

horizons. It helps to analyze the formation of sexually differentiated subjects 

in music in a way that takes into account the multiple bodily and material factors 

involved. In singers’ case organs refer to their various body parts and sites18 that 

become disciplined, highlighted and transformed in the acts of singing. The diverse 

corporeal components of a singing body do not form a stable organization determined 

for good. Rather, they are always on the move in terms of co-ordination, intensification 

and relaxation. It could even be argued that at their extreme vocal bodies 

approach the state of “the Body without Organs” (BwO), an idea also provided by 

Deleuze and Guattari. This concept refers to bodies as thresholds of multiple, proliferating 

sensations and powers. “Bodies without Organs” do not, of course, lack 

organs per se, but what they eschew is a stable, hierarchical organization of the body. 

Thus, the term BwO designates a tendency of bodies to become radically open-ended 

configurations. The transformations in capacity of such bodies are in excess of any 

totalizing form or definitive social categorization (Grosz “A Thousand Tiny Sexes” 

1453–54). 

The changing constellations – assemblages – of the organs of singing bodies 

relate to musical repertoires, which are in their turn sexually differentiated according 

to voice types. 19 In the end, however, the sexual characteristics of singing bodies 

vary according to, as well as within each corporeality, socio-musical moment and 

material location. To proceed with the Deleuzian framework, flows, energies, intensities, 

and durations are interconnected means of describing processes of differentiation 

which bodies are endlessly in (Braidotti Transpositions 144–203). With respect 

to singers, these take place simultaneously through sound production and other 

performative aspects, such as bodily expressions and investments connected to a 

stage role. Corporeal substances refer to the sheer materiality of singers’ bodies with 

their concrete traits and open-ended habits. Finally, incorporeal events are non-material 

forces – for instance, ways of conceptualizing and thus partly evoking features of 

bodies – which transform corporeal-material reality in their varying ways. In the case 


of singers, one incorporeal event might be said to occur when the voice of a singing 

student is declared to represent a certain voice type. In that moment, a voice, which 

has its singular, bodily embedded timbre and many open-ended capacities, becomes 

attached to a conceptual category that carries a heavy cultural load with it: associations 

with already formed aesthetic ideals, previous singers and performances, and 

sexual characteristics. Moreover, the consequences of this event are highly material. 

The fact of being named a representative of a voice type affects the ways the singer 

is taught and trained, and what repertoires s/he will sing. Incorporeal forces should 

not be interpreted, however, merely or even largely as instances of containment and 

control. In the framework of Deleuze’s thought, incorporeality refers in the end to bodies’ 

potential to vary: to their capacities of acquiring traits and performing deeds 

which are not, yet, materially present here and now (Massumi Parables for 5). 

It is of course impossible to account for each and every above-listed variable even 

in certain specific assemblages of music, the body, and subjectivity. Nonetheless, 

the fieldwork made it clear that if the goal is to rethink how subjects and sexes are 

constituted in live music, then the notion of assemblage proves to be not only fruitful, 

but almost a necessity. It is a great tool with which to grasp the multi-layered nature 

of the sonic in general and operatic music-making in particular. 

The concept of assemblage helps, furthermore, to complicate ideas about sexual 

difference. Since the focus is on singers, we can take vocal qualities as a case in 

point, without forgetting their linkages with other social, material and discursive components 

involved in singing. It could be argued that every voice, be it operatic or 

inhabiting some other musical-cultural domain, is an assemblage to begin with. This 

became clear in both of the stage productions I observed. Not a single role or character 

in them was univocal. 

In W.A. Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the first of the productions I attended, there is the 

role of Fiordiligi, a young woman. In vocal terms the role is usually defined as a part 

for high coloratura soprano, and the role demands indeed a very high voice capable of 

producing rapid figurative or “coloratura” passages. These vocal-musical features 

have been, interestingly enough, interpreted as simulations of female hysteria in various 

studies on opera, which renders them sexually differentiated in a stereotypical 

and moreover pejorative manner (Abbate In Search of Opera 86; 91–92). However, listened 

to more carefully, the part of Fiordiligi stretches beyond mere coloratura work 

and high frequencies. The singer of the role must also have a strong lower register in 

her voice with noticeably darker tones, as well as a capacity to shift quickly from the 

highest to the lowest register. Hence, we are talking about a voice/body that has both 

agility and steadiness, both readiness for light slides and remarkable muscular force 

to control the voice’s manifold movements, its “flows, energies, intensities, and durations” 

to quote Grosz again. It is the aspect of power and control on the one hand, and 

the multiplicity of the singer’s voice on the other that questions negative associations 

160 | Milla Tiainen

of this type of high voice to hysteria: to uncontrollability and vocally, piercing “feminine 

noise.” 20 


At least in the production I observed, Fiordiligi was rendered multiple also at the 

level of stage action. For one, the singer’s performance contained elements of irony 

and parody. These were used with the conscious aim to over-exaggerate conventional 

markers of “female hysteria” (this was agreed on in the rehearsals of the opera). The 

ironic and parodist expressions included theatrical bodily trembles and waving of 

hair, as well as a high moan in the middle of Fiordiligi’s major solo number. Apart from 

that, there were moments when the authority exercised by the singer (through her 

vocal and bodily virtuosity) over the other performers/characters was stressed in a 

more serious manner. The singer’s registers of action included moreover bursts of 

violence (like kicking one of the male characters, Fiordiligi’s fiancé Guglielmo), and 

tender bodily contacts with another female character/player, Fiordiligi’s sister 

Dorabella (FN Cft: 4 Nov 2003; MD Cft: 5 Dec 2003). 

What the scope of these expressions can be taken to demonstrate is that singers 

of contemporary operatic culture never, or at least rarely, actualize some uniform set 

of sexual difference. Rather, their performances create mobile assemblages of musical, 

cultural and sexed styles. Besides producing vocal tones with associations to 

varying modes of sexual difference in- and outside of opera, their gestures, movements 

and interactions with others can point to numerous cultural directions. These 

may range from opera and theatre to cinema, television, dance, current social discussions; 

even feminist theories of subjectivity. Furthermore, when forming and reforming 

into assemblages, the variables differentiate, so that they potentially 

engender new (micro-) existences of corporeality, sex, and subjectivity. Among other 

things, this depends on the perception of listeners-viewers. In feminist and queer 

studies of music, opera already features as a field where complex and sometimes 

surprisingly unconventional sexual differences – such as homoeroticism between 

female performers – are negotiated, (Blackmer and Smith). The notion of assemblage 

transports the question of opera’s sexual complexity into a new theoretical terrain, 

while, at the same time, reformulating it. 

As far as spatiality is concerned, opera – as a dynamic field of sexual differences – 

could be considered with Deleuze/Guattari as a “striated space” as well as a 

“smooth space.” Applied in a somewhat loose fashion, the first concept refers to 

domains and practices – cultural, socio-political, intellectual, etc. – that have become 

conventionalized, are more or less closed and often have a strict, centralized organization 

(Deleuze and Guattari 474–75). In everyday imagination, opera is perhaps 

likely to be equated with this kind of striated space: it seems to be dwelling in its own 

cultural sphere, repeating centuries-old narratives, sounds, and sexual arrangements. 

If, however, observed at the grass roots level, opera, as I tried to show above, 

reveals itself as at least partly and potentially open to other artistic and social 


spaces. Due to this, it is also open to the spectrum of sexual styles of being. Through 

these tendencies, opera culture possesses features of a smooth space alongside a 

striated one. It does not have an all-encompassing (transcendental) set of codes that 

regulates all its manifestations, but is in principle varied, unlimited and renewing in 

its current and future expressions (Deleuze and Guattari 474–500). 

The diversity of sexed potentials informing singers’ actions – their simultaneous 

restrictions notwithstanding – can be further explored with Grosz’s notion of “a thousand 

tiny sexes” (“A Thousand Tiny Sexes” 1456–57). Inspired by Deleuze and 

Guattari, the concept expresses a belief in the inescapable multiplicity of sexual differences, 

be they bodily, emotive, erotic, intellectual, or some other. Whatever domain 

we are talking about, the point is that this multiplicity blurs rigid dualisms of sex, no 

matter how strenuously the dualistic models are deployed in order to tame and control 

the abundance of sexual differences. At an analytical level, the acknowledgement 

of multiplicity calls for, in Claire Colebrook’s apt words, “a bottom-up theory” 

(Understanding 43). Instead of concentrating on how the big difference of “masculine” 

vs. “feminine” is articulated and partly unsuccessfully sustained in various cultural 

realms, we might begin at the other end: starting with the ways in which bodily 

subjects are different corporeally, expressively, sonically, through discursive attributions, 

in their encounters with others, and in connection to non-human factors. Or, to 

stress the aspect of materiality once again, we might ask, how are different modalities 

of sexual differentiation due to the specificity of different bodies? (Colebrook, 

“From Radical Representation” 90) 

The perspective of “a thousand tiny sexes” does not equate with obliviousness to 

power relations that prevail both between and within sexed, social groups. What it 

can mean is a theoretical and methodological opportunity to enrich our ideas about 

subject formation, the body and sex. This applies both to musical practices and to 

other fields. In this way, the perspective of “a thousand tiny sexes” may expose and 

then replace the insufficiency of dualistic accounts of sexual difference with their 

simplifying, controlling, and strongly hierarchical tendencies. 

New Materialism, Music and Cultural Theory 

To conclude, I would like to assemble the thematic threads of this article once more, 

this time, however, focusing on the concept of subjectivity, since it has received less 

explicit attention so far than the other two main concepts – body/corporeality and 

sexual difference. What is the relevance of the above observations on singing for current 

cultural theoretical and feminist discussions of subjectivity? What is subjectivity 

when mapped through singers’ live music-making? On what levels does it figure and 

whom it may concern? 

The answer to these questions appears twofold to me. On the one hand, it may be 

argued that issues discussed in this article – bodies’ openness to change and their 

162 | Milla Tiainen


surroundings, the varying modalities of sexual difference in vocal, corporeal and 

social registers, and the resulting expressive and thinking formations i.e. subjects – 

are characteristic of musical situations, especially sung ones. Thus, materially 

embedded and multiple subjectivities emerge when sounds are uttered, when bodies 

are situated in acoustic and performative spaces, and when social encounters are 

experienced on stage or as exchanges between different power positions, discursive 

acts and bodily arrangements (like teachers and singers in singing lessons). On the 

other hand, it could be argued that while these issues may appear in particularly 

interesting ways in music, they exist in other socio-cultural realms too, acquiring just 

positively different modes of differentiation there. The concepts of open materiality 

and assemblages can then be connected, not only to music but eventually to many coexistent 

slices of reality as well. Likewise, they can be elaborated in many disciplinary 

contexts besides musicology. This, however, does not diminish the fact that exploring 

music can bring about new cultural theoretical, philosophical, and feminist ideas of 

subjectivity that are of relevance across disciplinary borders. In regard to musicology, 

the new materialist approach challenges scholars working in this field to rethink their 

methods of studying the emergence, character and “worldly” effects of sounds. 

Recalling the location of this article at the crossroads of cultural studies, 

musicology and feminism, the following citation by Braidotti sums up, what kinds of 

re-articulations of subjectivity have been at stake in my mappings of singers’ musicmaking. 

In her article “Becoming Woman: or Sexual Difference Revisited” she states 

that the subject she is advocating in her own theoretical project is “an intensive, multiple 

subject, functioning in a net of interconnections. I would add that it is rhizomatic 

(that is to say non-unitary, non-linear, web-like), embodied and therefore perfectly artificial; 

as an artifact it is machinic, complex, endowed with multiple capacities of interconnectedness” 

(44). A little later, referring clearly to debates that concern the 

interrelations of discourses, bodies and subjects she adds that subjectivity “is to be 

understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point 

of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions” 

(44). It is precisely along these lines that I have argued for the materiality of bodies, 

sexes and subjects in music. As Braidotti’s expressions “artificial” and “artifact” 

make clear, re-theorizing subjectivity in a new materialist framework does not mean 

that its materiality be posited as an essential ground to our existence. Rather, this 

materiality is to be approached as a wealth of ongoing processes that become 

embroiled in other processes of the world, material as well as non-material. 

Interestingly for future studies on sonic phenomena and subjectivity, bodies that 

make vocal music form part of these processes. Opera culture is one fascinating 

framework in which such bodies, through their production of operatic voice, take on 

various forms, become sexed, relate to other components of reality, and endlessly 

differentiate. 


Notes 

1. As a general rule, the terms “sex/sexed” 

and “sexual difference(s)” are used in this 

article instead of that of “gender.” The 

motivations behind this choice are explained 

properly on page 150–51. Suffice it to say here 

that the concept of “sex” informs my affinities 

to theories of sexual difference, which depart in 

certain significant aspects from the social 

constructivist accounts of gender with their 

stronger linguistic emphasis. However, I also 

utilize the term “gender” when discussing such 

studies on music that explicitly use that concept 

and, more often than not, lean theoretically 

towards social constructivist approaches. 

2. For more extensive accounts of new 

materialist thinking in relation to cultural theory, 

feminism and philosophy, De Landa; Grosz, Time 

& The Nick of; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. 

3. The expression “positively different” 

crystallizes one of the aims of new materialism: 

to conceive of differences between things and 

phenomena beyond the more or less dualistic 

representational scheme of “analogous to” 

(sameness, resemblance) and “different from” 

(opposition). In place of this framework, new 

materialism proposes a view of differences as 

inexhaustible micro-differentiations, which occur 

both within and between phenomena. For a 

more detailed account of this, see page 55–56. 

4. The Sibelius-Academy is the leading Music 

University of Finland. Relating supposedly to a 

previous lack of interest in live musical situations, 

the use of fieldwork methods has remained rare 

in art music studies. Largely these methodological 

concerns have been left to the hands of 

ethnomusicologists and, to a lesser degree, 

popular music scholars. However, there exist 

already some well-known ethnographic analyses 

of art music culture. See Kingsbury; Nettl; Born. 

5. The terms “music theory” and “music 

analysis” are partly interchangeable, but their 

implications also vary when moving from 

Europe to the U.S. In US-American musicology 

departments, “music theory” often refers to 

different traditions of analyzing musical 

structures, forms, and stylistic conventions. 

164 | Milla Tiainen 

These include newer critical approaches, such 

as developments within feminist music theory. 

In Europe, on the other hand, “music theory” 

often carries a narrower meaning, referring 

more to the conservatory-type study of the 

traditional formal features of Western art music 

(from the composers” point of view) rather than 

to academic research. The term reserved for 

academic approaches dealing with the 

organization and meanings of musical textures 

is “music analysis.” From now on, I will use the 

latter term while acknowledging the 

terminological ambiguities. 

6. I do not wish to argue that the challenge to 

the establishments of music analytical 

scholarship has originated solely in the Anglo- 

American academia. Certain movements of 

more continental-based musical semiotics 

have, for instance, also redefined the goals and 

frames of music analysis (Välimäki 111–28). 

However, for reasons of brevity I limit my 

attention here to the new musicological 

impulses behind this paradigm shift. 

7. For example, music analyst and popular music 

scholar Nicholas Cook (204) notes with a critical 

tone the long historical roots of treating (art) 

music as written texts. He places the point of 

departure of this mode of thought in 

“musicology’s origins as a nineteenth-century 

discipline modeled on philology.” In place of a 

textual view of music, Cook envisions 

performance-centered approaches, and 

consequent reconsiderations of music’s ontology. 

8. An early and influential example is 

Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of 

Women (1989), which concentrates on 

bourgeois gender hierarchies in 19th century 

opera plots. In the study, Clément comments 

on the broader social and political implications 

of these plots, i.e., their relations with the wider 

gender–power-systems of the surrounding 

society. Textual-discursive approaches such as 

Clément’s come close to narrative and later, 

discourse analytical approaches prevalent in 

today”s cultural and literary studies. Many 

researchers in this field have in fact received 

their education originally in literature.

9. Study models of harmony, form, thematic 

processes, etc. 

10. Including feminist, queer and cultural 

studies perspectives. 

11. That is, actual instances of sound 

production and perception. 

12. This includes the presence of musicians’ 

bodies in sounds as well as the corporeal 

effects of music on listeners. 

13. Corporeal materiality in music is made to 

mark that which is original in us but at the same 

time irretrievably in the past. In other words, 

music’s bodily aspects are seen as highlighting 

the major distinction between “before the 

Symbolic” and “after the Symbolic” which 

according to both Lacan and Kristeva lies at the 

core of the subject. Moreover, it is this transition 

from the pre-symbolic domain to the regulated 

sphere of language and culture that allegedly 

creates a crack or a crisis in human (psychic) 

existence. It is in this way that psychoanalytic 

approaches, linking music as they do to the 

longed for, pre-symbolic origins of subjectivity, may 

be claimed to give its materiality at least a touch 

of essentiality. However, differences between 

Lacan and Kristeva’s views should be also taken 

into account. For Kristeva, the rift between 

symbolic and pre-symbolic forces is not as clear 

or fundamental as it is for Lacan. For example, in 

her theory of signification, all signifying events 

consist of two components: the semiotic (presymbolic, 

drive-anchored) and the symbolic 

(referring to language as sign, nomination and 

syntax) (Kristeva 19–106; Välimäki 138–39). 

Thus, utilization of Kristeva’s insights enables 

such analyses of music, in which the (corporeal) 

materiality of sounds does not designate so 

powerfully an essentialized primary stage of 

subjectivity, but is interpreted more as an actual 

part of the subject’s life throughout. 

14. This type of sexually differentiated scheme 

of subjectivity has also been used, après 

Kristeva, for feminist purposes: for affirming 

every subject’s “female” (mother-related) 

origins, which express themselves through 

corporeal registers of existence (desires, 


pleasures, affects). See Välimäki 138–42, 

301–27. 

15. Evidently, not all musicological studies on 

embodiment, sex, and subjectivity fit into the 

model presented above. Thus, the model should 

be seen more as a heuristic device of 

classification than as an attempt to offer a 

definitive account of musicological takes on 

these issues. To mention some exceptions to 

the model, Potter explores the cultural formation 

of voices, operatic and partly popular musical, 

with references to historically developed singing 

techniques and their bodily implications. 

Hutcheon and Hutcheon set out to examine the 

operatic body – both singers’ and listeners’ – 

through an interdisciplinary analysis of opera as 

live art. See also Abel; Koestenbaum. 

16. They could be geological or other natural 

processes, as well as human physico-cultural 

capacities and social organizations. 

17. Such as air, sensorial data (aural, visual, 

tactile), and affective forces of audience 

response. 

18. These include vocal cords, back and 

abdomen muscles, cavities of the head, lungs, 

and the whole circulation of air into, within and 

out of the body. 

19. Such as high dramatic soprano, 

lyrical/dramatic mezzo soprano, bass baritone, 

etc. All the voice types have, moreover, many 

further sub-categories. 

20. Women as central, even authoritative 

agents in opera, and bodily virtuosic 

sovereignty as a path to their empowerment 

are themes that have already been touched 

upon in several musicological studies. 

Abbate (Opera) insists that the noisy and 

indispensable presence of female singers on 

the operatic stage subverts at least in part the 

misogynist tendencies of many opera plots 

(see also Wheelock; Leonardi, and Pope). 

Taking another route, Hannah Bosma 

discusses the qualitative varieties in a single 

female artist’s, Madonna’s, voice, and their 

differing gendered potentials in a way that 

could be applied to operatic singing too. 


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Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood 

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2001. 

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1996. 

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Fieldwork material 

Field notes 

Così fan tutte (rehearsal) 4 Nov 2003. 

Singing lesson (Meri Siirala) 1 Dec 2004. 

Mini Disc recordings 

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Performing Subjectivity: 

Literature, Race and Mourning

Invisible Music (Ellison) 

ABSTRACT 


David Copenhafer 

Invisible Music (Ellison) 

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man “race” is not simply seen but heard as well. This article 

addresses the complex interaction of the audible and the visible in the novel and seeks 

to grasp the dynamics of race in terms of both music and figural language. Music, it is 

claimed, acts like a figure of speech; it can provide a measure of racial identity but also 

tends to destabilize any and all identity effects. The essay closes with a meditation on 

Jeff Wall’s photograph, “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface.” 

Introduction 

In music what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is 

language, it is, like notation in music history, a language sedimented from gestures. It 

is not possible to ask music what it conveys as its meaning; rather, music has as its 

theme the question, How can gestures be made eternal? (Adorno 139) 

Everyone knows that Invisible Man is a classic, but if that designation is to be anything 

other than a death sentence, then we must admit that we have yet to comprehend 

the novel, yet to understand completely what it has to say, in particular, 

regarding the interaction of the audible, the visible, and the racial. All three dimensions 

are invoked on its very first page: 

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless 

heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded 

by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my 

Invisible Music (Ellison) | 171

surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and 

anything except me […] Nor is that invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident 

to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition 

of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. (3) 

The narrator insists that his invisibility is not natural, nor even accidental, but the 

product of a “refusal” on the part of others to see him. “Blackness,” the unnamed 

“biochemical accident” to which he refers, would appear to provoke this refusal. But 

insofar as the narrator is able to speak, to write, to figure his condition, his invisibility 

would appear not to be absolute. Indeed, the very figure of the “bodiless head” by 

which he means to mark his invisibility confers some minimal visibility on the narrator, 

and it suggests that the refusal of a black body is perhaps never complete. A 

mouth, a face, may tend stubbornly to persist. Beyond this particular figure, however, 

the simple fact of the narrative voice, what we might call an irreducible acoustic 

remainder in the text, tends to bring the blackness of the narrator into visibility. 

Someone is speaking. And it is difficult not to confer a “raced” body to a voice 

despite the massive epistemological uncertainties of such a conferral. Oddly, voice 

translates a measure of vision. 

“Race” is constituted, in part, through looking, but that looking would appear 

already to be formed and inflected by notions of race, some of which belong to the 

order of the audible. This circuitous logic represents more than an epistemological 

quandary. It is the arena in which our constant failure to recognize one another 

occurs – the condition of our anxiety, our jealousy, our suspicion, and even of our 

love. There is very likely no exit from this circuit, only a renewed effort to, in Ellison’s 

words, “change the joke and slip the yoke,” that is, to grasp what this logic enables 

and disables and to modify the terms by which we are held. What, then, is the relationship 

in Invisible Man between speaking (or singing), race and in/visibility? A first 

attempt at answering this question takes us to a reading of – and a listening to – the 

novel’s prologue. 1 

Prologue: Music’s (Black and Blue) Face 

The prologue to Invisible Man is like a hypertext with the Fats Waller-Andy Razaf song 

“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” functioning as its soundtrack. This is not 

to say there is a one to one correspondence between music and text, but the song is 

clearly a phantom presence throughout the prologue: the writing is a response, an 

engagement both with its lyrics and its musical form. What both the song and the prologue 

advocate is a “logic” of the cut or sudden jump into a new key or register. 2 

Comparing the song to the prologue will enable us to elucidate this logic as well as 

to understand how both engage with the circuit of race and in/visibility. 

Armstrong recorded three versions of the tune in his lifetime. Two were recorded 

after the publication of Invisible Man, so it must be the version from 1929 to which 

172 | David Copenhafer

the narrator listens on his phonograph. The bluesy composition in A minor is written 

in the 32 bar, AABA form (three stanzas interrupted by a bridge) characteristic of 

many songs from the early jazz era. 

“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” 

Section/Key Lyric 

A (A minor) Old empty bed 

Springs hard as lead 

Feel like old Ned 

Wish I was dead 

All my life through 

I’ve been so black and blue. 

A’ (A minor) Even a mouse 

Ran from my house 

They laugh at you 

And scorned you too 

What did I do 

to be so black and blue? 

B (A-flat major / C major) I’m white inside 

But that don’t help my case 

Cause I can’t hide 

What is in my fa … 

A’’ (A minor) How will it end? 

Ain’t got a friend 

My only sin 

is in my skin 

What did I do 

to be so black and blue? 


The band runs through the song twice, first as an instrumental, a second time 

with vocals. During the instrumental first half, the melody rises towards C, what could 

be called the pivotal note of the entire composition. When Armstrong begins to sing, 

he does away with the rising contour of the melody, emphasizing only its peak. 

The lack of melodic movement in the vocal A sections is complemented by the images 

of destitution in the lyrics (“old empty bed/ springs hard as lead”) and by the simple 

rhyme scheme (couplets, rhymed aaaa in the first section). The song seems stuck on 

C, and a certain poverty in the form perfectly conveys the poverty to which the lyrics 

allude. Interestingly, the harmony moves to the relative major (C) in order to pose the 

highly rhetorical yet serious question “What did I do to be so black and blue?” 3 


The relative fixity of the A section makes the jump to the B section or bridge 

quite dramatic. Suddenly the song seems to be in A-flat major, a remote key from its 

A minor “home.” This harmonic distance complements the strangeness of the first 

line of the bridge – “I’m white inside” – and establishes something of a parallelism 

between white and black, major and minor (although, as we indicated, the major 

mode occurs at the end of each A section). The vaguely triumphant sound of the 

leap to A-flat major is quickly undermined however. The harmony oscillates between 

A-flat major and C major and does not affix what could be called the “ideal” of whiteness 

to either. Once again, C is the highest note of the main melody, but instead 

of rising toward or remaining stuck on it as in the A sections, the melody of the 

bridge falls away from C, as if to signal a falling away from the ideal of whiteness to 

which the lyrics allude or, alternately, to signify a falling away from blackness as an 

ideal. 

The bridge recontextualizes those elements of the A section – the note C and 

even the key of C – that signify blackness (or the condition of being black and blue). 

In the bridge, C is associated with a strange kind of “interior” whiteness, something 

not entirely of the order of the visible. Though it is tempting to think of the bridge 

as the simple interior of the song; it would be more accurate to say that it opens a 

gap or way out of the song’s conventions. The bridge itself is a convention, but one 

that doesn’t quite reinforce the conventional logic of what it interrupts. The bridge 

demonstrates the utter reversibility of musical tropes and suggests that a portion of 

music used to designate a particular race may quickly be turned to gesture towards 

another. 

We will return to the even more radical way in which Armstrong’s singing complicates 

the notions of blackness and of whiteness upon which the song finds an 

always uncertain basis. Now, however, I want to turn to the prologue of Invisible Man 

to demonstrate how it obeys a similar logic of the bridge. 

The narrator states: 

I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility – and vice versa. 

And so I play the invisible music of my isolation. The last statement doesn’t seem 

just right, does it? But it is; you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom 

seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black 

and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility? (13–14) 

“Play” here seems to refer to the fact that the narrator plays records on his phonograph 

but also to his activity as a writer, one who puts things down “in black and 

white.” One should imagine him engaged in a ritual of listening to songs like “(What 

Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” over and over, picking up the needle and dropping 

it, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes elsewhere, playing (with) the music but 

also transforming it, transcribing it onto another medium, the page on which he writes. 

Like the Waller-Razaf song, his narrative is both traditionally structured but given to 



sudden departure, changing the subject from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence 

to sentence. In order to demonstrate how the narrative logic corresponds to the 

logic of the song, allow me to quote one exemplary passage in full. Notice how “once” 

marks key changes in the narration; the word functions like the very temporal nodes 

of which the passage speaks: 

Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream 

and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the 

vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. 

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think 

it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility 

aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave 

me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was 

a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, 

you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. 

Instead of the swift imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those 

points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks 

and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music … Once I saw a prizefighter 

boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one 

violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel 

held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale 

of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as 

a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The 

yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time. So under the spell of 

the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. (my emphasis; 8–9) 

Ice cream becomes vapor becomes light and then music; then music becomes boxing 

and then music again. These rapid changes reinforce the narrator’s reflections on 

two methods of marking time that are represented by the two styles of fighting – one 

regular, or “scientific,” the other unexpected and violent. Style, whether in a narrative 

or a song (or a fight), is the tension between the propulsive force of the form – its 

tendency to move from a to b to c, from beginning to middle to end – and the force of 

interruption, one that threatens to take the form to a place from which it cannot 

return, or to induce a complete breakdown. 

The narrative departures, like the B section of “Black and Blue,” break with what 

comes before but also lead back to a renewed statement of the previous material. 

The brief narrative of the “yokel,” for example, is a bridge that cuts into the previous 

narrative of listening to Armstrong and ties the two parts of that story together. 

Similarly, the bridge of “Black and Blue” is where the song communicates with itself. 

Neither fully outside nor totally contained by the rest, it is an exterior interiority or vice 

versa. The bridge is a rhythmic disturbance or hesitation, a stylized shudder that troubles 

the dominant narrative pattern of both song and writing. 


The narrator describes Armstrong’s stylistic innovation primarily in rhythmic terms, 

and he relates rhythm to visibility: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different 

sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.” My question, then, is does 

style, whether as a cut or as playing with the beat, help to bring a performer into visibility? 

Armstrong worries the melodic line, stylizes the predictable, rushing some 

phrases, such as the initial “old empty bed,” and extending others, particularly those 

in the bridge (“iinside”), past what might be considered their usual term. Such idiosyncratic 

phrasing helps to stamp the performance as his own and constitutes what 

might be termed his aural signature. But does it allow us to “see” Louis Armstrong? 

The narrator writes: “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry 

out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible.” 

Armstrong, though he is invisible, apparently sings in such a way as not to register an 

awareness of that fact. If we follow the narrator’s lead in trying to understand 

Armstrong’s singing, is it not necessary to see-him-not-seeing that he is invisible? Is 

it not necessary, in other words, to see blackness, and to see the invisibility of blackness, 

in order to comprehend the performance? 

The narrator listens to Armstrong in a room “full of light” about which he says: 

Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, 

love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives 

birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay 

in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room 

becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it 

is with me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware 

of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not 

become alive until I discovered my invisibility. (6–7) 

In this paradoxical passage, the narrator asserts that light, an excess of light, confirms 

the reality that he is invisible. How can this be unless blackness itself were the 

true source of invisibility? Yet, as the narrator points out, blackness is not enough to 

guarantee invisibility: one must refuse it as well. In order to see invisibility one must 

see another who is either invisible to a third person or invisible to herself, perhaps 

both. At the limit, it might be possible both to refuse the blackness of another and to 

witness that refusal, to be the “first person” who sees as well as the “third person” 

who does not. In that case, one might be able to say of oneself: “I see myself not 

seeing another person.” This is one way to translate the narrator’s statement, 

“Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. 

I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible.” The narrator insists on 

the refusal to see Armstrong (his invisibility), participates in that refusal himself, and 

experiences the pathos of Armstrong’s own supposed lack of awareness of his invisibility. 

The tragicomic pathos of Armstrong’s performance would lie in the stark contrast 

between the tremendous vocal skill he brings to it and the failure of that 



performance to bring him social recognition, irrespective of his fame and fortune. 4 

For the narrator, Armstrong remains, like him, an “invisible man,” one who is subject 

to the same forms of racism, both institutional and non-institutional, intrinsic to midcentury 

American life. 

Must we accept the narrator’s hypothesis concerning both Armstrong’s invisibility 

and his lack of awareness of that condition? Armstrong would appear to be the most 

uncanny of figures, one whose invisibility may be seen; in which case, invisibility would 

appear to break down as soon as one tries to designate it. This tension between the 

visible and the invisible is most apparent in the narrator’s peculiar use of the word 

“form.” Apparently, there is a “form” of invisibility, a manner in which visibility and invisibility 

may co-exist. What is “form” for the narrator? Certainly it is linked to appearance. 

But, like the circus head in comparison to which the narrator first describes his 

invisibility, to have a form is crucially linked to having a face. The unnamed “beautiful 

girl” mentioned in the passage above is another figure for an invisibility that retains, 

just barely, a face. I can’t help but think she is also a figure for Armstrong, one produced 

by the narrator’s “new analytic way of listening.” For Armstrong fashions a memorable 

“face” in “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” by distending and 

distorting the very word into something scarcely recognizable. 

In fact, he never completes the word, never completes the rhyme with “case” that 

might bring some kind of closure to the bridge. 5 Instead “face” becomes the point of 

departure of his scat. Armstrong steps, or perhaps falls, outside of the boundaries of 

language and of the song’s steady tempo in order to announce another, always interrupted 

time, the time of the cut and of a cutting into the cut that represents a subtilization 

of the bridge. The bridge bridges. Each phoneme or sonic fragment 

constitutes a miniature drama of departure from and return to this face or figure that 

is not one. 

I am tempted to speak of Armstrong’s profound awareness of the face, of “his” 

face, precisely as a figure – a figure, in this case, for disfiguration. How else to 

explain the strange, no doubt improvised, grammar of the line: “ ‘Cause I/can’t hide/ 

what is in my face”? “In my face”? The original lyric had been “on my face.” And by 

means of that minor change, a single letter, a single sound, Armstrong turns the 

entire rhetoric of color and of race in the bridge on its head. He says, in effect, that 

race is not to be seen on his face, is not exactly “a biochemical accident to [his] epidermis,” 

but is to be found elsewhere “in” what the face signifies (as well as “in” the 

sound of his horn which is often literally in his face). In this way, “whiteness” and 

“blackness” are both drawn “inside” some ideal space of language, into the figures 

that produce our notions of color, our perceptions of racialized faces. All perception 

of color is a disfiguration insofar as our truly primitive, dichotomous vocabulary of 

“black” and “white” misleads us into believing that these adjectives possess some 

stable referential value. 


The form that allows the narrator to see the invisibility of blackness is the disfigured 

face Armstrong produces in “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?” It is the 

figure of prosopopeia which de Man in “Autobiography as De-facement” describes as: 

[T]he fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which 

posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice 

assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the 

trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is 

the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name […] is made as intelligible and memorable 

as a face. (76) 

Armstrong’s generosity, on the recording, is to offer his disfigured face as a form of 

address to an absent other, the listener. As de Man points out such an offering “posits 

the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.” In other 

words, at the same time that Armstrong both provides and deprives himself of a face, 

he posits the listening, perhaps singing or speaking face of another. There is a fundamental 

echolalia to all forms of address (and what language fails to address?): the 

apostrophe calls out to one who is recognized as capable of responding, of becoming 

alternately ear or mouth in a sequence that need admit no final term. 

One should not paint too rosy a picture of Armstrong’s address, however, for, as I 

have already indicated, his figuration is also a dis-figuration. The scat that emerges 

to interrupt his pronunciation of the word “face” points towards a history and a pain 

that cannot be uttered by means of conventional language. Nor, however, can it be 

uttered by “unconventional” language, but it may be more insistently indexed by the 

breakdown of language than by its untroubled operation. Scat both responds and 

alludes to the history of slavery and of racial violence but it can also produce a singer 

who, at least momentarily, is on the way towards losing his or her connection to other 

speakers. This potential loss of community is signified by the way the rhythm section 

drops out at the moment Armstrong sings “face.” Armstrong’s scat (dis)figuration 

exposes the tension between two temporalities at work in the song – the time of the 

soloist and the time of the ensemble. The price of freedom, of a soloist’s time, the 

time to index a pain that is at once personal and historical, is the loss of the common 

time of the community or ensemble. 

The narrator’s fear of the complete loss of form, expressed in the dream of the beautiful 

girl whose face expands beyond recognition, is related to the potential loss of both 

identity and community; and it is what drives his ambivalent response to Armstrong’s 

address. Although he clearly admires Armstrong’s virtuosity and rhythmic subtlety, he 

also posits the singer’s ignorance, a lack of awareness of his invisibility, as a way to differentiate 

himself and to grasp his own relative awareness of invisibility. By stating 

“I am an invisible man” the narrator fabricates an identity that both excludes and 

includes Armstrong: they are both invisible in his conception but only he is aware of that 

fact. As we have seen, however, the entire prologue represents a sustained attempt to 



recuperate the very work on invisibility that Armstrong’s music performs, its logic of 

the break and of the breakdown – the failure of language to capture either history or 

experience. 

The narrator translates part of his listening experience by saying: 

I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath 

the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it 

and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz 

as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the 

color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slave 

owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more 

rapid tempo and I heard someone shout: 

“Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the ‘Blackness of Blackness’ ” 

And a congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black, brother, most 

black…” 

“In the beginning […]” 

“At the very start,” they cried. 

“[…] there was blackness […]” (9) 

Insofar as the narrator records this vision, which is also a listening, he posits an historical 

community with which he clearly identifies. However, he also stands apart 

from it and does not join the “congregation of voices” that respond to the preacher. 

This is perhaps the narrator’s most characteristic gesture, to repeat and recast 

scenes of subjection, scenes in which invisibility becomes intelligible. If we recall the 

narrator’s question – “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and 

white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” – we see that he understands 

his own activity as a writer as analogous to Armstrong’s (dis)figuration of invisibility. 

Both Armstrong and the narrator give a face to the subject of racial violence at the 

same time that they are incapable of bringing that subject into full view. The narrator 

expresses an ambivalent identification with figures of blackness/invisibility such as 

Armstrong, the “beautiful girl,” or the others who emerge during his listening to 

“Black and Blue.” By turning away from such figures, the narrator produces what he 

takes to be his unique identity, that of the “invisible man” who is capable of stating 

that he is invisible. But the narrator’s turning away is never complete. He repeatedly 

conjures the figures or faces of those from whom he would seek to distance himself. 

The tendency to refuse to see blackness is one of the unspeakable conditions of 

the intelligibility of the subject. Though the narrator identifies this disposition as part 

of the social world that denies him recognition, insofar as he is part of that world he 

cannot help but repeat elements of its logic. The uninhabitable logic of social recognition 

– the web of social and linguistic forces that enables “one” to say “I” – would 

appear to demand that the narrator himself fail to recognize another on the basis of 

race, another whom he might wish to admire or to love. In other words, the narrator’s 


self-assertion – his capacity to say “I” – seems predicated on a certain destruction 

of community. The narrator’s resistance to this eventuality results in the melancholy 

repetition of figures of blackness/invisibility, figures that disavow the loss they also 

help to instantiate. 

Imitation of Life 

The narrator’s ambivalent reaction to Armstrong, which is really a refusal to grant him 

the status of a self-conscious artist, repeats aspects of the critical reception of the 

famous musician whom some, including members of the Be Bop generation, 

described as a racial opportunist or “Uncle Tom.” Armstrong incurred this charge in 

part because of the way he would contort his face while singing and playing. Ellison 

himself defends Armstrong from such criticism in his essay “On Bird, Bird-Watching 

and Jazz”: 

The thrust toward respectability exhibited by the Negro jazzmen of [Charlie] Parker’s 

generation drew much of its immediate fire from their understandable rejection of the traditional 

entertainer’s role – a heritage from the minstrel tradition – exemplified by such an 

outstanding creative musician as Louis Armstrong. But when they fastened the epithet 

“Uncle Tom” upon Armstrong’s music they confused artistic quality with questions of personal 

conduct, a confusion which would ultimately reduce their own music to the mere 

matter of race. By rejecting Armstrong they thought to rid themselves of the entertainer’s 

role. And by way of getting rid of the role, they demanded, in the name of their racial identity, 

a purity of status which by definition is impossible for the performing artist. (259) 

One senses, even in this defense, a certain unease with Armstrong whose “personal 

conduct” apparently needs to be held apart from his art in order for the latter to be 

judged properly. Ellison goes on to say that Armstrong’s way of performing is “basically 

a make-believe role of clown – which the irreverent poetry and triumphant sound 

of his trumpet makes even the squarest of squares aware of” (261). Again, we notice 

a slight, but unmistakable hesitation about Armstrong in that “basically.” I would 

argue that Ellison’s ambivalence about the need for a black performer to evoke 

aspects of the minstrel tradition is what produces this hesitation, even here in the 

context of his otherwise vigorous defense of Armstrong’s mode of performing. It is 

worth noting that it is the sound of Armstrong’s trumpet which apparently needs no 

defense and alerts even the “squarest of squares” of Armstrong’s real stance vis-àvis 

what must then be primarily a visible form of self-mockery. 

Can the stereotype of the black entertainer always be successfully turned in the 

manner Ellison implies Armstrong was able to turn it? And what might be the consequences 

of its unsuccessful turning? Is it enough to assert an artist exercises some 

conscious control over his or her role to escape a melancholy and ambivalent reaction 

to the appearance of that role? In what follows I want to take up these questions 

in relationship to another scene of subjection, one that occurs much later in the 



novel (though it takes place at a moment that is chronologically prior to the time of 

the prologue). 

The incident occurs while the narrator is working for “the Brotherhood” – what is, 

essentially, the novel’s name for the Communist Party. He stumbles upon a strange 

object and a mysterious scene unfolding on a crowded street in New York City: 

It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd’s fascinated eyes and down again, 

seeing it clearly this time. I’d seen nothing like it before. A grinning doll of orange-andblack 

tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which 

some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, 

shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached 

from the black, mask-like face. It’s no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll 

throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in 

public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions. (431) 

At first the narrator cannot seem to decide on an appropriate reaction to the tiny figure, 

and says he was “held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and 

struggled between the desire to join in the laughter and to leap upon it with both feet” 

(432). His description of the scene registers a distaste for the racial caricature but also 

a trace of amusement with its bouncy demeanor. He also suspects that something else 

lies behind the performance, possibly a “fierce defiance,” or a “perverse pleasure.” The 

narrator’s confusion seems partly to derive from his inability to identify the source of the 

doll’s motion. He imagines “some mysterious mechanism” to animate it, and he seems 

vexed by the contrast between the inanimate “mask-like face” and its lively movements. 

In “The Echo of the Subject,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes about a related 

scene in which an inability to identify the motive behind a visible, rhythmic gesture 

renders an event uncanny and incoherent. In the program notes to Mahler’s second 

symphony, the composer imagines someone coming across figures dancing at such 

a distance that no music is audible: 

The unceasingly moving, never understandable bustle of life becomes as ghastly as 

the moving of dancing figures in an illuminated dance hall into which you look from the 

dark night, from so far away that you cannot hear the music. The turning and moving of 

the couples appears then to be senseless, as the rhythm clue is missing. (193) 

For Lacoue-Labarthe, what renders the sight of the dancers unintelligible to the distant 

observer is the lack of an audible rhythm: 

Without rhythm, the dance (it is a waltz) becomes disorganized and disfigured. In other 

words, rhythm, of a specifically musical (acoustic) essence here, is prior to the figure or 

the visible schema whose appearance, as such – it conditions […] What is missing is 

quite simply a “participation” (categorization, schematization): in this case the repetition 

or temporal (not topological or spatial) constraint that acts as a means of diversification 

by which the real might be recognized, established, and disposed […] Missing is the repetition 

from which the division might be made between the mimetic and the non-mimetic: 


a division between the recognizable and the non-recognizable, the familiar and the 

strange, the real and the fantastic, the sensible and the mad – life and fiction. (194) 

If Lacoue-Labarthe is correct, then we are accustomed to seeing movement as what 

follows or imitates music – rhythmic gesture as a repetition of a rhythm that may be 

heard. Dance without music tends to discomfit. 

Unlike the figures of Mahler’s program the “Sambo” doll does not move in silence. 

Somewhat in the style of a vaudeville performer or carnival huckster, the narrator’s 

friend, Clifton, bounces in sympathetic motion with the dolls and produces a playful 

rap – the narrator calls it a “spiel” – meant to divest his audience of a tiny portion of 

their hard-earned money: 

Shake it up! Shake it up! 

He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. 

Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, 

– He’ll do the rest. Yes! 

[…] 

For he’s Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing, 

Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll. 

And all for twenty-five cents, the quarter part of a dollar 

Ladies and gentlemen, he’ll bring you joy 

[…] 

What makes him happy, what makes him dance, 

This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping joy boy? 

He’s more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he’s Sambo, the dancing doll, 

the twentieth-century miracle. 

Look at that rumba, that suzy-q, he’s Sambo-Boogie, 

Sambo-Woogie, you don’t have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed, he’ll kill 

your depression 

And your dispossession, he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile 

And only twenty-five cents, the brotherly two bits of a dollar because he 

wants me to eat. 

It gives him pleasure to see me eat. 

You simply take him and shake him … and he does the rest. 

Thank you, lady. (431–32) 

All of Clifton’s address appears in italics in the original, no doubt to denote the unreality 

of the scene for the narrator but also to indicate its quality as something other 

than everyday speech, something much closer to music or to poetry. One can imagine 

Clifton stressing individual words, somewhat in the manner of Armstrong, modifying 

either their duration or their dynamic. But despite Clifton’s musicality, the narrator is 


not comforted by the rhythmic correspondence between his rap and the doll’s movement. 

On the contrary, he is enraged by their association and identifies them so 

strongly with one another that his rhetoric tends to lose a distinction between the two: 

What had happened to Clifton? … It was as though he had chosen – how had he 

put it the night he fought with Ras? – to fall outside of history. I stopped in the middle 

of the walk with the thought. “To plunge,” he had said. But he knew that only in the 

Brotherhood could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo 

dolls. Such an obscene flouncing of everything human! (434–35) 

It is not clear whether the narrator’s judgment – “Such an obscene flouncing of everything 

human” – refers to the doll or to Clifton, for “flouncing” would appear to apply 

equally well to the spring-like motion of the doll but also to Clifton’s speech and its 

repetitive breaks and frequent internal rhyme. The narrator seems to view both performances 

as instances of the same pernicious stereotype, but would he be so quick 

to do so if the scene were played out in silence? What would have been the narrator’s 

reaction to a solemn-faced Clifton offering the dolls without commentary? It may be 

that the narrator is simply appalled by the fact that he is selling the dolls, trafficking 

in such images. But it appears that the “flouncing” rhythm of the rap is what enables 

him to make such a strong identification between Clifton and the doll. Whereas in 

Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the Mahler program, rhythm is what enables a division 

between “life and fiction” to be made, here rhythm produces a confusion between the 

two, a confusion between a living being and a made thing that is also a confusion 

between life and death. 6 

The narrator seems to believe that an identification with Sambo marks a kind of 

symbolic death, a “plunge” outside of history. “Only in the Brotherhood,” he thinks, 

“could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls.” The implication 

is that only the form of life offered to black people within “The Brotherhood” 

has a chance of surviving, of making history. By saying “we,” the narrator places himself 

momentarily within reach of the stereotype. But he does this only as a prelude 

to a more intense statement of his disagreement with Clifton and of his own loyalty 

to the Brotherhood: 

My God! And I had been worrying about being left out of a meeting! I’d overlook it a 

thousand times; no matter why I wasn’t called. I’d forget it and hold on desperately to 

Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge … To plunge! 

(435) 7 


Previously, we noted the narrator’s anxiety over the loss of form. In this instance, we 

witness something similar – a fear for the loss of a form of life that is viable. Crucially, 

however, this fear is linked to something like the opposite of the fear of formlessness: 

a fear of an identification with a stereotype which would be too rigid, deadly for 

being too “formed.” “Stereotype” derives from the Greek stereos (solid) � typos 

(type). All stereotypes are rigid, but the narrator’s rhetoric produces an extremely 


solid or tight identification between Clifton and the doll. In refusing to identify with 

Clifton, the narrator refuses to allow any significant difference between the performance 

of his friend and that of the doll. It does seem possible, however, to read 

Clifton’s performance against the grain as one that mocks the stereotypical image of 

Sambo as well as an audience’s delight in the eternally grinning figure. 

Despite the narrator’s identification of Clifton with the doll, he literally does not see the 

connection between them. Only after Clifton is killed – shot by a policeman shortly after 

his performance (pushed one too many times by a cop, the defiance his sales pitch had 

only partly disguised emerges when he pushes back) – and the narrator examines one 

of the dolls closely, does he discover the secret of its insidious movement: 

What had made it seem to dance? Its cardboard hands were doubled into fists, the 

fingers outlined in orange paint, and I noticed that it had two faces, one on either side 

of the disk of cardboard, and both grinning. Clifton’s voice came to me as he spieled 

his directions for making it dance, and I held it by the feet and stretched its neck, seeing 

it crumple and slide forward. I tried again, turning its other face around. It gave a 

tired flounce, shook itself and fell in a heap … It had still grinned when I played the 

fool and spat upon it, and it was still grinning when Clifton ignored me. Then I saw a 

fine black thread and pulled it from the frilled paper. There was a loop tied in the end. 

I slipped it over my finger and stood stretching it taut. And this time it danced. Clifton 

had been making it dance all the time and the black thread had been invisible. (my 

emphases; 446) 

Clifton’s link to the doll is more than a matter of a similar, “flouncing” rhythm; nor is 

it the pure product of the audience’s gaze or willingness to credit a resemblance 

between the two. It is material at the same time that it is nearly undetectable, a magician’s 

sleight-of-hand. 8 Once we are aware of the invisible string, it becomes possible 

to read the text of his performance retroactively and to see that it contains numerous 

double-entendres and outright lies. The entire first stanza – the instructions for the 

doll’s use which the narrator recalls privately – insists that having shaken the doll one 

may stand apart from it and watch it dance. “He’ll do the rest. Yes!” Clifton exclaims. 

But the existence of the string suggests that, on the contrary, there is an intimate 

connection between doll and performer, and that whatever foolish gestures one 

wishes to see it make, one must also, in a sense, perform. One could say that the 

“mysterious mechanism” of the doll exposes, at every step, the investment of the 

one who derives pleasure from the dance in producing it. 

Clifton’s rap plays openly with the origin of the doll’s movements, as he asks 

“what makes him dance?” This sly rhetorical question points, of course, towards the 

interest or investment on the part of his audience in seeing the doll move about. 

What makes the image of an eternally smiling, bouncing, black male performer 

appealing? Clifton’s comment “he’s more than a toy” suggests that in his rap we are 

dealing with a text that thematizes its own status as a stereotypical representation 



that sells. The figure of Sambo is indeed more than a toy: it is a powerful image 

whose commodification has had both psychic and economic effects (induced both 

“depression” and “dispossession”). The persistence of “Sambo” as a cultural commodity 

(and it is by no means clear that he has exited the “stage” of popular culture) 

points to the historical willingness of Americans to accept black entertainers, if not 

always black intellectual, black political, or black economic leaders. And this would 

seem to have to do with a willingness to accept images of black pleasure linked to 

subordination and a “refusal” to confront images of black pain. 

Clifton’s rap is a confidence trick: an effort to dupe others into buying a product 

that either will not work for them or that they will have to manipulate actively rather 

than enjoy from a distance. As a con it also tends to displace the meaning of the 

image, to expose the stereotype of the smiling performer as one that may contain a 

half-hidden form of resistance to the power that wishes to maintain it. The narrator’s 

suspicion that a “perverse pleasure” underlies the performance proves correct. But 

his discovery of the invisible string comes too late for him to realize the full import of 

Clifton’s words, too late for him to recognize his friend’s “fierce defiance.” 

The narrator’s statement that Clifton “ignored” him is untrue. The references to the 

“brotherly two bits of a dollar” as well as to “dispossession” (a word the narrator had 

stressed in a speech which Clifton attended) are clearly jabs at him, forms of address 

meant to draw the narrator into the joke. But they go unheeded. The “flouncing” rhythm 

of Clifton’s rap enables the narrator to refuse to recognize him. And the failure of the two 

men to acknowledge each other leads to a terrible outcome: Clifton dies, and the narrator 

suffers enormous guilt over not having confronted his friend. This failed identification, 

a missed opportunity, points to the great risk a performer takes when trying to turn a 

stereotype away from its conventional use, away from the image meant to justify domination: 

he or she may not be understood in their effort to produce such a turn and may 

be mistaken for one who simply believes in the stereotype or, worse, has become it. 

Melancholy, Listening 

In “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” Ellison describes Louis Armstrong as a trickster 

and magician: 

Armstrong’s clownish license and intoxicating powers are almost Elizabethan; he 

takes liberties with kings, queens and presidents; he emphasizes the physicality of his 

music with sweat, spittle and facial contortions; he performs the magical feat of making 

romantic melody issue from a throat of gravel. (106) 

Here, the slight hesitation about Armstrong’s joking which we noted in the essay on 

Charlie Parker is absent (although it would appear that Shakespeare’s clowns surpass 

even Armstrong in their prowess); and Ellison seems to credit Armstrong with a 

precise awareness of how his clownish physicality enables him to transcend his 

social status, to take “liberties with kings, queens, and presidents.” This is perhaps 


the understanding of Armstrong towards which the narrator of Invisible Man moves in 

the prologue, although, as we have indicated, he does not credit Armstrong with a full 

awareness of his invisibility. The narrator turns away from a complete identification 

with Armstrong in order to realize his own “form” of invisibility. But this turning away 

is also a turning towards: he is only able to understand his own invisibility by listening 

to Armstrong. 

The narrator listens to him in a room that he has wired to accommodate 1,369 

lights. But an excess of light is apparently not enough to reassure him of his 

form/face: he would have an excess of music as well: 

There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to 

feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five 

recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and 

Blue” – all at the same time. (8) 

In “ ‘I Am I Be’: The Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity” Alexander Weheliye writes persuasively 

about the narrator’s canny use of technology to invent new forms of subjectivity: 

If the multiplicity of the lights reflects the protagonist’s craving to understand his 

social invisibility, then the corporeal viscerality of the protagonist’s ideal listening scenario 

manifests an intense longing to experience his body in sound in ways that he cannot 

do visually. Wanting to embody and be embodied by sound, the protagonist 

imagines his flesh as an eardrum, transforming his corporeal schema into a channel 

for his sonic interpellation. Thus, the sonic and the scopic, far from being diametrically 

opposed, provide occasion for one another; visual subjection begets sonic subjectivation. 

(109) 

I agree with Weheliye that the narrator’s technology of self-understanding tends to 

reconfigure subjectivity along sonic rather than scopic lines, but I am afraid that the 

price of such self-understanding, of providing oneself with a face through listening to 

an absent other, appears to be the loss of a social world. Moreover, that the loss of 

that social world may bring about a debilitating compulsion to repeat a moment that 

figures the visible loss of the other. Is not the narrator’s “longing to experience his 

body in sound” precisely the index of his loss of contact with others? When the narrator 

describes listening to his phonograph, he may have been isolated in his underground 

dwelling for as many as twenty years, playing and replaying records, revisiting 

the most traumatic and compelling scenes of his life through a practice of listening 

and writing. And while he listens to Armstrong, the trickster who managed both to live 

and to succeed, it seems unavoidable that he would also mourn his friend, Clifton, 

the joking performer who “plunged” and died. It is unclear to me if this melancholy 

mode of “living with music” is viable. 

The turn towards Armstrong is somehow meant to compensate for the turn away 

from his friend. Yet Armstrong, too, is but a phantom, a voice emanating from a 



loudspeaker. Despite its power, this marvelous voice cannot, of course, bring the 

dead back to life. The joy of recorded music is linked to a unique form of sorrow: the 

feeling that it might be possible, just as one might return the tonearm on a record 

player to its original position, to return to an exact moment when the other was alive, 

and the recognition that this is impossible. 

Coda: “The Pre-face” 

In a beautiful photograph, “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Preface,” Jeff Wall 

imagines the narrator listening to music in his underground dwelling (see Figure 1). 9 

Though it would appear impossible to count all of the light-bulbs in the picture, I don’t 

doubt that there may be exactly 1,369. But the interest of the photograph does not, 

of course, lie in its faithfulness to Ellison’s text but in its going beyond verisimilitude 

to become a work of art in its own right. In fact, the very title is a misreading of sorts. 

Ellison did not write a “preface” but a “prologue.” That “error” seems telling however. 

The photograph is very much a “pre-face,” a work that posits the coming into visibility 

of a face as an event yet to be completed. 10 Moreover, our angle of vision is such 

that we feel always on the verge of being able to recognize the face of the narrator. 

Wall’s photograph evokes the tremendous melancholy of the moment in the prologue 

Jeff Wall 

“After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface”, 1999–2000 

Transparency in lightbox [174 � 250.5 cm] 


when the narrator tries to grasp through listening the fugitive faces of so many dead 

or missing who have preceded him. 

How do I know that the figure in the photograph is listening? It is not just his posture, 

the fact that he is seated, bent forward, directly in front of his phonograph (interestingly, 

another phonograph sits off to the side, as if the narrator were on his way 

towards realizing his dream of the five phonographs). Nor that the red liquid in the glass 

next to the phonograph seems a deliberate reference to his favorite drink (“sloe gin”) 

to have while listening. Look at what he is holding. It is some kind of cookware, either 

a bowl or a pot, and he also holds a rag with which to dry it in one of his hands. The 

sink on the left is full of dishes. The narrator has stopped washing dishes in order to 

sit in front of his phonograph while drying one of them (one can’t face a windowless wall 

for too long while doing dishes). It seems remarkable that, of the two chairs placed next 

to the phonograph, he sits in the one that appears less comfortable, not the armchair, 

but the folding chair. Perhaps this is because he knows he will have to return to his 

task. But it may also be that he does not wish to get too comfortable. The narrator 

rests, like a fighter in his corner, waiting to do battle. And the evidence of that battle sits 

precariously on top of his armchair – the pages of his novel or autobiography, a few of 

which may be seen on the chair’s seat, a few others on top of the little table in front of 

the phonograph. It is possible, in fact, that the narrator is reading something like his 

own interpretation of the music at the same time that he is listening to it, for a few 

pages seem directly in his line of sight. Possibly, the soft armchair is for writing while 

the more severe folding chair is for listening, the two seats productive of two temporalities, 

the disciplined time of listening and the more open time of composition. 

“After Invisible Man” has the aspect ratio of a cinematic film still, and much about it 

seems intended to evoke the experience of cinema, not least the absent or “implied” 

music. It succeeds, however, where so many film stills fail, in preserving the “continuous” 

tense of cinema, the sense that something is happening, that an action or event 

is incomplete. It is rare for actors to turn away from the camera for an extended period 

of time. The visibility of the face is of paramount importance to most films. Thus, “After 

Invisible Man” manages to appear like a transitional cinematic instant, a moment in 

between two others when the subject’s face would be legible. This “interstitial” quality 

reinforces its evocation of a moment of intense listening, for listening always occurs in 

the interval between an event and its cognition. Listening is transitory, incomplete. 

The narrator has not finished mourning either Armstrong or Clifton. This work cannot, 

in fact, be completed. It will have required hours of listening and writing; and it 

will have taken the form of the novel Invisible Man at the close of which he writes: 

“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. 

He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and without 

substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try 

to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is 



this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for 

you? (581) 

An entire alternate reading of Invisible Man could begin here with a reflection on how 

the narrator – who elsewhere in the novel shows himself to be something of a 

“square,” incapable of understanding rhymed speech – has, finally, himself learned 

to rhyme (“true,” “do,” “through,” “you”). Here he produces an elementary blues 

whose questions “what else could I do?”, “what else but try to tell you?” echo the 

muted question (muted, like a trumpet, because it is delivered as a parenthesis) of 

“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.” The narrator recognizes that, like 

Armstrong, like Clifton, he has become a “disembodied voice,” but a voice nevertheless, 

one that echoes in the body of a listener. And his final question (which has 

always baffled me) asks a listener to pursue the sound of his voice not in the customary 

register of speech but on those lower, bass frequencies one might feel while 

listening to five recordings play simultaneously. I still seek it there. 


Notes 

1. I would like to thank Katherine Bergeron for 

her fine reading of an earlier version of this 

article. I also wish to thank Armando Manalo 

for his excellent editorial assistance. A version 

of this paper was published in Qui Parle 2004. 

2. On the significance of the “cut,” see James 

Snead’s “Repetition as a Figure of Black 

Culture” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, 

Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Methuen, 

1984. 59–80. See also Fred Moten’s In The 

Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical 

Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 

2003, especially chapter one which deals with 

the prologue to Invisible Man. 

3. Does the “and” of the title separate two 

independent meanings – “blackness” and 

“sadness” – or does it conjoin the terms so that 

the title means “bruised” or “damaged”? 

Though grammatically distinct, the two 

meanings are, of course, not logically 

incompatible. 

4. The inability of even highly skilled African- 

Americans to gain social recognition is a 

consistent preoccupation of the novel. See, for 

example, the episode in chapter three involving 

the veterans at the Golden Day, many of whom 

are highly educated but have nevertheless 

lost their social status and become 

institutionalized. 

5. On more than one occasion Armstrong 

claimed to have invented scat. For some 

excellent reflections on the significance of 

Armstrong’s “scat-ology,” see Brent Hayes 

Edwards’ “The Syntax of Scat” in Critical 

Inquiry, 28.3 (Spring 2002), 618–49. 

6. The narrator’s confusion over Clifton’s 

appearance on the street contrasts with the 

great admiration for his face which he 

expresses on first meeting him: 

I saw that he was very black and very handsome, 

and as he advanced mid-distance into the 

room, that he possessed the chiseled, blackmarble 

features sometimes found on statues in 

northern museums and alive in southern towns in 

which the white offspring of house children and 

190 | David Copenhafer 

the black offspring of yard children bear names, 

features and character traits as identical as the 

rifling of bullets fired from a common barrel. And 

now close up […] I saw […] a small X-shaped 

patch of adhesive upon the subtly blended, velvetover-stone, 

granite-over-bone, Afro-Anglo-Saxon 

contour of his cheek. (362) 

The narrator’s disgust over Clifton’s 

“identification” with Sambo thus expresses a 

profound fear of de-facement, of the ruin of 

Clifton’s “statuesque” features. 

7. The narrator’s effort to reject Clifton and to 

assert that his subjection to the stereotype lies 

in the past is contradicted in a violent manner 

by the gesture of a man who also watches the 

doll’s performance. The narrator says that after 

he spits on the doll: “The crowd turned on me 

indignantly … I saw a short pot-bellied man 

look down, then up at me with amazement and 

explode with laughter, pointing from me to the 

doll, rocking.” (433). This laughter and this 

pointing posit a resemblance between the 

narrator and the doll, but one wonders if the 

man isn’t missing a chance to assert his own 

smiling, rocking resemblance to the tiny figure 

(now turned somewhat white by spittle). 

8. In a novel whose central concern is the 

invisibility of blackness, it is no accident that 

the string that ties Clifton to the doll is black. 

That the narrator does not see it speaks to his 

unwillingness to identify with blackness at this 

point in the story. 

9. See Jeff Wall: Photographs. Göttingen: 

Steidl. 2002. I would like to thank John Muse 

for pointing me to this photograph: “After 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface”; 

1999–2000; Transparency in lightbox; 

174 � 250.5 cm. 

10. The title of Wall’s photograph (“After 

Invisible Man”) captures the temporal distortion 

of the prologue. In terms of the story, the 

prologue comes “after” the rest of the novel. 

But as writing, or discourse, it is placed before 

that remainder. The grammatical tense of Wall’s 

photograph would be something like the future 

perfect in that it anticipates a prior event.

Bibliography 

Adorno, Theodor. “On the Contemporary 

Relationship of Philosophy and Music.” Essays 

on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of 

California P, 2003. 135–61. 

Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong: Satch Plays 

Fats (sound recording). Sony, 2000. 

De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” 

The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: 

Columbia UP, 1983. 67–82. 

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage 

International, 1990. 


—. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” The 

Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The 

Modern Library, 2003. 100–12. 

—. “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz.” The 

Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The 

Modern Library, 2003. 256–65. 

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “The Echo of the 

Subject.” Typography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 

1998. 139–207. 

Weheliye, Alexander. “ ‘I Am I Be:’ The Subject 

of Sonic Afro-Modernity.” Boundary 2 30.2 

(2002). 97–114. 


ABSTRACT 


Historicizing the Ghostly Sound 

of a Ghastly Sight: James 

Baldwin’s Blues for Mister 

Charlie 

Soyica Diggs 

Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight: 

James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie 

In African American literature, often authors use music as a model of historical recuperation. 

Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and W.E.B. 

Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) implicitly argue that spirituals, or sorrow songs, can 

communicate affective, personal, and social histories. Similarly utilizing a phonic dynamic, 

James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), communicates lynching victims’ pain 

and its causes by transforming the sound of moaning associated with lynching, which signifies 

grief and suffering, into the articulate speech of the protagonist, Richard Henry. 

James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), begins with Lyle Britten, a white 

man, disposing of the dead body of Richard Henry, a black man and the protagonist of 

the play, whom Lyle lynches. Directly following the disposal of Richard’s body the “sound 

of mourning begins.” 1 The opening sequence of Baldwin’s play references the thick 

acoustic history associated with lynching. The “sound of mourning,” coming from 

Richard’s father’s church, complicates the dangerous struggle between white and black 

men the play details by foregrounding the ghostly protagonist’s unfinished business. 

Blues for Mister Charlie depicts Richard, a disillusioned recovering drug addict, returning 

to his hometown after migrating to the North to escape the social restrictions of the 

South, and to pursue a music career. Once he returns, he begins to challenge his town’s 

most sensitive social conventions. For example, he carries around pictures of white 

women in his wallet, he brags to his friends about the relationships he has had with 

Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight | 193

these women, and he has a public verbal altercation with Lyle, a storeowner. Richard’s 

actions qualify him as dangerous because his racial difference has already registered 

him as a threat. In an American context, black masculinity has repeatedly been associated 

with danger, violence, and sexual excess. Therefore, all of Richard’s actions have 

an uncanny quality, since Lyle interprets them based on predominate understandings of 

black masculinity and not a personal knowledge of Richard. To quote Freud, “the 

uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and 

long familiar;” in this case what is “old and long familiar” is a stereotypical understanding 

of black masculinity. 2 Interpretations of his actions, therefore, must contend 

with the preexisting history of racial strife in the South. When Richard returns, he 

upsets his friends and family because he undermines all of the social mechanisms 

arranged to keep black men “in their place” and to alleviate the threat black men pose 

to the psychic economy of the townspeople. Since Richard threatens what Lyle knows 

and finds familiar, he feels no remorse when he kills Richard. Lyle’s action does not, 

however, end Richard’s role in the play. Seeming to haunt the other characters for the 

remainder of Blues for Mister Charlie, Richard appears through flashbacks that often 

focus on what and how he would respond to a given situation. As the “sound[s] of 

mourning” coming from the church, perhaps singing, crying, and moaning, suggest, 

even though Richard is dead, he continues to affect the living. Blues for Mister Charlie 

intervenes in a highly visual tradition greatly influenced by the systematic silencing of 

the victim of the lynch mob by giving voice to Richard after his death. 

The way we find the protagonist of Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie, in the opening 

scene, lying “face down in the weeds,” recalls perhaps the only lynching victim 

Americans know by name and sight – Emmett Till (2). Emmett Till’s body haunts James 

Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie much like Toni Morrison’s “ghost in the machine.” 3 In 

1955 the fourteen-year-old, black boy was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for 

allegedly whistling at a white woman. Although, Richard Henry, the play’s protagonist, 

does not represent Emmett Till, his tragic death and the staging of his funeral, nonetheless, 

echo throughout the play. Similarly to Till, Richard has a larger effect on his community 

in death than in life. His haunting speech shows how the acoustic legacies left by 

the victims of lynching inform the shape of historical narratives. Richard’s voice marks a 

threat similar to the danger expressed by the moans and cries for help enunciated by victims 

of lynching. At the same time that his voice recalls the pain experienced by lynching 

victims and their communities, it signals the trauma that lingers after the fact. Based on 

that temporal incongruity, the sound of his voice evokes visceral responses from the 

other characters because it brings to mind histories of pain. Richard’s voice disrupts and 

jars the other characters as it structures the play. 

Blues for Mister Charlie utilizes a legacy of acoustic resistance modeled in African 

American literature to present the competing historical narratives that necessitated 

Till’s death and the deaths of thousands of other lynching victims. Frederick Douglass 

194 | Soyica Diggs


(1818–1895), a formerly enslaved African American who gained international prominence 

as an abolitionist, and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a forefather of African 

American studies and one of the most influential American scholars of the 20th century, 

strategically represent the sound of spirituals to structure the narrative progress 

of their most often cited works, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) 

and Souls of Black Folk (1903) respectively. 4 In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick 

Douglass, the author’s first autobiography, the juxtaposition of Douglass hearing his 

Aunt Hester screaming, and hearing the singing of spirituals by his fellow enslaved 

Africans, creates the conditions that necessitate the development of his concept of 

self. The sounds that Douglass hears remain an absent presence that the reader 

gains partial access to through the historical results that emerge throughout the narrative. 

In Douglass’s autobiography, the reader never hears the sound of Aunt Hester 

screaming or the enslaved Africans singing, but the narrative demonstrates how those 

sounds inform who Douglass becomes. Similarly, in The Souls of Black Folk, a collection 

of essays, Du Bois frames each chapter with epigrams of musical notation. The 

musical notation or “the sonic signs” that frame The Souls of Black Folk, as Alexander 

G. Weheliye explains, “cannot form a mimetic merger with spirituals.” 5 The musical 

notation points towards sounds, but does not create them. Therefore, the epigrams 

serve a double purpose. First, they represent but do not replicate a cultural history 

marked by the spirituals, which the individual must hear and feel to realize fully. 

Second, they create a structure to read the narrative histories presented in The Souls 

of Black Folk. Douglass and Du Bois offer strategies to engage the operation of the 

repressed, the ghostly, and the sound of loss in all narrative, by organizing their texts 

through sounds that are an absent presence. In these cases, the sound of loss supplements 

the representation of a fullness that does not exist. 

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk model 

strategies of narration and demand certain modes of reading. Following in that legacy, 

Blues for Mister Charlie deciphers the social structures that allowed lynching to take 

place by utilizing the sound of Richard Henry’s voice to structure the play. One notable 

difference between Baldwin’s and Douglass’s and Du Bois’s pieces is that Blues for 

Mister Charlie is a play, and, therefore, through theatrical production, it creates the 

sound of Richard’s voice. As with the representations of sound in The Narrative of the 

Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk, I am primarily concerned with 

categorizing the sound of Richard’s voice by the affective and psychic dynamics it produces. 

In Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, Karla F.C. Holloway explicates 

a relationship between artistic representations of historical events, both phonic and 

visual, and the affect generated by the actual events. Using the sorrow songs as an 

example, she argues, 

African American cultural practices – music, literature, and visual arts – all used the 

facts of black death and dying as their subject. There was an overlap of fiction and fact, 


artistic subject and streetscape, lyric and conversation. The spirituals, those ‘sorrow 

songs,’ also of course, captured black melancholy. 6 

Building on Holloway’s astute analysis in, this article’s formulation, the sounds of lynching, 

refers to the affective and psychic dynamics produced in response to and as a result 

of black death in both historical and artistic representations. Historically, the sound of 

lynching, to borrow from Fred Moten, could be best categorized as mo’nin’, a sound that 

registers and communicates mourning and pain. Cries of “have mercy,” the dead silence 

of shock and the gesticulations and heaving thrust of sounds that often accompany weeping, 

all qualify. In art, Billie Holiday’s weathered and sophisticated voice, a voice that 

sounds like it has “been through something,” heard in her rendition of Lewis Allen’s lyrics 

“Strange Fruit,” is the sound most readily associated with lynching. 7 In this article, I 

explain how Blues for Mister Charlie extends the literary history of representations of 

mo’nin’ by creating a voice that explains those losses in order to move from ghostly memory 

to the introjection of history, from the incorporation of loss to the “work of mourning.” 8 

The play represents some of the social, psychic, and historical legacies that could produce 

such ghastly sights and did produce such ghostly sounds and comments on the relationship 

between those sounds and the process of historical narration. 

One of the final scenes of the play establishes the haunting quality of Richard’s voice 

and presents the social and cultural paradigms that his bold performance of black masculinity 

challenges. The play explains not only why Richard must die, but also why his 

death “marks panic.” Not the emergence of panic, especially since “panic had already 

led to the death of so many,” but a genuine sense of frantic urgency nonetheless. 9 Lyle 

describes this confrontation after his acquittal. Even after Lyle has killed Richard, even 

in death, he must continually remember Richard questioning him: 

RICHARD. Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me? Why are you always trying 

to cut off my cock? You worried about it? Why? (Lyle shoots again.) Okay. Okay. Okay. 

Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like it. 

You might get to like it, too. Wow! (Richard falls). (120) 

Richard’s final spoken lines, in the play and in the chronology of his life, illuminate the 

investments Lyle has made to secure his ego. While Richard can physically die only 

once, he asks the question, “Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me?” The 

ongoing process he identifies signals the perpetual threat he represents as black masculinity 

embodied. He continues: “Why are you always trying to cut off my cock?” His 

second question points to the threat of castration and highlights the way psychic and 

physical forms of castration collapse at the intersection of a particular black, male body 

to guard against the bold performance of black masculinity that Richard enacts and the 

subversive histories he echoes. Even though a distinction exists between the bodily 

penis and the symbolic phallus, “access to the phallus is still predicated upon possession 

of the penis.” 10 Moreover, the emphasis marked by italicizing “my” personalizes 

this memory and points to a specific voice that Lyle calls forth as he remembers 

196 | Soyica Diggs


his final encounter with Richard. Therefore, when Richard states “Okay. Okay. Okay. 

Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like 

it. You might get to like it, too”, he reveals to the audience the process of fetishization 

and the secret desire on the part of Lyle to possess blackness, a symbolic value that 

exceeds Richard’s physical body and becomes transcribed onto his voice. When Lyle 

kills Richard, he does so to secure his position in the social order of the town. Richard, 

however, continues to haunt Lyle through his final spoken words, which draw attention 

to Lyle’s inability to kill what really troubles him. Richard’s haunting voice, produced in 

Lyle’s memory, also serves as a metaphor for the relationship between unconscious 

histories and national narratives. 

The characters in the play hear Richard’s voice, which serves as a catalyst for them 

to refine their own voices. Lyle fears that Richard will expose the ubiquitous lack he, 

like all male subjects unable to realize an unobtainable ideal, fiercely tries to hide. 

Unfortunately, Lyle does not realize that the subject he becomes is predicated on the 

perpetual incursion of Richard’s voice. Exposure would free Lyle to tell a different 

story, allowing him to give up the ghost and become a fuller subject. 

By structuring the play through Richard’s speech, Blues for Mister Charlie complicates 

the genealogy of the lynching narrative. During the late 19th and early 20th century, 

the reiteration of lynching across the southern landscape reflected and 

normalized it as a mode of discipline. 11 Depictions of lynching scenes also pervade 

early 20th century American literature. Consequently, even though lynching was an 

uncommon practice in 1955, and certainly in 1964, the “meaning, made an excess in 

time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order,” 12 to borrow a phrase from 

Hortense Spillers, continued to inform the national landscape. Even though black 

communities created strategies to resist the morbid display of mutilated black bodies, 

the repetition of those images over time informs our historical understanding of lynching. 

As Ashraf Rushdy suggests in his analysis of the brutal lynching of James Byrd 

(1998), “African American men have long been portrayed as comic buffoons or dangerous 

criminals, and a large segment of this nation [the United States] remains incapable 

of imagining black suffering.” 13 Once again, the body, covered by the history of 

racial construction, serves as a shibboleth of black performance, authorizing certain 

actions (the black man acting as violent criminal) and making others undecipherable 

(the black male experiencing pain). In order to move past this binary, Baldwin’s play 

focuses on the ways discursive performances produce blackness. 

The lynching narrative not only qualifies as a significant national narrative, but it 

also occupies a specific space in American drama. In the introduction to Black Female 

Playwrights: an Anthology of Plays Before 1950, Kathy Perkins describes the proliferation 

of lynching in America up until the 1930s: 

An estimated 3,589 blacks, including 76 women, were lynched between 1882 and 

1927. According to historian John Hope Franklin, “In the very first year of the new century 


more than 100 Negroes were lynched, and before the outbreak of World War I the number 

for the century had soared to more than 1,100. 14 

Perkins notes Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), Safe 

(1929) and Blue-Eyed Black Boy (1930) as well as Regina Andrew’s Climbing Jacob’s 

Ladder (1931) as distinguished plays by black women about lynching. Meanwhile, black 

male playwrights were also interested in this peculiar form of American discipline. 

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia (1913) and Langston Hughes’s Mulatto (1931) 

also qualify as lynching narratives. In both of these texts, the lynching scene establishes 

the power of the white community while it simultaneously instantiates the human 

sacrifice of black people as central to the development of communities. 

Besides endowing the victim of lynching with a voice, the play further transforms 

the lynching narrative by utilizing the blues as an idiom that situates the function of 

Richard’s voice. Houston Baker explains in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American 

Literature: A Vernacular Theory: 

The materiality of any blues manifestation, such as a guitar’s walking bass or a 

French harp’s “whoop” of motion seen, is, one might say, enciphered in ways that enable 

the material to escape into a named code, blues signification. The material, thus, slips 

into irreversible difference. 15 

Designating the play as a blues for Mister Charlie situates it within a formal and thematic 

tradition whose material “slips into irreversible difference.” The opacity to which 

Baker refers, as enciphered by the blues, explains why Blues for Mister Charlie draws 

on this particular music as a formal model. Through its structure, the play references 

the sounds of lynching and the cadence of the blues tradition in a manner that reveals 

the sounds of lynching in all its mutations as acoustic regimes constituting and constituted 

by America. 

Prior to Baldwin’s depiction of Richard’s haunting voice, Jean Toomer described a different 

kind of phonic excess enacted at the site of a lynching. “Blood Burning Moon,” 

one of the short stories in the first section of Toomer’s Cane, depicts a black man, Tom 

Burwell, who is lynched for fighting and killing a white man, Bob Stone, in a fight over a 

black woman, Louisa. As in Blues for Mister Charlie, in this story, too, societal constraints 

challenge the black characters’ ability to act. Thus, as expressed through the changes in 

the form of the story, from prose to poetry, the characters must invent modes of expression, 

practices that exceed the constraints of the societal narrative. 

Through the spilling of Tom’s blood and the depiction of the sound of lynching, the 

story instantiates the physical contribution black people have made to America’s history 

and landscape. After fighting with Bob and eventually cutting his throat, Tom is 

apprehended, bound and dragged to a factory: 

The big man shoved him (Tom) through the door. The mob pressed in from the sides. 

Taunt humming. No words. A stake was sunk into the ground. Rotting floor boards piled 

around it. Kerosene poured on the rotting floor boards. Tom bound to the stake. 16 

198 | Soyica Diggs


Tom is portrayed as quiet, “his eyes were set and stony. Except for irregular breathing, one 

would have thought him already dead.” 17 In African American literature the lynching victim 

is often depicted as quiet, if not silent, in the face of demise. Writers portray black people 

performing with dignity in death to counter the dehumanizing stereotypes ascribed to 

African Americans, and used to justify lynching. Similarly, in Cane the lynching victim is 

silent and it is the white mob that is undignified in their screams. Once “a great flare muffled 

in black smoke shot upward,” the only sound heard is the mob yelling: 

Its yell echoed against the skeleton stone walls and sounded like a hundred yells. 

Like a hundred mobs yelling. Its yell thudded against the thick front wall and fell back. 

Ghost of a yell slipped through the flames and out the great door of the factory. It fluttered 

like a dying thing down the single street of factory town. 18 

In this case, although the “Ghost of a yell” comes from the lynch mob, it reveals 

part of the acoustic legacy echoed through Richard’s haunting voice, which is also 

filled with Till’s legendary whistle. The “ghost of a yell” draws attention to the lack of 

the victim’s voice as it presents a sound associated with lynching as a disembodied 

echo. Similarly, many accounts of Emmet Till’s lynching story focus on the legendary 

whistle that purportedly incited his killers. Both references point to the way sound 

lingers after its production has ended, making it a fitting method of symbolic representation 

for the effects of lynching Baldwin delineates in his play. 

Fred Moten extends the theorization of the acoustic history of lynching saying, “you 

need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost, the 

agency of the fixed but multiply apparent shade, an improvisation of spectrality, another 

development of the negative.” 19 Moten implies that ghosts always have a sound that 

must be attended to, a sound that can be read back alongside the visual to enrich and 

explain it. However, that sound is complex and dissonant because it calls on historical 

narratives some Americans would rather forget. As a result, those sounds manifest 

themselves as the “polyphonic affectivity of the ghost;” sounds that signal the return 

of repressed, the history of mo’nin’. Recalling the famous photograph of Emmett Till’s 

corpse displayed on the cover of Jet magazine, Moten argues that the photo had a 

phonic materiality because the photograph “restage[d] death and rehearse[d] 

mo[ur]nin[g].” 20 Aware of the social impact Jet created by printing Till’s photograph on 

its cover, Moten describes an accompanying phonic dynamic. Moten’s language, calling 

the photography a re-staging of death, indicates viewers had seen this kind of death 

before. Furthermore, his contention that the photograph “rehearse[d] mo[ur]nin[g],” 

implies that once Till’s image became fixed for the world to see, African Americans, and 

Americans in general, were then able to begin to mourn his loss. The haunting, “polyphonic 

activity” of the photograph echoed “the logos that voice implies” and as Moten 

goes on to explain, 

has been complicated by the echo of a trangressive whistle, abortive seduction, stuttered 

leave-taking, and by reconstructive overtones of mo’nin’. Something is remembered 


and repeated in such complications. Transferred. To move or work through that something, 

to improvise, requires thinking about mourning and how mourning sounds, how moaning 

sounds. What’s made and destroyed. 21 

Moten works carefully to explain how the transgressive whistle complicates “the logos 

that voice implies.” He suggests that the trangressive whistle lingers, repeats, modifies, 

and becomes incorporated in the voice’s implied logos. In the moaning evoked by 

mourning, Emmett Till transforms the polyphonic activity produced by the lynch mob. 

Yet, the two do not function in isolation. A more productive formulation would emerge 

by considering how the sound of the lynch mob, the transgressive whistle, mourning 

sound, and moaning sounds collectively inform the sounds of lynching. 

In Blues for Mister Charlie, also structured through phonic interruption, the interruption 

of Richard’s voice extends the representation of the sounds of lynching by calling 

on another acoustic history: the blues. And, as the play’s title infers, the blues 

idiom inflects Richard’s voice, which allows it to recall the horror of lynching, while critiquing 

the contemporary social structures that encourage the practice. The blues, 

originating at the crossroads of African and American music, incorporates the inherent 

dichotomy between African Americans and the concept of nation. In “African 

Slaves/American Slaves: Their Music” Amiri Baraka writes, blues is “the product of 

the black man in this country; or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think 

about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.” 

22 Baraka limits his analysis to a specific gendered identity. Nevertheless, 

Baraka distinguishes the initiating societal pressures that ushered in the blues by noting 

that the trans-Atlantic slave trade resulted in the blues. He also makes clear the 

consistent restrictions experienced by black Americans as both African and American 

captives. The blues as songs of the American captives demand a certain performance 

of Richard’s voice. While his voice evokes the grief and pain produced by lynching, 

it also inspires insurgent behavior. In the third and final act, Richard’s father’s 

intractable testimony is inflected by the conversations he had with his son. Because 

Richard falls in the gulf between Whitetown and Blacktown, he questions the social 

mores. 

By invoking the blues, the play also demonstrates how the personal informs the 

social. Lynching signifies terror and panic. To comment on the process of creating terror, 

Baldwin’s play attempts to disarm the public display. The blues, as Cheryl Wall 

argues in Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition, 

“offers a way of contextualizing the ‘private story.’ ” She goes on to write, quoting Amiri 

Baraka: 

In African American culture, the blues had been the vehicle for discussing and analyzing 

people’s most private concerns. In the musical tradition, the persona of the individual 

performer dominates the song which centers on the singer’s own feelings, 

experiences, fears, dreams, acquaintances, and idiosyncrasies. As Amiri Baraka (then 

200 | Soyica Diggs

Leroi Jones) argued in Blues People, “[E]ven though its birth and growth seems connected 

finally to the general movement of the mass of black Americans into the central 

culture of the country [during and after Reconstruction], blues still went back for its 

impetus and emotional meaning to the individual, to his completely personal life and 

death.” 23 

Richard haunts deeply personal scenes in the play, and, as Baraka indicates, the 

scenes derive their “emotional meaning” from the individual. The inflection of the blues 

comes through the environments that house the tenor of Richard’s voice. The scenes 

focus on how Richard’s haunting informs the individual’s self-perception. The acoustic 

is not inherently more private than the visual, but the specific idiom – the blues – that 

the play deploys, lends itself to the personal. Blues for Mister Charlie does not turn to 

the acoustic, but echoes an acoustic legacy, the cry of many thousands gone, the 

“ghost of a yell” emanating from the mob, and the whistle of Emmett Till, through a 

personal (African) American form. 

The blues song, in Blues for Mister Charlie, also mourns the inability of Parnell 

James, a white lawyer whose class privilege allows him to serve as the mediator 

between the white and black communities, to acknowledge his social privilege. In the 

trial of Lyle Britten for the murder of Richard Henry, Parnell is called to testify for the 

prosecution. Parnell has information that could confirm Lyle’s guilt, but he decides to 

withhold that information from the court. As a result, Richard’s story never becomes 

part of the public record. Nonetheless, through a flashback that interrupts his testimony, 

Parnell realizes how Richard’s death secures his performance of American masculinity. 

Even though Lyle denies killing Richard, he offers a justification for Richard’s 

death; while on the stand, Lyle claims that Richard assaulted his wife. When the state 

questions Parnell about the same encounter he recalls: 

PARNELL. I – I knew of a fight. It was understood that the boy had gone to Mr. Britten’s 

store looking for a fight. I – I cannot explain that, either. 

THE STATE. Who told you of the fight? 

PARNELL. Why – Mr. Britten. 


THE STATE. And he did not tell you that Richard Henry had attempted to assault his 

wife? Come, Mr. James! 

PARNELL. We were all very much upset. Perhaps he was not as coherent as he might 

have been – perhaps I failed to listen closely. It was my assumption that Mrs. Britten had 

misconstrued the boy’s actions – he had been in the North a long time, his manner was 

very free and bold. (113) 

Parnell presents the discrepancy between his testimony and Lyle’s as a lapse in memory. 

The structure of the play, however, uncovers what causes Parnell to “fail to listen 


closely.” Immediately before Parnell takes the stand, the play flashes back to Parnell 

in his bedroom, contemplating his sexual desires for black women. In order for Parnell 

to negotiate his anxiety over Richard’s death he has to regress to a personal, sexualized 

space. He thinks: 

PARNELL. Richard would say that you’ve got – black fever! Yeah, and he’d be wrong – 

that long, loud, black mother. I wonder if she’s asleep yet – or just lying there, looking at 

the walls. Poor girl! All your life you’ve been made sick, stunned dizzy, oh Lord! Driven half 

mad by blackness. Blackness in front of your eyes. Boys and girls, men and women – 

you’ve bowed down in front of them all! And then you hated yourself. Hated yourself for 

debasing yourself? Out with it Parnell! The nigger-lover! … Jesus! I’ve always been afraid. 

Afraid of what I saw in their eyes? They don’t love me, certainly. You don’t love them, 

either! Sick with a disease only white men catch. Blackness, What is it like to be black? To 

look out on the world from that place? I give nothing! How dare she say that! My girl, if 

you knew what I’ve given! Ah. Come off it, Parnell. To whom have you given? What name 

did I call? What name did I Call? (106) 

Parnell’s disjointed flashback, marked by the incursion of echoes of Richard’s voice, 

exposes the motivations for his testimony. One could imagine Parnell performing his 

prediction that Richard would deem him infected with “black fever” in a mocking semblance 

of Richard’s voice. Even if the actor did not issue the line in that way, the text 

calls attention not only to what Richard would say but also to the way he would say it 

through the emphasis added by the dash that precedes and the exclamation point that 

ends it. Parnell signals the impact of Richard’s imagined judgment by defending 

against it by invoking a racial slur. Parnell fears what admitting Richard’s innocence 

reveals about him. If Richard were innocent, Parnell would have to confront the ways 

he – like all other subjects – constantly avoids facing their limitations and insufficiencies. 

Parnell’s anger with Richard, “that long, loud, black mother,” is a manifestation 

of the challenge Richard poses to the way Parnell sees himself. He lies to protect himself, 

to halt the revelation produced by Richard’s probing voice. Each time Parnell 

utters the word “blackness,” he draws attention to the threat Richard poses which is 

symbolized in the play by the incursion of the sound of Richard’s voice. 

Parnell’s repeated iteration of “blackness,” in a memory that takes place in his bedroom, 

also foregrounds what Richard’s sexuality has to do with his identification as a 

black man. Richard’s hyper-virility mirrors the excess attributed to blackness and the 

excessive materiality of the voice, the other that the child cannot incorporate, and 

therefore, in defense, eventually repudiates. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice 

in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman contends 

the male subject later hears the maternal voice through himself – that it comes to 

resonate for him with all that he transcends through language […] the male subject subsequently 

“refines” his “own” voice by projecting onto the mother’s voice all that is unassimilable 

to the paternal position. 24 

202 | Soyica Diggs


Blues for Mister Charlie depicts the loss of Richard as incomplete by flashing back to 

him throughout the play. Parnell attempts to refine his own voice by projecting onto 

Richard all that is unassimilable to his position. It is fitting that Parnell literally 

attempts to take his words and put them in Richard’s mouth, since the play represents 

the excess stereotypically ascribed to blackness as akin to the quality of the sound of 

the voice. Consequently, Richard’s voice and the words he says remain a haunting 

trace that interrupts the narrative structure of the play. 

The play establishes a stunning addendum to Freud’s representation of sexual difference, 

a visual difference, as the primary difference. 25 Freud depicts the castration 

crisis as the moment when the male child first learns to manage the difference of the 

female child and not, strikingly, his own difference from her. As portrayed by Freud, the 

male, racially non-marked and hence implicitly white child initially experiences the castration 

crisis when he sees that the female child does not have a penis. Freud 

describes: 

when a little boy first catches sight of a girl’s genital region, he begins by showing 

irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen, he softens 

it down or looks about for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations. 

It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that 

the observation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses 

a terrible storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat 

which he has hitherto laughed at. 26 

The little girl poses a psychic threat to the male child because her body establishes 

the possibility of physical castration. In Freudian terms the female body initiates the 

primary psychic cut which continues to haunt the male throughout his life. Kaja 

Silverman revolutionizes Freud’s paradigm, by arguing that difference is first registered 

through hearing not through sight. Theorizing what she calls an “acoustic mirror,” 

Silverman contends that before the child sees himself as different from others he 

notices the difference between his voice and the voice of his mother. By situating the 

loss of the mother’s voice, as a linguistic, primary loss, Silverman upsets the gender 

hierarchy implicit in Freud’s model. Silverman’s challenge to Freud also enables analysis 

of the racial dynamics contained in his depiction of the castration crisis. 

Reorienting Freud and pressing at the implications of Silverman’s analysis, I contend 

that Blues for Mister Charlie establishes the phenotypic difference in features associated 

with race as a necessary part of the force that perpetuates psychic division, the 

force that recalls a prior loss. Silverman argues that the little boy’s visual recognition 

of physical difference is a by-product of a preexisting psychic process: he associates 

the threat of losing the penis with another loss, the loss of the mother’s voice. Blues 

for Mister Charlie explains the visual threat posed by the black male body, by recouping 

another overlooked phonic history of loss – the sounds of lynching. In the same 

way that the little boy represses the loss of his mother’s voice, Blues for Mister Charlie 


suggests American narrative has repressed the suffering of African American’s and 

the sound of their mo’nin.’ 

The choices made in staging the Broadway premier of Blues for Mister Charlie 

heighten the impact of Parnell’s confessional soliloquy. The production of the play 

staged in April 1964 by the American National Theater and Academy Theater (ANTA) 

utilized no scenery. 27 The production depended on the effect caused by lighting, intonation, 

and spacing to communicate the shifts in time and space. Both white and 

black characters occupy the stage at the same time, however when the black characters 

present their stories they move downstage while white characters move upstage, 

similarly the white characters move to the front during their scenes. 28 Placing individuals 

from one community in the shadows and the others illuminated but occupying the 

stage at the same time, the production of the play created a spatial dynamic that complements 

the psychic history it presents. Furthermore, by not having scenery the ANTA 

production emphasizes how sound and body language can work together to create narrative. 

Keeping in mind the lack of scenery further emphasizes how Blues for Mister 

Charlie derives its narrative coherence from Richard Henry’s voice, which shifts the 

focus of lynching from the event, what happened, to the causes for the event, why did 

this happen? The stage directions say: 

For the murder scene, the aisle functions as a gulf. The stage should be built out, so 

that the audience reacts to the enormity of this gulf and so that RICHARD, when he falls, 

falls out of sight of the audience, like a stone, into the pit. (2) 

Consequently, the play opens with: “In the darkness we hear a shot. Lights up slowly on 

LYLE, staring down at the ground. He looks around him, bends slowly and picks up 

RICHARD’s body as though it were a sack. He carries him upstage drops him.” (2) At the 

end when the death scene is reenacted, Richard again falls out of sight. While his falling 

body represents the loss experienced in each lynching, his haunting return throughout the 

play models how to transform the affect associated with loss into insurgence. 

The flashbacks staged in Blues for Mister Charlie elaborate on the cutting that Freud 

describes. Freud depicts the male subject deploying strategies he developed to counter 

the threat of castration in moments when he feels threatened. In Blues for Mister Charlie 

characters register a threat in the moments before the flashbacks. As a part of the play’s 

structural apparatus, the flashbacks expose why the character feels threatened and what 

the character thinks he or she might be losing. The flashbacks as interruptions or cuts 

draw attention to the cultural histories that exemplify the process of castration. 

Kaja Silverman qualifies the acoustic realm as a suitable space to historicize the 

anatomical loss described by Freud as the castration crisis. She depicts the auditory 

as one of the spheres, if not the most important one, in which the child, both male and 

female, learns to distinguish between self and other – between his or her own vocal 

self and the mother’s voice. In the moment of distinction the mother’s voice becomes 

204 | Soyica Diggs


excess. The child’s realization that the voice is not a part of the self, the realization 

that the child cannot contain the voice, is both traumatic and necessary. 

Nevertheless, the child creates strategies to manage the loss of the mother’s voice. 

Freud attempts to present the castration crisis as an initial splitting, as the male 

child’s first introduction to the potential of loss. Silverman counters Freud arguing, that 

“there is a castration which precedes the recognition of anatomical difference – a castration 

to which all cultural subjects must submit, since it coincides with separation 

from the world of objects, and the entry into language.” 29 Silverman locates the threat 

of castration, the threat of losing part of the self, as not gender specific, but as a common 

bill that all individuals must pay to enter into language. She explains that 

“[a]ccording to the terms of Freud’s own argument, if the spectacle of female castration 

strikes the male viewer as ‘uncanny,’ he himself must already have experienced 

castration […] he too inhabits the frame of the unpleasurable image.” 30 When the 

male child realizes his anatomical difference, he is already in pursuit of the phallus, 

which is “a signifier for symbolic knowledge, power and privilege.” 31 Parnell’s and 

Lyle’s power depends not only on their sex but also their gender, within the social political 

landscape of the U.S. Therefore, every mechanism they formulate to defend 

against the threat of castration that is directed toward the object, in this case Richard, 

will always fall short, since “what seems to confront [them] from without, in the guise 

of the [black male] body, actually threatens him from within, in the form of [their] own 

history.” 32 Parnell and Lyle are unable to banish the threat symbolized by Richard’s 

voice because they participate in producing it. 

Baldwin’s play emphasizes the collective phonic nature of lynching, a practice primarily 

associated with the visual, to uncover its perpetrators motivations. Lynching is 

a social mechanism par excellence of disciplining communities. In Discipline and 

Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault theorizes the interdependence of public 

violence and community consolidation. He asserts that “[t]he public execution did 

not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.” 33 Moreover, he contends that public displays 

of violence served a reciprocal purpose; they established the role of the discipliner 

as those displays subordinated the disciplined. Emmet’s mother, Maime Till 

Bradley, attempted to shift the power dynamics implicit in the visual dominance of 

lynching by presenting her son’s mutilated corpse in a casket instead of hanging from 

a tree. 34 By altering the setting of the “scene of subjection,” to borrow a phrase from 

Saidiya Hartman, Bradley usurped some of the power of the lynch mob. 35 Till’s mother, 

however, was not the first family member of a lynching victim to challenge the authority 

of the mob. Therefore, her actions must be read within the historical context that 

precedes them. In “Exquisite Corpse,” Ashraf Rushdy describes some of the actions 

of Bradley’s precursors. He explains: 

In 1889, after a mob broke into a Barnwell, South Carolina, jail and lynched eight 

African American men, the local black community displayed its solidarity at the funeral. 


More than five hundred people lined the street, and several women implored the Lord to 

“burn Barnwell to the ground.” The community refused to bury six of the men, claiming 

that the whites who killed them should bear that responsibility. In Virginia, Joseph 

McCoy’s aunt refused to bury the body of her nephew, who was lynched in 1897. “As the 

people killed him, they will have to bury him,” she explained. The body, whether buried or 

left to the elements, had become a symbol of the injustice and barbarism of the white 

community, the failure of the nation’s founding principles: Let the dead bury their 

dead. 35 Family and community members decided to respond to the brutality of lynching 

by transferring the symbolic weight of the death from the victims to the “whites who 

killed them.” 

Instead of utilizing the dense visual history formed by historical responses to lynchings, 

Blues for Mister Charlie takes a different tactic; it obscures lynching from view 

and does not emphasize its physical results. The play calls attention to the aural history 

that may have been overlooked by focusing on the visual evidence. The reorientation 

in Blues for Mister Charlie from the visual to the acoustic marks a consideration 

of what Toni Morrison posits as the “racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of 

race.’ ” 37 In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison considers 

how race or racial unconsciousness informs the narrative choices of American 

writers. She goes on to question how the racial unconsciousness of the writer contributes 

to the formation of “literary whiteness” and “literary blackness.” Using the 

logic implicit in Morrison’s inquiries, Baldwin’s act of narration not only comments on 

the creation of American literature but also on the shape of all American narrative and 

its reception. The phonic history produced by the theatrical production of the play 

points to how racial unconsciousness interrupts, informs, and reroutes historical narration. 

In that way, Blues for Mister Charlie stages an aural intervention, which mimics 

the historical interruption caused by Till’s death. Baldwin’s play and the emphasis it 

puts on sounding Richard’s voice, calls into question the primacy afforded the visual 

signifiers of race. 

206 | Soyica Diggs

Notes 

1. Baldwin 2. Further citations will be noted 

parenthetically. 

2. Freud “The ‘UnCanny’ ” 220. 

3. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The 

Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” 

Toni Morrison calls the African American 

presence in American literature “the ghost in 

the machine” (11). The phrase was coined by 

Gilbert Ryle. 

4. Cheryl Wall explains in Worrying the Line 

Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary 

Tradition, that “ ‘The Sorrow Songs’ is the 

penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk. 

Its importance derives from its rightful 

estimation of the centrality of spirituals to 

American culture. Not simply the ‘sole American 

music, but […] the most beautiful expression of 

human experience born this side of the seas,’ 

the spirituals were the slaves’ message to the 

world. Extending the insight of Douglass in his 

1845 Narrative, Du Bois defines the ‘hearttouching 

witness of these songs’ as an 

indictment of the ‘inhumanity of slavery’.” (36) 

5. Weheliye 320. 

6. Holloway 61. 

7. In Gayl Jones’ novel, Corregidora, Cat, a 

secondary character, categorizes the voice of 

the main character Ursa, as a voice that sounds 

like “you been through something” (44). 

8. Abraham and Torok 16. 

9. Moten 196. 

10. Silverman 26. 

11. Farah Jasmine Griffin claims in “Who Set 

You Flowin’?”: “Through both the media and the 

cultural production of these African-American 

visual, literary and musical artists, lynching 

became a dominant symbol of the South” (15). 

She goes on to explain that although the 

frequency of representations of lynching in 

fiction decreased significantly after 1968, black 


women writers, including Gloria Naylor and Toni 

Morrison consider the impact of violence on 

black women and the black family (46–47). 

12. Spillers 203. 

13. Rushdy 77. 

14. Perkins 9–10. 

15. Baker 6. 

16. Toomer 34. 

17. Toomer 34. 

18. Toomer 34–35. 

19. Moten 196. 

20. Moten 196. 

21. Moten 201. 

22. Baraka 17. 

23. Wall 118. 


25. Freud “Some Psychic Consequences of the 

Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” 

252. 

26. Ibidem. 

27. The ANTA Theater became the Virginia 

Theater in 1981 and the August Wilson Theatre 

in 2006. 

28. Gansberg, “James Baldwin Turns to 

Broadway.” 






33. Foucault 49. 

34. For more on Bradley’s decision to display 

her son’s corpse see: Maime Till-Mobley and 

Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The 

Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. 

New York: Random House, 2003. “The Untold 

Story of Emmett Louis Till.” Till Freedom Come. 

Keith Beauchamp, writer, producer and director; 

Ceola J. Beauchamp, Edgar Beauchamp, Ali 

Bibliography 

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and 

the Kernel volume I. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 

1994. 

Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro- 

American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. 


Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie. New 

York: Dial P, 1964. 

Baraka, Amiri. Blue People: Negro Music in White 

America. New York: William Morrow, 1963. 

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of 

Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by 

Himself. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s P, 

1993. 

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New 

York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. [originally 

published 1903]. 

Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity 

in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth 

of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 

Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” The Standard 

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of 

Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XXI. 

London: Hogarth, 1961. 149–57. 

—. “Some Psychical Consequences of the 

Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” The 

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological 

Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 

XIX. London: Hogarth, 1955. 241–60. 

208 | Soyica Diggs 

Bey, Steven Laitmon, executive producers; 

Yolande Geralds, producer. 2002. 

35. Saidiya V. Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: 

Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- 

Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 

36. Rushdy 72. 

37. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xii. 

—. “The ‘UnCanny.’ ” The Standard Edition of the 

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 

Ed. James Strachey. Vol XVII. London: Hogarth, 

1955. 218–56. 

—. “The Unconscious.” The Standard Edition of 

the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund 

Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol XIV. London: 

Hogarth, 1955. 159–209. 

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: 

The African American Migration Narrative. New 


Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: 

Terror Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- 

Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 

1997. 

Holloway, Karla F.C. Passed On: African American 

Mourning Stories. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 

Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon P, 

1975. 

Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. 

The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald 

Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton and 

Company, 1973. 

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness 

and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage 

Books. 1992. 

—. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro- 

American Presence in American Literature.” 

Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1989): 1–34.




Perkins, Kathy. “Introduction.” Black Female 

Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950. 

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 1–17. 

Rushdy, Ashraf. “Exquisite Corpse.” Transition 

9.3 (2000): 70–77. 

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female 

Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. 

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s 

Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black 


White and In Color: Essays on American 

Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 

2003. 203–29. 

Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1975. 

[originally published 1923]. 

Wall, Cheryl. Worrying the Line: Black Women 

Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel 

Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. 

Weheliye, Alexander. “The Grooves of 

Temporality.” Public Culture 17.2 (2005): 

319–38. 


ABSTRACT 


Between Orality and Literature: 

The Alida Folktale in Ellen 

Ombre’s Short Fiction 

“Fragments” 

Joy Smith 

Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Folktale in 

Ellen Ombre’s Short Fiction “Fragments” 

This essay explores sound and subject formation through orality in the case of a 

Surinamese folktale. It examines through different historical periods, from pre-independent 

Surinam to post independence, and various mediums, such as radio, theater, and print, 

how communal and national affiliations are achieved. Questions of identifications through 

sound, in terms of the cross-cultural and the transnational, are raised as a result of how 

the folktale travels from Surinam to the Netherlands. The meaning and importance of the 

folktale, its strategic deployment at home and abroad, are explored here. The latter half 

of the essay concentrates on the ways sound is captured in literature with an analysis of 

a short story, written by a Surinamese migrant writer, Ellen Ombre, in which the tale 

appears in print. The story was part of a collection that was published in the Netherlands 

during the postcolonial era. 

The Alida Folktale 

There is a story about a beautiful, mulatta, slave girl, told for generations, passed down, 

from slave to slave in Surinam, and to their current-day descendants. A Creole house 

slave’s beauty, particularly her lovely figure, catches the eye of the plantation owner who 

then takes her for his own sexual gratification. Later, when the master is away, the mistress 

expresses her rage at her husband’s sexual infidelity by venting her wrath on the 

defenseless slave girl by brutally mutilating her: she hacks off one of her breasts. 

Despite the severity of the attack and having been disfigured, the slave girl survives. 

Between Orality and Literaure | 211

This story, now known as the Alida folktale, is a Surinamese oral form, part of a 

much larger array of black, expressive culture called vernacular. In his influential book 

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Houston A. Baker Jr. is concerned with 

explicating the way sound permeates African American literature. To that end, he 

focuses on the term vernacular, a word he defines in expressive terms as “arts 

native or peculiar to a particular country or locale” (2). But in alluding to black vernacular 

forms in the U.S., and by his own definition, all of the Americas, he asserts, 

[t]he ‘vernacular’ in relation to human beings signals “a slave born on his master’s 

estate” (2). He is alluding to, and making central, the material conditions of slavery, 

what he calls an “ancestral matrix” that has produced a particular kind of creativity 

for black people in the Americas. When he defines the “blues” he does not restrict it 

simply to a musical form, or a particular geographical area, the U.S., for he refers to 

black slaves as “Africans in the New World”: 

The blues are a synthesis […] Combining work songs, group seculars, field hollers, 

sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald 

humor, elegiac lament, and much more, they constitute an amalgam that seems always 

to have been in motion in America – always becoming, shaping, transforming, displacing 

the peculiar experiences of Africans in the New World. (5) 

Black vernacular forms have their basis in a history of certain conditions in the “New 

World,” and they are a kind of response to these conditions that include, but are not 

limited to verbal practices. Literary critic Carolyn Cooper concurs with this broader 

definition of oral forms in her book on Caribbean literature, Noises in the Blood. In it 

she writes, “[t]he oral tradition in Jamaica is conceived as a broad repertoire of 

themes and cultural practices, as well as a more narrow taxonomy of verbal techniques” 

(2). The vernacular forms to which Baker and Cooper refer include diverse 

forms such as music, dance, drumming, rituals, cultural beliefs and practices such 

as obeah, story telling rituals, and proverbs. This expressive culture encompasses 

performance, dramaturgy, the body, and importantly sound. 

Much has been written about the enforced illiteracy, and the “embattled terrain” of 

writing for black people during slavery in the Americas. 1 Well-known scholar of orality, 

Walter J. Ong notes, “[i]ntertextual analysis has commonly paid relatively little attention 

to the interaction between texts and their circumambient orality” (Ong 164). This article 

attempts to do just that by first exploring the particular social relations that have produced, 

and reproduced the Alida folktale, and then examining its continual occurrence in 

various media, in order to ascertain its importance for Surinamers of African descent. The 

history of slavery in the New World, captured, ravished, and pained bodies, as well as a 

lack of access to alphabetic script provide the backdrop for these performances. Both 

Fred Moten and Paul Gilroy emphasize expressive culture, particularly music, as well 

as “hollerin,” and “moanin,” as important cultural and individual acts, modes of communication, 

and fleeting experiences of performed identity that “raises aspects of 

212 | Joy Smith


embodied subjectivity that are not reducible to the cognitive and the ethical” (Gilroy 

76). Gilroy is speaking of structures of affect expressed and communicated in ways 

other than writing, or even language. They evoke a painful history, the sounds of slavery. 

The Alida folktale is part of this history, what could be described as an acoustic 

legacy of slavery that encompasses much of black vernacular expression. 2 

While Gilroy and Moten choose music as their main subject, as Baker and Cooper 

have asserted, musical performance, song and dance are not separate and distinct 

from verbal, oral forms of black vernacular cultural expression. They often interact, or 

collide, influencing each other and acting as models for various expressions. For 

example the dance Juba came out of the prohibition against slaves drumming in the 

New World. Instead they used their bodies, slapping thighs, hands and feet, in order 

to recreate the sounds of the drums, a powerful form of expression and communication 

in Africa. The drum, its tonal quality, has influenced orality as well. Literary theorist 

Robert Elliot Fox has termed this influence “drumtalk” and asserts its major role 

in black rhetorics, rhythms, writings and literatures (3–16). 3 

Orality in literature has been explored with regard to its intertextual relations with 

oral forms, indigenous resources of a particular culture (Arndt; Quayson), the oral performative 

approach, where “speakerly texts” are examined that emphasize sound in 

terms of voice, patois, Creole, as well as style, rhythm, alliterations, call and response 

(Cooper; Gates; Glaser and Pausch; Hoving 122–83), and/or black musics, jazz and 

blues, as models for literature (Baker; Mackey). Much as Fox’s assertion of the tonal 

quality of the drum operating underneath, or infiltrating various aspects of black language 

and writing, I would like to locate the importance of the Alida folktale, as not necessarily 

on the level of narrative, but on the symbolic, that of sentiment, as an 

invocation of a painful history of terror, that addresses particular readers in acts of cultural 

memory and communal bonding, i.e. aural communities. This calls for thinking 

about narrative, in this case, as something less linear and referential, and reorienting it 

to the oral as excess, noise, and an absent presence. 

To that end, I provide an analysis, Ellen Ombre’s short story “Fragments” that will 

take into consideration this opacity (Glissant 111–20, 189–94), when attempting to 

identify an oral poetics. While the oral connotes speaking, the aural turns on listening 

and hearing, and this is key to Ombre’s work and how sound operates within the 

text. I will also investigate how Ombre constructs a model of subjectivity in relation 

to sound in her fiction, and I assert that this is mirrored in reader response; that 

Ombre is able to summon an aural community with particular readers. 4 

Repetition, Revision, and the “Cut” 

The “material conditions” of slavery to which Baker, Gilroy, and Moten refer, is part of 

the “ancestral matrix” of slavery in the New World that precedes and produces the 

Alida folktale. It is based on an actual historical event involving two now famous 


women: a notoriously cruel slave mistress, Susanna du Plessis, and an unknown 

slave girl, posthumously named Alida. In the historical experience from which the 

folktale grew, the unknown mulatta slave girl was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, 

ran out of the slave owners house, and then died in the streets of Paramaribo. Du 

Plessis who was of Dutch descent, despite the French name, has come to signify the 

cruelty of the Dutch slave-owning, colonial enterprise in Surinam. 5 

The importance of the figure of Alida for Surinamers of African descent is apparent 

in the yearly commemoration day held for her in Surinam, and she has been 

memorialized in a monument whose image captures the silent scream of a onebreasted 

slave girl (Accord 65; Neus-van der Putten 15, 130–37). Beginning in the 

sixties, the folktale began appearing in print in Surinam as part of a play about 

Susanna du Plessis. In the late eighties and early nineties, it was written into fiction 

and published in the Netherlands. In 2003, the Alida tale was recounted in two nonfiction 

works that were also published in Holland. The changing nature of folktales, 

and the fact that they are anonymously and communally authored, makes it difficult 

to account for transformations in the narrative unless they appear in print. Over the 

past fifty-sixty years, however, since this oral folktale has been incorporated into written 

works, changes and shifts in details have been documented. 6 

In the book titled, With My Own Eyes: A Current Day Look at Surinamese Slavery, 7 written 

by Clark Accord and Nina Jurna, the authors have compiled fiction, memoir, oral 

forms and nonfiction pieces in order to assert links between the colonial past of 

Surinam and current day Dutch society in the Netherlands. In a chapter titled “Slavin 

Alida, symbol van onverzettelijkheid” [The Female Slave Alida, Symbol of Indomitability], 

the folktale is described as one of the most important out of the history of slavery in 

Surinam, that would make two women, Alida and Susanna du Plessis, two of the bestknown 

figures from the colonial period in Surinam (Accord 65–70). 8 Given the name of 

the chapter, Accord and Jurna stress that the importance of the tale is in the slave’s 

imagined survival despite inhumane conditions; a testimony of strength and endurance 

for Surinamers of African descent. 

Hilda Neus-van der Putten, in her book Susanna du Plessis: Portrait of a Slave 

Mistress, 9 identifies 1963 as the year when the unnamed victim of the folktale becomes 

“Alida.” The shift from merely surviving the stabbing, to the cutting off of one breast, also 

occurs in a play about Susanna du Plessis performed in 1963. 10 This performance 

occurred during a centennial celebration marking the one-hundredth year of the abolition 

of slavery in Surinam. Neus-van der Putten implies that this may be the reason for Alida’s 

new found status as survivor (130–31). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that a play about 

the cruel plantation mistress and the transformation from death, to a story of survival for 

the slave girl, would occur in the decade just preceding decolonization. 

Neus-van der Putten asserts a connection between a rise in national consciousness 

that becomes apparent in Surinamese writers’ works during the 1950’s when 

214 | Joy Smith


they began to stress their own culture and appreciation of creolized languages over 

the supposed superior European languages (128–32). Cultural anthropologist 

Regina Bendix would seem to concur with Neus-van der Putten on the use of folktales 

in nation formation. In her book, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore 

Studies, she discusses how folklorists have historically been concerned with how 

folktales have been used for nationalism, the psycho-social importance of these 

works and their communal significance. In line with the changing nature of the 

Alida tale, Bendix emphasizes the dynamic, performative aspect of folktales, and 

the importance of cultural context, as she discusses their usage in the politics of 

culture. She describes how folklorists’ paradigms shifted from attempts at recuperation 

of static, authentic oral “texts” to process and performance-oriented studies; an 

understanding of the created and invented nature of folktales grew as well as an 

appreciation of the “conscious and strategic deployment of expressive culture” 

(188–218). 

While Bendix focuses on folktales with regard to European nationalism, and 

makes an argument for how they may function in those societies, the way in which 

groups employ these works for social and political purposes is applicable to the 

Surinamese case in its pre-independence years. In the Caribbean context, the role of 

sound and its importance in terms of nation formation, and movements for decolonization 

in particular, has been demonstrated. In her article “Rude Bwoys, Ridim, 

Rub-A-Dub and Rastas,” Loretta Collins, drawing on Baker asserts: 

Each emerging nation has its genesis not only in material cultural practice but in 

sound: ‘Just as infants babble through a welter of phones to achieve the phonemics of 

a native language, so conglomerates of human beings seeking national identity engage 

myriad sounds in order to achieve a vocabulary of national possibilities’ […] In the 

process of nation formation, a repertoire of sounds emerges. (Collins 169) 

Collin’s article is concerned with the soundscape at a particular historical moment in 

which attempts were made at decolonization in Jamaica. Her arguments about the role 

of sound in nation formation give credence to Neus-van der Putten’s assertions about 

the folktale’s role in nationalism and the social uses of the Alida folktale. According to 

Collins, sound may be involved in “articulating a desire for self-determination” for 

Caribbean countries on their journey to decolonization (“Rude Bwoys” 170). And it is 

during this time, the years just before Surinam’s independence, the folktale changes 

from the death of a slave to that of stubborn survival. 

In this case, the Alida folktale crossed and occupied several media simultaneously. 

It was performed repeatedly in theaters as part of a play about du Plessis in 

Surinam, in the sixties and early seventies. Another production of the play was broadcast 

over the radio three years after Surinam achieved independence in 1978. During 

the twentieth century, the folktale entered not only into the printed medium, but also 

sound technology and reproduction, what Ong has termed “secondary” orality. The 


adio makes for a voice/body-split that allows, as Marshall McLuhan observes, “words 

[to] suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures” (quoted in Collins 

“Crossroads” 2). Similar to embodied oral storytelling, the “intimate but disembodied” 

radio transmission may grab hold of the listener, a sort of possession or resonance 

within, that “enters and speaks through the engaged listener” (“Crossroads” 1). Radio 

acts as a conduit that through electromagnetic waves transmits disembodied voices, 

which in the case of the Alida folktale, passes on ancestral stories and collective 

memories. 

Given the play’s performance in post independence years, the folktale’s importance 

then would seem to go beyond nationalistic pursuits, just as it had been told for 

centuries before that possibility, to a kind of testimony that “writes into history the 

trauma of the Caribbean, […] foregrounding the strength of a culture that sustained 

itself through subversive sounds” (Collins, “Rude Bwoys” 185). 11 The Alida tale 

became a function and reflection of longings for independence and growing nationalist 

fervor, as well as a call for the recognition of a painful past. These repetitions and 

varying reiterations place the Alida folktale at the center of Surinamese political culture 

as well as black communal identifications. 

Alida represents the victimization and atrocities that occurred during the colonial 

period of slavery in Surinam and all its implications. It is a primary text, whose import 

and meaning is dependant upon its present context. In the sixties, it was part of acts 

of subversion, sounds of protest, and calls for independence, where writers were concerned 

with telling/performing history from the vantage point of the colonized. In the 

21st century, in Accord’s book for example, Alida is recounted within the context of 

forty years of Surinamese immigration to the Netherlands that spanned the period 

just before Surinam’s independence, and during the neocolonial period. 

Given the book jacket not only references the abolishment of slavery in Surinam 

140 years before its publication, but also the debate over the slavery monument in 

the Netherlands during the nineties, communal identifications in the Netherlands, as 

well as, or rather than national ones, would seem to be operating here. 12 The Alida 

folktale, and its cross cultural movement, begs the question of sound and communal 

identifications, as well as sound and transatlantic flows for those who study and theorize 

sound and aural culture. 

For a country on its way to independence, a tale of communal mourning symbolized 

by a nameless, faceless victim is transformed into Alida, a survivor, a kind of 

communal and then national symbol and heroine. How do sonic practices come into 

play in terms of national and communal identifications? How then may we think about 

repetition and revision, in the recounting of the folktale? How does a story about victimization 

come to stand for self-conscious empowerment, agency, and nationalistic 

endeavors? For Susanna du Plessis is one of many cruel slave mistresses, and Alida, 

one of countless many slaves who died at the hands of their masters. 

216 | Joy Smith

For an analysis of the reiteration of the tale, I will turn to the influential article 

“Repetition as a Figure in Black Culture” and its insistence on the notion of the 

“cut.” 13 James Snead regards repetition and revision as fundamental to modern 

black culture. “Circulation” and “flow” are key terms, where accidents and changes 

are allowed for, built into the dance, song, or sermon, etc. This is in distinction to progression, 

a destination or end goal. The “cut” is part of this tendency to repeat. 

As Snead explains, it is analogous to a break in music where the tune strays from 

the beat and then returns, but in a different register. The “cut” connotes continual 

return, a cutting back to the start, but with a “renewed statement of the previous 

material.” 14 


When discussing the folktale’s changes in narrative, as well as its emergence into 

print and radio, I do not mean to present a teleological construct; a progression from 

the oral to the written, from death to heroic survival. The nod to an historical event 

goes hand and hand with recreation and imagination. It implies a deferral of any originary 

event. Thus to see the folktale as a performance followed by variations, that differ 

from an original narrative, the metaphor of original and copy, are insufficient in 

capturing its ongoing reinvention and collective importance. Rather than focusing on 

an authentic tale and its divergences, one should, according to literary critic 

Alexander Weheliye, focus on the cultural conditions and the medium in which the 

object appears. In other words, as Weheliye, in referencing Snead, argues, where repetition 

and black culture are concerned, expect difference, “repetition with difference”(Weheliye, 

Phonographies 32). 

The Alida folktale(s) circulate and flow and yet they can be viewed “as events in 

their own right” (Weheliye 33). The rather pronounced break in the narrative, from 

dead victim to survivor, as a result of nationalist longings and practices is one reading. 

Saidiya Hartman’s elaboration on the “cut,” however, that deals with memory, 

slavery, pained bodies, and forms of redress, is just as relevant. Despite the fight for 

independence that was eventually won in Surinam, there is a continual return to a 

narrative about slavery and its focus on terror, pain and loss, a constant state for 

those who were enslaved in the New World, what Saidiya Hartman describes as a 

“history of hurt” (51). 

Hartman insists on the “centrality of practices” in the enslaved lives. While 

“agency” would be an exaggeration, resistance was to be found in the “mnemic 

traces” of everyday practices; the quotidian. In dancing juba, secret gatherings, 

drumming, or storytelling, slaves often witnessed what they had not seen, testified to 

what they had not experienced. Whether they danced a dance that was a remnant of 

Africa, or told stories about the homeland they had never seen, or reflected on the 

horrors of slave life they had not personally experienced, they not only expressed the 

violence of dislocation and the everyday violence of slavery, but they were also 

reflecting on their conditions. 


In this way slaves could reappropriate dominant social space, transforming a 

“space of captivity” into a “sacralized and ancestral landscape,” or in the case of the 

Alida folktale, soundscape. As Hartman argues, everyday historicity of these practices 

were the way in which, 

the quotidian articulates the wounds of history and the enormity of the breach instituted 

by the transatlantic crossing of black captives and the consequent processes of 

enslavement: violent domination, dishonor, natal alienation, and chattel status. (72) 

The enormous “subterranean history of death and discontinuity” is a history that cannot 

be fully undone. And it is this rupture, and inevitable inability to address it fully, 

that ignites the continual return to these practices, the “cut” to certain stories, memories, 

or African retrievals. It is this “inevitable loss or breach that stands at the origin 

and engenders the black ‘New World’ subject […] As well, the ‘cut’ returns to 

denied and unmet needs” (75). It is a collective, ravenous need that drives attempts 

at redress that is always already denied. 

Thus redress cannot solve the dilemma or put an end to a history whose effects 

are still felt in terms of continued racism and inequality. It would seem that memory 

is not enough, and yet central in terms of demands for recognition and articulating a 

brutal history. For Hartman, the body, the slave’s pained body, becomes the central 

site for memory in the service of redress. 

The event of captivity and enslavement engenders the necessity of redress, the inevitability 

of its failure, and the constancy of repetition yielded by this failure. […] In this regard, the 

body is both the ‘eroding witness’ to this history of terror and the object of redress. (77) 

The Alida story in its narrative and in the continual return is an example of the centrality 

of the pained body as witness and means for attempts at redress. Since total 

redress is an impossibility, Alida has stayed alive, not only in the retelling of the tale, 

but in the narrative, she lives, but experiences and embodies the “cut,” the cutting of 

flesh, is cut into continually, as part of a story that is cut back to always. 

The folktale, which centers around the cutting of flesh – containing an image of 

violence, amputation, and loss – can be read as a physical rendering of the psychic 

fragmentation of subjectivity that had to occur in order for Africans to be successfully 

interpellated into slave society. 15 The collective return during the sixties, to a folktale 

that describes the cutting off of flesh, the breast in particular, from a mulatta slave 

girl as punishment for having been the (unwilling) object of desire of a slave owner, 

puts the ravished (sexually and physically), hybrid, female body at the site of cultural 

conflict and domination in Surinam. Clearly agency, in terms of redress, was at work 

in the tales’ reiteration and performance in theaters during pre-independence years, 

in the “strategic deployment” of the folktale by individual writers. 

Although grounded in fact, this story changes and grows, passes from oral expressive 

culture into the written language and back again, moves from the Caribbean to 

the Netherlands, and twists and turns with the consciousness of a people. 

218 | Joy Smith


“Sonic Afro-Modernity”: Between Orality and Literature 

The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken 

word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that 

it makes is part of its meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of 

as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning. When it is written, you lose the 

sound or noise and therefore you lose part of the meaning. (Brathwaite 17) 

In the postcolonial or neocolonial period, the Alida folktale has been re-imagined and 

reiterated in two recent works of fiction published in the Netherlands: How Expensive 

was the Sugar?, by Cynthia McLeod published in 1987, and a short story collection 

entitled Vortex, published in 1993 and written by Ellen Ombre. 16 The folktale’s 

appearance in written texts is just one of a myriad of examples of the obsessive ways 

in which African Americans “sounded modernity” in literature. The infusion of oral 

forms in written texts is a twentieth century phenomenon for black literature in the 

Americas, part of a larger characteristic of this period that confirms the “crucial place 

of sound in modern black culture” (Weheliye 99–105). 

In the quote above, taken from Brathwaite’s well-known History of the Voice, he considers 

what is lost when orature is written down, how the aspects of cultural tradition 

and performance are no longer readily discernable. The missing, tonal quality of the 

voice, sounds that carry emotion and connote immediacy and presence, interpersonal 

and communal connection, and most certainly cultural context, is all implied in 

Brathwaite’s lament. When dealing with orality, one does need to consider what is missing 

in the translation. Orality is better understood as a gesture, an embodied mode 

of social behavior, it is interpersonal, and while we tend to view it as words written on 

a page when it appears in literature, there is an entire cultural tradition that comes 

into play in its evocation. What we are left with in written form is an incomplete, if not 

poor, rendering of an oral form as well as a transformation of an oral utterance. 

Yet one also needs to consider what is gained when orature is not only written 

down but becomes part of an interaction with literature. This loss or absence can be 

generative of other meanings and produce communal affiliations. The readers’ ability 

to respond to and experience communal identifications is not obliterated in the 

writing, but remains. 17 A separation does occur between author and text, so in a 

sense it becomes autonomous, but as Ong asserts, “removing an utterance from its 

author is not removing it from discourse. Written utterances then can only interrupt 

discourse, perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years, but it does not “fix” it. “In 

this way, in their need to be uttered, all texts are part of discourse”(Ong in Foley 149). 

The ghostly sound remnants of vernacular performances may be captured in print, 

discernible to those who can hear and listen between the lines conveying “a new 

sense of sound, and noise, emerging from the present-day Caribbean” (Baker in 

Reckin 5; Cooper). 


Weheliye asserts these “possibilities” in his article “I Am I Be: The Subject of 

Sonic Afro-modernity.” He discusses sound recordings and reproductions and their 

importance to twentieth century black culture. Weheliye identifies music and orality 

as two of the most important modes of cultural transfer, and these aural forms figure 

prominently in African American written works in the last century (102). 18 His project 

is mainly concerned with the ways music and sound technologies offer different 

modes, other than the linguistic, for theorizing subjectivity. These technologies allow 

a space-time split where performance is separated from the contexts of reception. In 

other words, “orality and musicality were no longer reliant on the immediate presence 

of human subjects” (99). 

While many critics, like Brathwaite, have interpreted this condition as one of lack 

(of authenticity or immediacy), Weheliye contends that they neglect the possibilities 

occasioned by this disjuncture. This complex “interfacing” of black culture with 

sound technologies in the twentieth century, and all the varied cultural practices that 

are produced, are what Weheliye calls “sonic Afro-modernity.” This aural sphere is not 

only limited to music, included in Weheliye’s list of technologies is writing, and he discusses 

black writers’ obsession with attempting to “capture sound in literature.” 

These writers have dealt with black musical forms as well as orality in their works. 19 

Weheliye understands these texts as “sounds recordings” of another kind. He adds, 

“These texts suggest a different way of merging the phono and graph than the technology 

of the phonograph, underscoring how sound and writing meet and inform each 

other in the written annals of twentieth-century African American literature” 

(Weheliye, “I Am” 103). 

Like many theorists when dealing with orality and literature, Weheliye limits his concern 

to the “oral performative dimensions of written language,” the way black writers 

endow certain texts with the allusion of speech (103). The fact that folktales and oral 

traditions are generally acknowledged as a major part of how sound suffuses black literature, 

the vernacular theories of Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., which emphasize 

musical influences or the speaking voice, have gained widespread influence. Gates’ 

notion of the “speakerly text,” for example, has informed many analyses of black literature. 

20 With the “speakerly text,” Gates elaborates on the many ways in which black 

writers endow the written text with the allusion of something approaching the oral. 21 

The emphasis has been on how this literature approximates spontaneous, conversational 

speech, how the writer’s use of rhythm and diction breathe life into the 

text creating a kind of immediacy. The use of dialect and Creole also dominate these 

analyses because they help to create a strong voice that involves the reader in a 

more active, listening posture, much in a similar way to oral storytelling. 

While in Ellen Ombre’s story “Fragments” the protagonist’s voice narrates the 

story providing an intimate tone, Ombre does not include a Creole language or 

dialect, and thus diverges from the notion of the “speakerly text.” Yet orality still plays 

220 | Joy Smith


an important role in her reiteration of the Alida folktale. For as literary critic Ato 

Quayson asserts, when theorizing the interaction of oral forms to written texts, orality 

“does not reside solely in the mimesis of verbal speech and in the forms of oralization 

as is arguably the case in poetry. It also lies at the level of the reproduction 

of cultural codes and signifiers” (14). Quayson would seem to mean the interaction 

of a wide breadth of oral forms to written literature, the way works of literature are 

informed by as well as recount various kinds of black orature. 22 

I will now elaborate on sound in terms of subjectivity in Ellen Ombre’s story 

“Fragments” in the hope that it can tell us something about the nature and formation 

of black subjectivity. I will also explore the dialogical interaction of the Alida tale 

within the short story, which manages to enlarge Ombre’s written story while also acting 

to subvert its own subjection, or capture, within the literary text. “Fragments” confirms 

a literary aesthetic based on tensions between orality and literature, producing 

a text that requires a “hearing and reading through” by listener/readers (Reckin 2). 

What interests me here is what occurs in the interaction between oral expressive culture 

with that of literature; this play of absence and presence and what is produced. 

The Alida tale is not only retold but structures the story thematically, providing a 

hidden polemic within the text that addresses potential readers in various ways. I 

want to also consider the way “Fragments,” and its inclusion of the folktale, interpellates 

Surinamese readers into communal subjects with its performance of cultural 

codes that act as interpretive guides for particular communities. The notion of an 

“oral poetics,” rather than that of a “speakerly text” would better describe Ombre’s 

ways oral forms are embraced within the story and provide a meta-expressive function 

within the text. “Fragments” would seem to challenge many existing assumptions 

about the importance of dialect with regard to orality in black literature and may 

theorize important ways in which the spoken word and literature come together. 

Fragments: Sound and Subject Formation 

In her 1992 short story collection Maalstroom [Vortex], author Ellen Ombre deals with 

subjects in motion. The movement of immigrants, travelers, and exiles are explored 

through geographical space as well as temporal shifts between the past and the 

present. These journeys span different time periods, and involve themes of exile and 

alienation, not only from one’s homeland, but from one’s own self. The transnational, 

migratory themes that abound in the collection, foreground destabilized identities. 

This cross-cultural meditation on fragmented subjectivity is echoed in the story 

“Fragments.” The longest story by far in Ombre’s collection, “Fragments” is set in the 

city of Paramaribo in colonial Surinam, in the year 1939, seventy-six years after the 

abolition of slavery. 

In an intimate tone that approximates a confession, a young Creole girl recounts 

her passage from the Surinamese interior to Paramaribo and life with the Miskins, a 


Christian couple who become her guardians. Ombre’s story is focalized by the protagonist, 

who is estimated to be four years old. The narrative however moves back 

and forth between that of the older, perhaps adult woman and the impressions of the 

young girl. The girl’s story is told as a long monologue, a testimony of sorts, bearing 

witness to her own journey from the Spite and Remorse plantation in the countryside 

to the home of the Miskins in the waterfront, capital city of Paramaribo. 

Her past recollections are no longer of importance to her current life, as she 

makes clear, “What took place in my life before I left my relatives, continued in an 

underworld of spirits and shadows” (78). 23 Given her young age, she has very little 

memory of her past, is in a sense tabula rasa. The Miskins immediately give her the 

name Hannah, and in the naming there is a revision or undoing of what was. The significance 

in the naming, the Western, Christian name she is given, would seem to 

somehow mark this break with the past, and identify her new, or burgeoning nature, 

“I am named with their name and speak as they speak” (79). It signals an abrupt end 

to the past. 

Now nameless, but renamed, with memories fading fast, the past has been 

forcibly ruptured perhaps prompting her claim that she did not exist until she was 

written into the Paramaribo town records. There is no written record of her existence 

on the plantation from which she comes. She confides, “history is silent on that” and 

adds, “my existence begins in the house of Mr. and Mrs. Miskin in Paramaribo” 

(79). 24 Unlike in her former life, it is made official by the act of writing her name into 

the city’s registry: 

At the town registry office, my parents entered me in as: ‘Hannah, foster child 

belonging to the family of Eugenio Miskin and Esmeralda Miskin, nee Schattevoo. At 

the time of delivery, the 22nd of February, 1939, estimated age four years. 25 

It is only as her name is recorded, a sign of her entrance into the world of Western 

writing and history, that she is delivered from her past. She is literally written into 

existence. 

On the night of her arrival, sleepy and disoriented, the girl is stripped naked and 

given a cold shower by the mistress who would become her caretaker. As Mrs. Miskin 

later recalls “that first cold shower” given to the protagonist, she proudly remarks on 

her self-defined role in the acculturation process as one meant to break the girl: 

You had a strong will, girl, typical character of a mixed blood. If an Indian and a bush 

Negro come together you get a kind of… She cleared her throat, gave me a serious look 

and frowned. As tough and impenetrable as a mangrove swamp. It took me a lot of 

effort to break that will. But listen up, where there’s a will, there’s a way. (80) 26 

It is a symbolic baptism of sorts, one that marks her entry into dominant, colonial discourse, 

just as the naming in the written registry confirms it. 

Naming is essentially what happens when subjects are interpellated. The word at 

the root of interpellation is the same as the root for the word “appellation,” meaning 

222 | Joy Smith


to name. 27 According to Althusser, ideology “hails” or calls concrete individuals. They 

then become “concrete subjects” (1504). Ideology represents subjects’ ideas in 

relation to the world. It is material in that it involves rituals and practices, and 

requires concrete individuals to act on them. Individuals are enlisted into belief 

systems by ideology. In “Fragments,” the colonial state and its hierarchical situation 

regarding Western values – expressed through the ideologies of the ISAs (Ideological 

State Apparatuses), most notably in the form of family, church, and school – are operating 

by and through Mrs. Miskin. 

While it is the Creole girl who guides us through the narrative, her mistress’s voice, 

is recounted frequently and is prominent. Mrs. Miskin is the agent who interpellates 

the young girl into Dutch colonial life. From the very beginning, Mrs. Miskin’s words not 

only create, or remake the girl, but they begin a process of dismemberment, a psychological 

and emotional undoing, that takes the form of incessant derogatory comments: 

“a mixed blood […] as tough and impenetrable as a mangrove swamp.” It is (at times) 

more subtle, but a constant assault, nonetheless, from which the girl will never recover. 

The title “Fragments” would seem to be descriptive of the effects of loss, rupture, 

and forced acculturation the young girl experiences in the Miskin household. 

As part of this “civilizing mission,” 28 the Creole girl is sent to a Catholic school, 

taken to church every week, taught to say her prayers nightly, and is groomed for 

household chores such as clearing the table, cleaning fish, and later, giving Mr. Miskin 

daily manicures. She must eat separately from the Miskins, secluded in a room off 

from the kitchen. 

While the promise of a better life may have been the impetus for the Creole girl’s 

removal, the reality is a different story. She is not embraced as a member of the 

family, but instead becomes a kind of house servant and improvement project. The 

“privilege” of obtaining a Dutch education and gaining literacy comes at a high and 

terrible price. 

The largest part of this acculturation process is done at home. With a missionary’s 

zeal, Mrs. Miskin takes on the role of educating and refining her ward. 

Recitation plays an important role in the Creole girl’s indoctrination into Dutch culture, 

language, and literacy in the form of Mrs. Miskin’s voice, her pedagogical recitations 

which include storytelling, history lessons, poetry recitations, and 

monologues. 29 When the girl is taught to recite lines of poetry from Mrs. Miskin’s 

favorite Dutch writer, she is plainly confronted with her place in society: 

‘What is important is the art of declamation, giving the correct emphasis,’ she 

spoke, ‘but that is preceded by committing the text to memory, word for word.’ And 

emphasizing every syllable she recited: ‘Negritude is like flowering vanilla, high in the 

jungle trees. Still far away, the odor greets us, while carried with the breeze.’ That verse 

is carved into my brain. As self-evident as the fact that the knife, as Mrs. Miskin taught 

me, is laid to the right of the plate when setting the table. 30 


While mastering Dutch and living under the guidance and influence of her mistress, 

the destination, the end goal, is that the Creole girl become better than those who 

are like her, but who have not learned the colonizer’s language or ways. In the acculturation 

process, all that has to do with her past and where she comes from is devalued, 

or inspires terror. 

Oh, won’t they get the shock of their lives if they ever see you again at Spite and 

Remorse. When a lady comes to visit them. We, Mr. Miskin and I, may not have brought 

you to this world but, by cultivating you, with a great deal of refinement, I shall succeed 

in making you into a copy of ourselves. No one, no one will recognize you there when 

you stand, clean and well cared for, in front of the primitives. They will ask themselves 

who the lady is. And what will you answer? 

‘I am Hannah Miskin,’ I answered. 

I tried to imagine returning to Spite and Remorse. The only things I had to hold on 

to were Mrs. Miskin’s descriptions. Primitiveness, poverty, idolatry, rattlesnakes, and 

other terrifying things, such a story about the history of the place name Spite and 

Remorse, which she told me with great enthusiasm. (89) 31 

It is clear that in learning Dutch the language becomes the ideological structure or 

system that will speak the girl, provide the blue print for identifications, for that which 

is valued and that which is not. 

The title “Fragments” would also seem to refer to Mrs. Miskin’s sense of self and her 

Dutch colonial identifications. She wears only plain dresses, never flowers and stripes. 

“ ‘To loud,’ she found them, ‘too negro-like.’ ” 32 When she teaches the girl poetry, it is from 

Dutch writers, whom she refers to as “our” old masters, and she calls the Netherlands, 

the colonial power of Surinam, the “mother country.” In taking the girl from “primitive” to 

cultured and middle-class, the girl becomes a kind of affirmation of what Mrs. Miskin 

aspires to be, the ideal, the Subject in Althusser’s terms; the white, Dutch colonial. 

With this aspiration, the girl provides Mrs. Miskin with a purpose, in various ways, in 

an empty life filled with disappointments. In her task to remake the girl, Mrs. Miskin finds 

refuge from her distant marriage, where husband and wife seldom talk, and even less frequently 

touch. She is grateful to have the girl in the house, needs her in fact, and not only 

because of the servicing chores she makes her do in the household. Mrs. Miskin turns 

away from the disturbing state of her marriage, when she concentrates on the regime for 

the girl. She denies her feelings of anger about being infertile, about feeling abandoned 

or cursed by God, after all her years of piety, good service, and devotion. 

Mrs. Miskin’s form of dismemberment, a kind of soul-killing marriage and life, 

comes to the surface in occasional bouts of madness: she lives in a liminal state 

between sanity and insanity. Only when the moon is full, do the suppressed emotions 

come forth. During her periods of “illness,” Mrs. Miskin is overcome by “strange 

moods.” These spells are characterized outwardly in rumblings of dissatisfaction, 

mumbling, followed by an eruption of an uncontrollable urge to remove the “filth” 

224 | Joy Smith


from the house. Everything must go, must be cleaned. She rages, curses God, and 

the “kweekje,” her ward, until she must take to her bed in exhaustion. 

In her escape from her marriage, her life, and the silence, she is obsessed with 

the sound of her own voice, and spews a continual flood of words. Her husband is 

not interested in interacting or communicating with her. 

He had no time for her rhymes and what he called her verbal flood. […] If in her 

attempts at conversation she spoke too long, he would cut her off with “Words, words, I 

can’t bear all this racket” (89). 33 So instead she turns to her ward, who describes Mrs. 

Miskin as her “radio,” “on all day, […] she was my background music. I was her only audience. 

We were in tune with each other. (88) 34 

In the constant flow of language, the girl becomes advanced in Dutch in a very short 

time and learns her place within Dutch society as well. The Creole girl’s interpellation 

into Hannah Miskins is one of sonic interpellation. 

While Althusser’s theory of interpellation does not expressly deal with sound, the 

example he gives of subject interpellation, is auditory, it is an actual hailing or call by 

an agent/representative of the state, a policeman: “Hey, you there”! When the policeman 

calls out, the subject will turn around. “By this mere one-hundred-and-eightydegree 

physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized 

that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ 

(and not someone else)” (1504). 

In Althusser’s theory of the subject, subjection plays a large role. The subject is 

lured/forced into accepting ideal notions of the subject, which Althusser distinguishes 

by a capital letter, the Subject, the ideal person, image, or values the subject 

attempts to be or to have. The force of authority involved in the hailing causes a reaction 

in the subject one of recognition or misrecognition (1503–05). Mrs. Miskin’s 

ideal Subject is the White, Dutch colonial, or the values extolled, that she tries to 

attain through her dress and tastes. 

Language, recitation, and Mrs. Miskin’s voice act as key interpellative forces, the 

ideology that shapes the girl. While language is the agent of her transformation into 

a subject, sound in terms of voice and recitation are the means: a sonic interpellation. 

Yet the girl’s journey into colonial discourse, a passage from being viewed as 

barely human to that of “the civilized world of the church” is an ambivalent one. For 

in learning the language, her position within colonial discourse is made apparent. 

Rather than securing her place in civilized society, she is placed into a liminal space, 

as the girl learns to see herself through the eyes of others, and learns that she can 

become “similar, but not quite.” 35 

The schoolbooks had pretty pictures in them. Of Ot and Sien and Trui. Children who 

aged a year with every new book. They weren’t precocious. But they were very far away 

in an unreachable world. We of St. Peter’s School could never be like them. We were 

from a different world. (86) 36 


In school she is taught to read books about people she does not resemble, who lead 

lives she does not recognize, in family situations she does not know, but has learned 

to recognize as better, and to long for their lives. It is as if the world of Dutch literacy 

holds promises unfulfilled. 

This kind of complicated example of (mis) identifications in terms of language and 

images is an important area in thematics of violence and ambivalence that run 

through Caribbean and postcolonial theory as well as literature (Bhabha 121–31; 

Nair 236–52). In the mission to remake the girl into a Christian, and a good colonial 

citizen of Surinam, there is an inherent ambivalence in the whole project. The “mimic 

man,” Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry” comes to mind: “colonial mimicry is the desire 

for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the 

same. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry must continually produce its 

slippage, its excess, its difference […] Almost the same but not quite” (127). 37 In 

this case, almost the same, but not white. Failure is inherent in just how far the inculcation 

process of the protagonist can go. For language, in the quest for full citizenship/subjectivity 

for the colonial, appears to have its limits. 

Alida Folktale in Print 

The history of the reversed names was from long ago, from the time when there 

were still slaveholders. 38 

‘If I told you how we were mishandled and humiliated in former days.’ She made a 

face as if she were trying to suppress after pains. ‘Like a cancer, the worm of slavery 

gnawed at every budding sprout which, with proper care, could have contributed to the 

blossoming and prosperity of our country. You can get down on your bare knees and 

thank our Dear Lord that you didn’t live in those times. 

On my bare knees I thanked the Lord with devotion. (88, emphasis mine) 39 

It is in the use of the pronoun “we” that Ombre overtly identifies Mrs. Miskin as a 

black woman. Mrs. Miskin continually reiterates the need for the girl to know history, 

although generally she teaches her Dutch history and literature. In this case, however, 

that precedes and leads to the Alida folktale, Mrs. Miskin passes down history 

about slavery. Mrs. Miskin acts as a kind of griot, a carrier of ancestral voices. 

Her colonial identifications are so strong, it would not be apparent to many readers 

that she is not Dutch. That she herself is Surinamese, is only clear to those who 

know the history of “kweekjes” in Surinam, for that was an intra-racial, class phenomenon. 

The pronoun “we” is in counter distinction to the former “our” she used 

when dealing with Dutch history and literature. In this prelude to the recounting of the 

Alida folktale, it becomes clear that Mrs. Miskin’s interpellations are varied and confusing: 

she consistently attempts Dutch, colonial, nation state identifications, tempered 

with very occasional attempts at ethnic communal building. 

226 | Joy Smith


Two pages later, the Alida folktale is interjected into the text as Mrs. Miskin, once 

again, gives history lessons, but this time she tells the girl something about her own 

personal history too, the background of the place from which she came, and exactly 

how the Spite and Remorse plantation received its name. In the recounting of this 

oft-told tale, Mrs. Miskin is also imparting knowledge about the Creole girl’s particular 

legacy as a mulatta in Surinamese society. In this revision and repetition of the 

folktale, Alida, appears here as the house slave Etrave. The story covers one and a 

half pages: 

Long, long ago, when slaveholders still had slaves, the plantation I came from was 

the property of the wealthy Du Plessis family. Mr. Du Plessis was an incorrigible lady’s 

man and his wife a jealous spouse who watched over her husband like a kidnapper 

guarding his victim. She traced all his movements and noticed that he spent a noticeably 

large amount of time in the vicinity of a certain house slave, Etrave. One time the 

jealous Mrs. Du Plessis saw how her husband, in an attempt at seduction, casually 

stroked the young slave’s breasts as he passed her. The mistress was furious. She was 

in charge in the house. With such behavior the slaveholder undermined her authority. 

Outside he could go his own way and let his bestial drives run free. But inside the house 

her rules applied. She summoned the plantation flogger and ordered him to chop off 

the young slave’s breasts. That would teach her to make eyes at her husband. […] 

‘Silently the couple sat down to their meal,’ she continued the story. ‘The man clearly 

enjoyed it and smacked his lips heartily. 

“Superb,” he said, praising his wife’s culinary art. 

“Well then,” she said, when the meal was finished and the man had uttered a satisfied 

belch, “I hope you’ve finally had your fill. You just ate the breasts of your beloved Etrave.” 

The man stood up, with knees bent he tried to support himself on the edge of the 

table. He tore the buttons off his shirt and grabbed at his throat. All that would come 

out was vomit. It was like the explosion of Krakatoa. […] He fell down and vomited out 

his heart and soul. Mrs. Du Plessis looked down with horror at her dying husband. 

“Oh God, my Lord,” she called out in despair, “what have I done?” Her spite had 

made way for remorse. 

“ ‘Well’ she said, because there was silence, ‘what do you think of that?’ ‘I don’t 

know’ I answered.” (90–91) 40 

On the level of narrative, the incorporation of the Alida folktale, one that centers on physical 

mutilation, is a representation of violence and dismemberment of slave bodies. This 

dismemberment is doubled in the psychic fragmentation of the receiver of the tale, the 

Creole protagonist, as well as the storyteller, Mrs. Miskin. The absence of roots, for the 

girl, and the sense of lack of origins they both share, and that make up the New World 

African American subject, would seem to offer a clue as to the importance and functioning 

of the Alida folktale within the story’s plot. The girl lacks her own personal narrative, and 

so it would seem the folktale anchors her into a communal identity and historical position. 


Her status as mulatta carries with it a history of anxiety about hybridity in terms 

of race and culture, a repulsion mixed with that of desire, contained within the folktale 

in that Alida, thus Etrava, is mulatta, carrying a generational context of miscegenation. 

41 The sexualized aspect is made apparent with the emphasis on the breast 

as fetishized object of desire, even as mutilated flesh, that becomes a possession of 

both the slave owners in its literal consumption. 

In the case of the Creole girl, it is not only the girl’s personal past that is passed 

down to her by Mrs. Miskin, an entire nation’s forgotten or disowned past and injustices, 

are explored in Ombre’s story. This fragmented history seems to spawn fragmented 

subjectivities for all involved. The hybrid, mulatta child’s presence, however, 

bears the burden of this history. She is part of an on-going negotiation of forces that 

come together in a particular part of the world. As Althusser asserts, a subject is 

already a subject. The girl has been interpellated into Surinamese society long before 

she actually physically entered into it. Her gendered, racialized, and sexualized 

Creole body is “overdetermined” (Lionnet 87). 42 

As literary critic Françoise Lionnet asserts, in Caribbean women’s literature, the 

female body, both “striking” and “disturbing,” acts as a revealing text. It may serve 

as a privileged, symbolic site representing the clash of cultures (94). The “clash of 

cultures” is captured in the folktale that harks back to the “subterranean history” of 

rupture and death, of the Middle Passage, that “history of hurt,” of pained and dismembered 

bodies. This is not only true for characters in the story, but also for all 

Surinamese readers/listeners of African descent in their continual collective return 

to the folktale. 

On the level of narration, it is as if the folktale comes to stand for the protagonist’s 

lack of history and origins in Ombre’s implanting of it. The girl’s personal story is displaced 

by the folktale that provides a sense of a dark, inhospitable history. This function 

of filling in a missing gap in the girl’s past, is doubled on the narrative level in 

terms of providing interpretative meaning to Ombre’s short story. Much in the way of 

the folktale is alluded to and implied in the story without being overtly stated. What 

is immediately apparent and resonates with the folktale, for those who are familiar 

with it, is the servicing role of the girl in the Miskin’s household and the triangulated 

relationship between the couple and herself. 

By adding complexity and layers of meaning to the story, the folktale manages to fill 

a gap, produce something that is lost, or absent in the storytelling. Some things are 

not, and perhaps, cannot be said, and yet they are conveyed. They are, quite possibly, 

“the hidden language of the slave” (Davis and Fido 5). The Alida tale in conjunction 

with the short story, both reveals and conceals, and in the oscillation between what is 

grasped and what is not, something is at once repeated and created anew. 

Ombre seems particularly adept at engaging critical strategies in her fiction. 43 

Would it be too far off the mark, then, to suggest that Ombre’s story may also be read 

228 | Joy Smith


as deconstructing an entire emphasis on language and the written word, where, paradoxically, 

gaining literacy in her story plays such a significant role? The folktale, this 

corporeal, communicative gesture, has been recounted, perhaps translated into the 

written word, replacing while communicating, with a hidden polemic, what cannot be 

spoken. The written language has the potential to be overridden in Ombre’s text by 

the inclusion of sonic expressive culture in the form of a reiterated folktale. 

Reader Interpellation 

Althusser’s theory of interpellation extends to readers. Communal building is not only 

going on between the girl and Mrs. Miskin within the text. Althusser’s theory of reader 

interpellation allows that the text also has the power to hail and transform in terms 

of forms of address. If as Ong states, “a code both interprets and itself needs interpretation,” 

the folktale is itself a code to be unlocked, filled with uncertainty and possibility 

(165). By “code,” I mean an interpretive guide for a particular community, a 

starting place for meaning making. The inclusion of the folktale in “Fragments,” acts 

as encoded information, a mise-en-abyme that functions on two levels, guiding the 

narrative plot, while also hailing particular readers. While reader response theories 

allow that there is no over-determined way in which a text can be read, issues of 

authorial intention come into play when history, oral forms, and literature come 

together. 

From the first brief opening paragraphs, cultural codes, mnemonics of history and 

collective memory, the ghosts of slavery are ever present, acting as interlocutor 

between the writer, her protagonist, and the audience(s). The story begins, 

I was born in the Commewijne district. Some of the plantations in this fertile, once 

wealthy Surinamese district have meaningful names: Mon Souci, Mon Tresor, Newfound 

Care, Peace and Delight. I come from Spite and Remorse. (78) 44 

The girl’s individual memory coalesces with collective memory when she remarks on 

how the “plantations had meaningful names.” The names act as mnemonics, triggers 

of cultural memory, evoking certain histories to some readers, mainly Surinamers, 

particularly those of African descent. And while Ombre’s story is set during the colonial 

period, after the abolition of slavery, this slippage in time, between the past and 

the present, is purposeful, and significant to the protagonist’s experiences and the 

plot line. These plantation names add deeper levels of meaning to the story, and prepare 

certain readers for what will undoubtedly be a dark tale. 

The well-known, slave-owning family Du Plessis, owned the Mon Tresor plantation 

at one time, and Susanna du Plessis herself owned the plantation from which the 

Creole girl was taken, Spite and Remorse. The Commewijne district has a history of 

church-related foster care for Hindustani, Javanese, and black children. The mere 

mentioning of the plantation names, perhaps anything associated with Susanna du 

Plessis, may evoke a strong emotional reaction with certain audiences. 45 


The folktale’s oral performances connoted a public, communal type of call and 

response that mobilized affiliations and demands for redress. In the written context, 

this excess does not disappear, but these sounds “solicit the body” (Morris 33). 

Remnants of the oral performance’s ability to engage the “body’s vibratory field” an 

“articulatory stream of sound” within the body, a subvocalization occurs while reading, 

what Garrett Stewart calls the “phonotext.” In the volume Sound States, literary 

critic Adelaide Morris’s article is concerned with epic composers and the modernist 

epics of the twentieth century, “a handful of poems written in response to two world 

wars, global economic collapse, and the development of nuclear armaments” (33). 

What is important for this analysis is in the aural dimension, the hearing and listening 

that occurs in the body, and as Morris asserts, “their reach is requisite to the 

magnitude, eloquence, […] they need to mobilize a culture’s historic, spiritual, and/or 

mythic heritage and suggest a route toward durable release (33). The Alida folktale 

carries a similar kind of cultural weight and public appeal for Surinamers and in its 

retelling within fiction activates a “phonotext” for listeners/readers. 

Sound and Silence 

In following the principle of the folktale, that of impurity and powerlessness, the 

Creole girl’s body represents the possibility of service, and pleasure. For at the end 

of the story, Hannah’s job of providing manicures for Mr. Miskin becomes something 

more intimate and terrifying. Mrs. Miskin has transferred many of her household 

duties to the girl, and the latest job is filing Mr. Miskin’s nails. When she is in his private 

reading room performing her duties: 

Mr. Miskin turned onto his side. He looked at me, stretched out his arm and spread 

his fingers out on the towel. A smile played over his lips. ‘You see this hand?’ Mr. Miskin 

moved his fingers forcing me to stop my task. “This is the hand that feeds you. Without 

this hand you head, your belly, your limbs don’t exist, none of you exits. This hand turns 

you into a big girl. Look at me.’ I looked him in the eyes. ‘What happens between the 

walls of my reading room is our secret. Miss Treurniet, Mrs. Miskin, no one exists here 

except you and me. You understand?’ 

I did what was asked of me. (102) 46 

The Creole girl’s journey has led her to confinement. She is an island, cut off from the 

mainland of community with no escape. 47 The road to Dutch literacy has become one 

where the threat of speech and speaking are now a danger to her survival, part of her 

imprisonment. Her journey into alienation and exile is complete. She’s come undone. 

She’s become Hannah Miskin. 

Not only does Hannah experience separation from others, but she is disconnectedness 

from herself, fragmented through her forced objectification. Her invisibility 

becomes a kind of inexpressibility. She is only able to hint at her abuse, “I did what was 

asked of me,” and her later depression. Language is fused with ambivalence in Ombre’s 

230 | Joy Smith


story, for example the strange lack of communication between Mr. and Mrs. Miskin 

despite her barrage of words. In the acquisition of the Dutch language, Hannah is paradoxically 

silenced. In a doubling of the Alida tale, Hannah is condemned to household 

servitude, and sexual servitude. 

The Alida folktale operates as an alternative way to communicate the violence 

done to the girl and to others for centuries. The unspeakable that cannot be captured 

by the sign, is encoded in the text through sound by the inclusion of the Alida folktale 

in Ombre’s work of literature. Edward Glissant’s notion of opacity is appropriate here. 

The linguistic is not always transparent. Caribbean proverbs, for example, are notoriously 

opaque for those who are not of the culture and they may not carry a literal 

meaning. They convey a feeling, a culture, a history, and sentiment. What I mean to 

say is that linguistic communication may lose some of its direct indexical meaning, 

may not be transparent or easily understood, and illicit the same affective qualities 

as say music, dance, or songs of mourning. 

The girl’s “I don’t know” in response to Mrs. Miskin’s question about what she 

thought of the Alida folktale is suggestive of the way readers may have thought 

about the abrupt inclusion of the tale, which on the surface, appears to be loosely 

tied to the story in terms of the girl’s origins. In actuality, it is a mise en abyme, one 

that signifies a particular cultural history of slavery and terror. But it is something 

much more. 

The folktale functions as a trace, not a mere presence, but as a productive combination 

of presence and absence. It is a trace of the sound, the corporeal, and of 

the Surinamese communal structures of affect that the textual alone cannot fully 

capture. “Fragments” “exhibits the performativity of sound: sound that reveals transoceanic 

relation […] sound that animates sound-space and brings the living and the 

dead into our presence” (Reckin 3). The recounting of the Alida folktale within the 

short story acts as a kind of pastiche. And yet, it is not so much the modernist collage 

of rupture and digression, but instead it adds a “sense of enlargement and revelation,” 

similar to how Anna Reckin has described the way sound operates within 

Brathwaite’s work. 48 

With the inclusion of the Alida tale, like a magician Ombre tells and conceals, elicits 

and critiques the power and limitations of the written word. Perhaps these kinds 

of binaries are all questioned in Ombre’s work, that between the oral and the written, 

authorial intention and reader’s interpretation, and that between the textual and the 

sonic. 


Notes 

1. In his highly influential book The Signifying 

Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr, provides an 

analysis of the historical significance of writing for 

enslaved black people. He asserts that slave 

narratives were not only biographies of life under 

slavery. The task and burden was for blacks to 

write themselves into being, as proof of their 

reason and rationality, becoming a “speaking 

subject,” in order to gain recognition of their 

humanity. In order for blacks to assume human or 

civilized status, writing, a display of logos, was 

crucial. These carefully crafted “autobiographies” 

were necessarily political, and they were identity 

performances. Written slave narratives were part 

of a larger debate in the Western world about the 

very humanity of black peoples. For as Gates 

writes, “slaves possessed at most a liminal 

status in the human community. To read and to 

write was to transgress this nebulous realm of 

liminality (128). 

2. See Diggs’s article in this volume that 

examines an acoustic legacy of lynching 

invoked in a James Baldwin’s play. 

3. For the importance of the drum and 

drumming in Africa, it’s legacy in the Americas 

in the black vernacular see Robert Elliot Fox’s 

Masters of the Drum: Black Lit/Oratures Across 

the Continuum. Westport and London: 

Greenwood P, 1995. 

4. I would like to thank Murat Aydemir, Sylvia 

Mieszkowski and Isabel Hoving for their 

comments on this article. 

5. Neus-van der Putten’s book is devoted to an 

entire study of the facts and myths surrounding 

du Plessis. 

6. For the difficulties and politics involved in 

scholarly research and questions of historical 

figures as recounted in oral historical accounts 

(as opposed to written, often colonial history), 

particularly its importance to black Caribbean 

history, see Jenny Sharpe’s Ghosts of Slavery, 

1–43. 

7. Met eigen ogen: Een hedendaagse kijk op de 

Surinaamse slavernij 

232 | Joy Smith 

8. Neus-van der Putten concurs with Accord 

on the folktale’s importance and has written an 

entire study on the facts and fiction 

surrounding du Plessis. 

9. Susanna du Plessis: Portret van een 

slavenmeesteres 

10. It is not clear whether the play is named in 

Neus-van der Putten’s account. She cites 

Michiel van Kempen’s book, Repertorium van 

het Surinaams theater [The Repertoire of 

Surinamese Theater] (1987) and mentions a 

review called “Sussana du Plessis,” (131) 

which may or may not have been the name of 

the play. 

11. I borrow the phrase “history of hurt” from 

Saidiya Hartman’s book Scenes of Subjection, 

49–78. 

12. For a discussion of the Dutch national 

slavery monument and memory politics see 

Smith’s “Diasporic Slavery Memorials and 

Dutch Moral Geographies” in Migratory 

Aesthetics. Rodopi P, 2007 forthcoming. 

13. See James Snead’s influential article 

“Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture.” For 

the “logic of the cut”, as it relates to literature 

and music, see Copenhafer in this volume. 

14. See Copenhafer. 

15. See Keizer’s Black Subjects in the section 

“Divided Subjects,” 25–30. See also Saidiya 

Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. 

16. The titles in Dutch are Hoe duur was de 

suiker by McLeod and Maalstroom by Ombre. 

17. I am drawing on Hoving and Ong who 

emphasize the importance of the audience in 

shaping discourse, in the oral as well as the 

literary experience. The reader’s role in 

completing the text, is a potentially shared 

process, a dialogue, and in the case of oral 

forms as cultural mnemonics, this communal 

bonding might play an even stronger role as a

esult of “The situatedness of texts and 

language practices” (Hoving: 139). In an article 

titled “Text as Interpretation” (147–69), Ong 

discusses similarities in the nature of 

interpreting both oral and written texts. While 

he acknowledges that there are differences, 

they are similar in that they both are part of an 

“ongoing interpretive negotiation.” In other 

words they are part of an exchange, or 

dialogue, which is perhaps easier to 

understand in the context of a verbal utterance, 

“where one utterance gives rise to another, and 

another, and so on. Meaning is negotiated in 

the discursive process.” One patterns their 

utterances based on how they think others 

might react or whether they will understand. If 

the response does not fit the conjecture, then 

one can accommodate in tone or clarify one’s 

thoughts. “Oral discourse thus commonly 

interprets itself as it proceeds. It negotiates 

meaning out of meaning” (148). 

18. See Weheliye’s article “I Am I Be: The 

Subject of Sonic Afro-modernity,” and his book 

Phonographies. 

19. In his majesterial literary history Mama 

Sranan, Michiel van Kempen documents 

Surinamese literature from well-known folktales 

to the works of current authors of written 

literature. While he acknowledges the influence 

of orature on some Surinamese writers (13), he 

does not analyze the way in which these forms 

interact within these texts. 

20. For example, see Hoving In Praise of New 

Travelers. 

21. What is important for Gates with regard to 

black literature is the disruption that occurs 

between signifier and signified, this doublevoiced 

quality, based on Bakhtin’s, notion of 

dialogism, that language, despite authors, 

speakers intentions, “expresses a plurality of 

meanings” (Irwin 227), combined with the 

practice of using black vernacular and 

conversational speech within a written text, 

giving the allusion of the oral within a written 

text. He likens it to the Russian formalist 

theory of skaz, a formal category for several 

literary devices creating the impression of 

expressive, spontaneous speech acts. Zora 


Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were 

Watching God, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo 

Jumbo, are two paradigmatic cases, where the 

use of Creole, dialect, and colloquial slang in 

free indirect discourse “serves to privilege the 

speaking voice” (Gates 131). 

22. Quayson’s book Strategic Transformations 

is devoted to aspects of Yoruba beliefs and 

storytelling rituals that appear in the works of 

certain African writers. 

23. “Wat zich in mijn leven heeft afgespeeld 

voordat ik mijn verwanten moest verlaten om 

overgeleverd te worden als kweekje in de stad, 

set zich voort in een onderwereld van 

schimmen en schaduwen” (78). 

24. “Mijn bestaan begint in het huis van 

meneer en mevrouw Miskin in Paramaribo” 

(79). 

25. “Bij het bevolkingsregister van deze stad 

hebben mijn kweekouders me aangegeven als: 

‘Hannah, kweekje behorend tot het gezin van 

Eugenio Miskin en Esmerelda Miskin geboren 

Schattevoo. Op het moment van aangifte, de 

22ste februari 1939, vermoedelijke leeftijd vier 

jaar’ ” (83). The diminutive noun “kweekje” 

conjures memories of a racial caste system for 

Surinamers. Poor children of color from the 

rural areas in Surinam, were placed with 

middle-class black, Creole families in 

Paramaribo. A term in English that 

approximates “kweekje” is foster child or 

“ward.” In the van Dale Dutch dictionary, the 

Dutch verb kweken is defined, as to “cultivate” 

or “grow.” It means to foster, nurture, to help 

grow and develop, generally used in relation to 

plants or flowers. Historically, these children, 

mostly girls, would do chores for these families 

in exchange for food, clothes, a place to sleep 

and access to school. They generally received 

less in terms of quality in all that they were 

given in these households compared to the 

biological children in the host family. Most 

importantly, they were completely at the mercy 

of their foster parents. 

26. “Je had een willetje, meisje, typisch het 

karakter van een kaboegroe. Als een Indiaan en 

een bosneger samengaan, dan krijg je een 


soort…’ Ze kuchte, keek me ernstig aan en 

fronste het voorhoofd. ‘Zo taai en 

ondoordringbaar als een mangrovebos. Het 

kostte me veel inspanning om dat willetje te 

breken. Maar let op, waar een wil is, is een 

weg (80).” 

27. This is derived from Mary Klages’ 

exposition on “Ideology and State 

Apparatuses” see 20 May 2005 

�http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2011 

Klages/1997althusser. html�. 

28. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The 

Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The 

Location of Culture. 122–34. 

29. For an article on the interpellative force of 

recitation see Mutman in this volume. 

30. “Het gaat om de kunst van het voordragen, 

om de juiste klemtoon, sprak ze, maar daaran 

vooraf gaat het onthouden, woord voor woord.’ 

En met nadruk op iedere letter-greep droeg ze 

voo: Ne-ger-schap is als bloei-en-de vanille, 

hoog in de bo-men van het bos. In wij-de omtrek 

laat de geur niemand los.’ Dit vers zit in 

mijn hoofd gegrift. Even vanzelfsprekend als 

date het mes, zoals mevrouw het me leerde, 

rechts van het bord gelegd wordt bij het dekken 

van de tafel” ( 87). 

31. “ ‘O, wat zullen ze schrikken als ze je ooit op 

Nijd en Spijt terugzien…. Niemand, niemand zal 

je herkennen als je daar schoon en goed 

verzorgd voor die primitieven staat. Ze zullen zich 

afvragen wie die dame is. En wat zul je zeggen?’ 

‘Ik ben Hannah Miskin,’ antwoordde ik. 

Ik probeerde me voor te stellen dat ik op Nijd 

en Spijt terugkwam. Ik had alleen maar de 

bescrijvingen van mevrouw om me aan vast te 

houden. Primitiviteit, armoede, afgoderij, 

ratelslangen en andere afschrikwekkende 

dingen, zoals het verhaal over de 

geschediedenis van de plaatsnaam Nijd en 

Spijt dat ze me met overgave vertelde” (89). 

32. “ ‘Te oproerig,’ vond ze dat, ‘te 

negerachtig’.” 

33. “ ‘Woorden, woorden, ik kan niet tegen dat 

geroezemoes’ ” (89). 


34. “Mevrouw was als een radio die de hele 

dag zachtjes maar goed hoorbaar aanstond. 

Ze was mijn achtergrondmuziek. Ik was 

haar enige gehoor, we waren op elkaar 

afgestemd” (88). 


Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The 

Location of Culture, 122–34. 

36. “De Leesboekjes op school hadden mooie 

plaatjes. Van Ot en Sien, en Trui. Kinderen die 

in ieder volgend leerboekje een jaartje ouder 

waren. Woorlijk waren ze niet. Wel ver weg in 

een onbereikbare wereld. Wij van de Sint- 

Petrus-school zouden nooit zo kunnen 

worden.wij waren van een andere wereld (86). 



Location of Culture, 127. 

38. With the abolition of slavery, 1 July 1863, 

the formerly enslaved had to choose names for 

themselves. Many adopted a version or the 

reverse of the name of the slaveowner, for 

example, Desse became Essed. 

39. “De geschiedenis van de omgekeerde 

namen was van lang geleden in de tijd dat er 

nog slavenmeesters waren.’Als ik je vertel hoe 

wij mishandeld zijn en vernederd in vroegere 

tijden.’ Ze trok een gezicht alsof ze napijn 

probeerde te onderdrukken. Als een kanker 

knaagde de worm van de slavernij aan ieder 

ontluikend spruitje, dat bij behoorlijke 

verpleging to bloei en welvaart van ons land 

had kuunned strekken. Je mag de Lieve Heer 

op je blote knieën danken dat je niet in die tijd 

geleefd hebt.’ Ik dankte de Heer met overgave 

op mijn blote knieën” (88). 

40. “Heel lang geleden toen slavenmeesters 

nog slaven haden, was de plantage waar ik 

vandaan kom het eigendom van het rijke 

geslacht Du Plessis. Meneer Du Plessis was 

een rissige rokenjager en zijn vrouw een jaloerse 

echtgenote die over haar man waakte als 

gijzelhouder over een gijzelaar. Ze ging al zijn 

gangen na en merkte dat haar man zich 

opvallend veel in de omgeving van een zekere

huisslavin Etrave bewoog. Op een keer zag die 

jaloerse mevrouw Du Plessis, hoe haar man in 

een verleidingspoging bij het voorbijgaan 

achteloos de borsten van de jonge slavin 

streelde. De meesteres werd furieus. Zij was de 

heerseres in huis. Met een dergelijk gedrag 

ondermijnde de slavenhouder haar gezag. 

Buitenhuis kon hij zijn gang gaan en zijn dierlijke 

driften de vrije loop laten. Maar in huis golden 

háár regels. Ze ontbood de plantagebeul en gaf 

hem de opdracht om de borsten van de slavin af 

te hakken. Dat zou haar het lonken afleveren. 

De afgehakte borsten braadde ze, overkokend 

van woede, eigenhandig voor haar man […]. 

‘Zwijgend zat het echtpaar aan de maaltijd,’ 

vervolgde ze het verhaal. ‘De man genoot 

zichtbaar en smakte naar hartelust. 

“Voortreffelijk,” prees hij de kookkunst van zijn 

vrouw. 

“Welnu,” sprak zij, toen de maaltijd was 

beëindigd en de man voldaan oprispte, “ik hoop 

dat je voorgoed je bekomst hebt. Zojuist heb jij 

de borsten van je geliefde Etrave gegeten.” 

De man stond op, met gebogen knieën zocht hij 

steun aan de tafelrand. Hij rukte de knopen van 

zijn hemd los en greep naar zijn hals. Het enige 

wat hij kon uitbrengen was braaksel. Het leek 

wel een uitbarsting van de Krakatau. Eerst kwam 

dampend het onverteerde eten naar buiten, één 

dikke brij. Daarna het galgele vocht en ten slotte 

het kolkende schuim. Hij kon niet meer 

ophouden met braken. Hij viel neer terwijl hij zijn 

ziel en zaligheid uitkotste. Mevrouw Du Plessis 

keek vol ontzetting naar haar zieltogende man. 

“O God, mijn heer,” riep ze vertwijfeld, “wat heb 

ik gedaan?” Haar nijd had plaats gemaakt voor 

spijt.’ 

Nou, zei ze, want er was een stilte ontstaan 

‘wat vind je hiervan?’ 

‘Ik weet het niet, antwoorde ik.’ 

‘Natuurlijk weet je het iet. Het is van lang voor 

jouw tijd’ ” (90–91). 

41. In Accord’s book she is mentioned as 

house slave, which often has a connotation of a 

lighter skinned slave, sometimes related to the 

master (65). In Neus-van der Putten’s book she 

is referred to as the “neergestoken mulattin” 

(130). In English that is “Stabbed mulatta.” 

42. Much has been written about the 

sexualized bodies of creoles, mulattas, and the 


history of the concept of hybridity as having its 

roots in racial categories. For those who are 

interested here are some references: Robert 

J.C. Young, Colonial Desire; Ania Loomba. 

Colonialism/Postcolonialism; Supriya Nair, 

“Creolization, Orality, and Nation Language in 

the Caribbean” in A Companion to Postcolonial 

Studies; Jenny Sharpe; Ghosts of Slavery; David 

Theo Goldberg. “Heterogeneity and Hybridity” in 

A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. See also 

Mark Reinhardt’s discussion of Margaret Garner, 

in Critical Inquiry. Garner was the woman whose 

story inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. 

43. Ombre is known for her general ironic 

tone in her literary works. In a review of 

another collection of stories by Ombre 

called Vrouwvreemd, which shares similar 

themes of subjects in motion and their 

various experiences of alienation, literary 

critic Isabel Hoving describes one of 

Ombre’s stories as offering a critique on 

Dutch discourses of nationality and 

belonging, describing the effect of the oral 

monologue device used within it as an 

“ironic strategy of deconstruction.” (181) 

44. “Ik ben geboren in het district 

Commewijne. Sommige plantages van dit 

vruchtbare, ooit rijke Surinaamse district 

hadden betekenisvolle namen: Mon Souci, Mon 

Tresor, Wederzorg, Lust en Rust. Ik kom van 

Nijd en Spijt”(78). 

45. When borrowing Neus-van der Putten’s 

book on du Plessis at the Universiteit van 

Amsterdam library, some of the books borrowed 

from another library set off the alarm as I was 

walking out. When I brought my bag over to the 

security guards (all three of them black men 

from Surinam) their reaction to the du Plessis 

name on the book they inspected was sharp, a 

bit critical at first, for they were perplexed at 

why a black woman, who was not Surinamese, 

would be interested in her. They then made 

several attempts to make clear that du Plessis 

was not a figure to be admired. This instant 

and emotional recognition is in wild 

contradistinction to the blank-faced reactions I 

receive from my Dutch white majority population 

colleagues at the University of Amsterdam 

when mentioning du Plessis’s name. 


46. “ ‘Zie je deze hand? Meneer bewoog 

zijn vingers zodat ik mijn taak moest staken. 

‘Dit is de hand die je voedt. Zonder deze 

hand bestaan je hoofd, je buik, je ledematen 

en al jouw andere lichaamsdelen niet. Deze 

hand maakt dat je een groot meisje aan 

het worden bent. Kijk me aan.’ Ik keek hem 

in do ogen. ‘Wat tussen de muren van 

mijn rustvertrek gebeurt is ons geheim. 

Juffrouw Treurniet, Mevrouw, niemand, 

behalve jij en ik bestaan hier. Begrijp je 

dat?’ Ik deed wat er van me werd 

verlangd” (102). 

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Mixing Music: Event, Place and 

Transculturality

ABSTRACT 


“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black 

Noise Andalusian Style in 

Contemporary Spain 

“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise Andalusian Style in Contemporary Spain 

In contemporary Spanish music a new genre called “flamenco hip-hop” has arisen. 

This “urban sound” combines elements of two different traditions: rap music, which 

is embedded in the larger context of US African American and global hip-hop culture, 

is blended with flamenco, which is a traditional musical and corporeal expression in 

Southern Spain. Both their histories have been the subject of different narratives to 

which the new hybrid genre of flamenco hip-hop connects. This contribution asks 

about the “cultural matrix” that might link these two expressive forms and establishes 

three categories for a comparative analysis: the performative aesthetics, the 

urban setting and the potential for cultural resistance. 

Introduction 

aquí un poquillo de jiphop flamenquillo/ 

pa toas las quillas, pa tós los quillos/ 

aquí un poquillo de jiphop flamenquillo/ 

pa que te metas por la vena cosa rica chica si!!! 

here’s a little bit of flamenco hip-hop/ 

or all the girls, for all the guys/ 

Susanne Stemmler 

“Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise Audalusian Style in Contemporary Spain | 241

here’s a little bit of flamenco hip-hop/ 

for you to get something sweet in your vein, girl, yes!!! 1 

These lines are taken from the song “Tiempo de Soléa” by Ojos de Brujo, a band from 

Barcelona. This first track on their Album Barí (“Joy”), released in 2002, introduces a 

new musical style they call “jip-hop flamenquillo.” It is a soléa, a central flamenco form 

(among about fifty song forms), originally a dance for women, with its music often sung 

for the dancer. On the textual level the expression announces a combination of musical 

genres that the group suggests to its wide audience. This fusion has its musical counterpart 

on the level of instruments, techniques and tunes. Within the song, we hear 

scratching, palmas, 2 rapped lyrics, flamenco guitar, human-voice beat-boxing and tunes 

from North Africa. What is this hip-hop flamenco? Is it rap “aflamencado” or a “rapped 

flamenco”? What kind of transcultural sound crossings is Ojos de Brujo creating by 

doing this? How can cultural analysis deal with this new style? In order to answer these 

questions, I will demonstrate how the group, Ojos de Brujo, is situated within the context 

of these popular musical forms in contemporary urban Spain and North Africa. I will 

then briefly present (critical) histories of the two genres: rap music, embedded in U.S. 

hip-hop culture, and flamenco, embedded in the historical and cultural context of 

Andalusia. These genres are in constant exchange with other musical forms like jazz, 

R&B, Reggae or salsa, and can thus be analyzed within the discourses on authenticity 

of a (non-) genre called “world music” with its interacting technologies, markets and 

imaginaries, as ethno-musicologist Ana Maria Ochoa points out (1). My hypothesis is 

that there are structural as well as social affinities between the musical styles of flamenco 

and rap music, and their respective performances, which lead towards a new 

mix. If sound structures are social structures (Feld), the new sound of “flamenco hiphop” 

creates a new, yet old imaginary space historically known as Al-Andalus. 

Rap Meets Al-Andalus 

During the last decade, there has been a comeback of flamenco in contemporary 

popular music in Spain, and its extremely lively and young performers present themselves 

in concerts and festivals – especially in the southern part of Spain, and just 

across the Mediterranean in Morocco. The new genre is called flamenco-rap, hip-hop 

Andaluz, street-rumba, or – as Junior, a rapper from Málaga, puts it – rap with “sabor 

al sur” (“southern flavour,” Rincón 15). The Spanish music industry has developed 

the label “sonido ciudadísimo” (“urban sound”) for the acoustic fusions of hip-hop 

and flamenco. This term is used to designate contemporary North-African music and 

Rumba as well as Ragamuffin and Punk. It refers to that category of “urban music” 

in the U.S., which has been developed by music marketing departments, and seems 

to be as wide as the category “world music.” Among its representatives are La Mala 

Rodriguez, Ojos de Brujo, Haze, La Excepción, Macaco, Ariana Puello, Sólo los Solo, 

242 | Susanne Stemmler


El Payo Malo, Rakel Winchester, and Zur. Some of these groups can be found on the 

double-album Barcelona Zona Bastarda, a sampler that unites the sounds of the 

streets of Barcelona, a Barcelona “bastarda … negra y árabe, brasileña y navarra, 

gitana y paya …,” 3 as the programmatic liner notes state. On the cover of the booklet 

a container ship named “Bastardo” figures as a metaphor of Barcelona, the port 

city within a globalized economy and with a multiethnic population. The boat, with its 

heterotopic connotation in the Foucaultian sense, is a frequently used metaphor to 

describe cultural exchange and movement with the Mediterranean. Another sampler, 

Rap kañi Del Flamenco al Rap y del Rap al Flamenco, unites a variety of rap and flamenco 

artists on the same disc without stressing the fusion-aspect as much. Finally, 

a more recent release, Hip Jondo: Hip-Hop Cañi and Flamenco Rap, 4 puts some 

emphasis on the music’s hybridity. 5 On this CD, we can find the presumably “first ever 

rap-flamenco,” Lola Flores’ “Como Me las Maravillaría Yo.” All these groups form part 

of a movement that is very popular in Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, and Málaga in 

Andalusia, but also in the Catalan capital Barcelona and in Madrid. It seeks to revitalize 

the multi- and transcultural traditions of Andalusia as an urban culture. 

Pioneers like La Mala Rodriguez and Ojos de Brujo, are internationally successful and 

collaborate with nationally well-known flamenco artists as well as with international 

rap and Reggaetón artists from the U.S. like Full Nelson for example. Ojos de Brujo 

refer to their music as “polyglot flamenco” 6 and have released their first album 

Vengue7 in 1999. In creating their own structures of production and distribution, Ojos 

de Brujo go far beyond the musical dimension of flamenco and hip-hop: they invite 

artists of different visual genres (e.g. graffiti) to collaborate during their live performances 

as well as on their CD designs, as the new release Techarí (Free) documents. 

This links Ojos de Brujo to urban subcultures in the U.S. Hip-hop culture originated 

during the mid-seventies in New York City as an integrated series of live communitybased 

practices like graffiti (the art of spray painting on walls or trains), breakdance 

(hip hop dance), MCing (spoken word of the MC, the Master of Ceremony over a beat) 

and DJing (the art of turntablism) (Dimitriadis 1). 8 

Southern Spain and parts of northern Africa have been designated as “Al- 

Andalus” both on geographical and mental maps. From the late seventh century to 

1492, the southern part of Spain was shaped by Arab, Jewish, Moorish and Christian 

music, literature, architecture and food. In 1492, the Arabs and Sephardic Jews were 

expelled by the “Reconquista” of the “Catholic King and Queen,” Ferdinand II of 

Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. But the cultural traditions mingled and persisted, so 

that today this period is still referred to – in an often idealizing and nostalgic manner – 

as a paradise lost: a high culture, which has become a model for religious and ethnic 

tolerance (Liauzu 223). This space can be considered as a culturally heterogeneous 

but inter-related space. It is part of the geographic and historic Mediterranean 

world that the French historian Fernand Braudel has described as an “intersection of 


different worlds” (Braudel 6). According to Braudel, the Mediterranean is a world of 

differences that is connected into a picture only in our imaginations, like a system in 

which the differences are blended and then interlaced as an original unity (Braudel 

6). This means that the historic space of Al-Andalus is subject to constant 

re-interpretation. It is the space where cultural contact took place and still today takes 

place. Following Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban sociologist, this process can be called 

“transculturalization.” It is part of everyday life. Both Arabic and Jewish cultures are 

as present in Spanish language as in contemporary musical performance around the 

Mediterranean. This is clear in the great variety of fusion music, for example, the 

recordings of the Sephardic Diaspora9 demonstrate. Groups, such as Radio Tarifa, 

(re)combine flamenco from Andalusia with folk tunes from the Maghreb, using the 

Arabo-Andalusian loud ud10 (Washabaugh 97). The band’s name is programmatic: in 

considering themselves a radio station of Tarifa, Andalusia’s portal city at the Gulf of 

Gibraltar opposite Tangier in Morocco, they de-link sound and place. Instead, sound 

creates an imaginary space that encompasses both sides of the Mediterranean. This 

“holistic” spatial concept also underlies the CD cover of Bari by Ojos de Brujo, that 

depicts a map of the entire Mediterranean with sailing ships. 

The sonic and visual material, present on Ojos de Brujo’s CDs and DVDs, clearly 

aims to connect the “Andalusian” cultural heritage to contemporary globalized urban 

culture. This goes far beyond the exoticism of nineteenth century literary or visual representations 

of Andalusia. On the album Barí the band Ojos de Brujo, whose artistic 

name means “eyes of the witch,” juxtaposes graffiti with metaphors of nature (mountains, 

earth, stones), memory, or local traditions. By this kind of witchcraft they open 

a new space for social and political critique: A critique of contemporary multi-ethnic 

Spain that still seems for claim homogeneity and that closes its borders for immigrants 

from Africa. Technically Ojos de Brujo decontextualizes local elements, while at 

the same time recontextualizes them within a deterritorialized culture by using the 

global hip-hop “idiom.” This tendency is even stronger on the album Techarí. The DVD 

cover shows a female Flamenco dancer in a pop art style. It reminds one of how the 

lead singer Marina dresses during performances: She often wears a “classical” flamenco 

dress with frills, her hair pinned-up, sneakers, a pink feather boa, seventies 

style make-up and lots of exotic plastic jewels. The stereotypes of the “gypsy dancer,” 

the “oriental woman,” and the Indian belly dancer are all exposed in an ironic way. The 

typical footwear, an important part of the flamenco performance, has been replaced by 

sneakers, a symbol today of hip-hop fashion and culture. The aesthetics of graffiti, 

scratch, and rap interrupt and mobilize the static representations of flamenco (as it 

has been common in romantic travel writing) in a very dynamic way. 

This syncretism corresponds to the musical fusion of flamenco, rap, Latin, and 

banghra. 11 On the CD Techarí, there are various guest artists, among them are Faada 

Freddy from Daara J, a group of rap artists from Senegal who commute between 


Dakar and Paris. Daara J’s music is already a hybrid mixture in itself: rap has come 

full circle, “back” to West Africa where the slave ships began for the Middle Passage. 

Aptly enough, the album, which mixes traditional Senegal tunes with the French banlieue 

rap, is called Boomerang. On Techarí, bandleader Marina, together with Faada 

Freddy of Daara J, raps in Caló, in the song “Runalí,” the language of the Andalusian 

Roma. She evokes the mystical and religious dimension of life, by integrating West- 

African Yoruba saints and drum rituals. The opening song “Color,” a piece on “neighborhood 

taggers,” “aerosol nights,” drug dealers, breakers and skaters, unites 

different and interrelated elements of hip hop culture. 12 Even the recent phenomenon 

of Reggaetón, a rising new genre of rap-styled lyrics with a beat that is influenced 

not by hip-hop, but by reggae, dancehall, merengue and techno is mentioned in this 

song. 13 This connects flamenco rap to the growing Spanish-speaking community 

worldwide. 14 


Flamenco-rap is not the only the result of the constant change that flamenco has 

been undergoing since the mid-seventies, which marked the end of Franco’s regime 

and the fascist era in Spain: Since then, new innovations have occurred in flamenco 

in the “song-text” (“cante-letras”) of “flamenco Nuevo” because of musicians like Paco 

de Lucía, Camarón de la Isla, and Lole y Manuel, to mention a few. Composers also 

began to incorporate harmonic progressions taken from jazz (as being performed on 

Gerardo Nuñez’s album Jazzpaña or by the band Ketama) and Latin or South American 

rhythmic patterns (Nieto) like Salsa (e.g. La Barbería del Sur). They added congas, 

drums, cajun, keyboard, bass, flute and other instruments not originally used within 

the flamenco tradition. Choreography began to change too, as dancers began to study 

modern and jazz dance (Nieto). Purists of the genres are sceptical. They consider rap 

and flamenco as distinct forms and criticize the reductionistic use of flamenco style 

for commercial purposes: “Son cosas diferentes. […] Metes flamenquito y ya has triunfado.” 

15 But others, like Haze from Sevilla, defend this kind of “rap aflamencado”: 

“Más calle que tiene el flamenco no lo tiene el rap nacional.” 16 On his album Crónicas 

del Barrio the artist Haze has published five tracks considered as “rap puro” and nine 

tracks “de fusion con flamenco” (Rincón 13). He has chosen two female flamenco 

voices from his neighborhood Los Pajaritos in Sevilla. In his statement, he points out 

that rap was to the South Bronx youth, and still is today for millions of youth elsewhere 

in the world, what flamenco used to be for him. Like rap music in the Bronx Flamenco 

is what people in his barrio sing in the streets and the way in which his songs are 

passed on “de boca en boca,” “from mouth to mouth” (13). The title of his album, 

Crónicas del Barrio, alludes to rap’s eminent function as an orally transmitted “news 

channel,” reiterating the characterization of rap music as the “Black CNN,” as Chuck 

D, of the US rap group Public Enemy, has stated. Rap music is deeply embedded in 

African American and Hispanic U.S. popular culture and has a specific way of using language 

and music that is rooted in Black Arts. For a better understanding of the cultural 


orrowings and quotations of rap in contemporary Spanish pop music, I shall briefly 

outline the history and context of hip-hop culture. 

Hip-Hop – A Global Sound and its Local Histories 

The hip-hop association H20, in New York has celebrated hip-hop’s 31st anniversary 

in November 2005. 17 Historically, the phenomenon of hip-hop was born in New York 

City’s boroughs of the Bronx and Harlem and in the city of Philadelphia at the beginning 

and until the mid-1970s. It became very popular in the mid and late 1970s of 

the twentieth century. Hip-hop combines various elements of African-American and 

Latino popular culture which today is often connected to a specific place: the Bronx. 

Hip-hop used to be a verbal musical performance that has defined a community 

(Norfleet 1) and shaped the life-style of an entire generation. From the beginning, hiphop 

culture has been in constant change, to the extent that there is no static object 

called hip-hop: “One cannot say what hip hop culture is; one can only explain the 

process by which it changes” (Pihel 252). One important aspect of this process is 

the transformation of New York City into a post-industrial city from the 60s onwards 

(Rose, Black Noise 21–23). But there are a number of different narratives about hiphop’s 

origins: historically, rapping is considered an oral legacy from slavery. In terms 

of its technical, musical production, however, it comes out of the Jamaican sound 

system and the innovations of DJing and sampling (Rose, Black Noise 51–52; 

Mitchell 4). In terms of its aesthetics, which means its forms, structures and its cultural 

references rap music may also be considered as an invention by a group of lyricists 

called The Last Poets, who have brought together music and the word in the 

1960s. 18 Scholars document the different contribution of races and ethnic groups in 

the US to the evolution of rap music, be it the African-American community (Rose), 

the Latinos or Puerto Ricans in New York and their interaction with African Americans 

(Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop; Rivera, Hip-Hop and New York). Pioneers of hip hop 

like Melle Mel of the Furious Five or L.A. Sunshine of the Treacherous Three emphasize 

the fact that the MCs emerged to “move the crowd,” to have fun, to have a party. 

They claim that they created something of their very own out of nothing because they 

had no access to clubs or sophisticated musical equipment. 19 

Today, hip-hop is no longer exclusively an expression of an African-American identity 

but part of a world-wide movement. There is a global, urban hip-hop culture that 

receives its main impulses from the transatlantic exchange and transfer. It is part of 

the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 13), a system of historic, cultural, linguistic, and political 

interactions and communication that has its origins in the Middle Passage. In Africa, as 

well as in Europe, this has led to the development of specific hip hop forms during the 

last two decades that are connected by one aspect: This art can be understood as an 

articulation of local or regional conflicts and may have an integrative function for young 

ethnic minorities and for those of different social classes. It arises from migration and 



the coming together of different cultures, and this produces new cultural codes. Hiphop 

is part of youth culture and everyday life. Its practices are often divided into four 

main aspects: rap, DJing, dance, and graffiti that may or may not overlap. 

First of all, there is rap music, originally an expression that “prioritizes […] voices 

from the margins of urban America. Rap (“to rap” means “to beat”) music is a form 

of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music” 

(Rose, Black Noise 2). Lyrics and rhythm are inseparable and take up Afro-American 

oral traditions but also Dadaist-like puns, nonsense-verses that deconstruct meaning 

and play with the poetic functions of language. Rap battles, competitions where rappers 

display their skills, ever-changing slang, referring to black cultural figures, word 

games (“the dozens”), and quoting from songs or films, are all part of the African- 

American contribution to U.S. popular cultural forms of rap. Originally, during the ritual 

of live performance, rappers were mediators (Master of Ceremony, MC) between 

the music and the audience. There function was to encourage people to dance. As 

time went on, the MC became more and more important and developed into the independent 

role of a commentator or storyteller. To this day, most of the artists consider 

themselves MCs. This kind of a narrative mediation between performance and audience 

also exists in flamenco. 

Secondly, the technical innovations of DJing add rhythm and beats. Examples of 

these innovations in rap music are breakbeats, scratching, and human beat-boxing. 20 

Hip-hop is characterized by “bricolage”: the cut-and-paste principle that seems to be 

characteristic for contemporary cultures. This challenges the opposition of “citation,” 

versus the original, in high culture by attacking the notion of originality itself, and 

problematizes the legal concept of “property.” Sampling was created by DJs who 

recontextualized bits and pieces of recorded music in new combinations. Public 

Enemy, one of the most successful rap groups of the 1980s and 1990s, use Diana 

Ross’ soulful voice in “Yeah, Yeah,” half a second of Bob Marley’s “Don’t give up the 

fight,” as well as extracts of a speech from Martin Luther King for the beginning of 

their song “Party for your right to fight.” “The coded familiarity of rhythms and hooks 

that rap samples from other black music, especially funk and soul music, carries with 

it the power of black collective memory” (Kage 52). But there are not only quotations 

of melody, rhythm, or text. There is also “noise.” 21 The extra-musical sounds that are 

used, however, do not qualify as noise, because they may be interpreted as indices 

of place: gunshots, ambulance sirens or traffic noise are cited as signifiers of urban 

soundscapes. 22 Rose characterizes these principles as part of a “syncretic process 

[that] is especially apparent in the relationship between orality and technology and 

its production of orally derived communal narratives via sampling equipment” (Rose, 

Black Noise XV). 

Another aspect of hip-hop is bodily expression: in addition to voice and gestures, 

there are the fluent moves of hip hop dance (break dance, smurf etc.) are characterized 


y a unique body language. In the beginning, B-Boys und B-Girls were those men and 

women dancing during the breaks (�B) of the beats. From then on, hip-hop dance 

became an independent style on its own. Dancer’s freestyles very often overcome horizontal 

boundaries. Dancers conquer space with backspins, head spins and poses 

(Gaunt 277). The movements are often inspired by Capoeira-dance or martial arts – and 

are sometimes considered to represent symbolic fights between gangs. By this, hip-hop 

produces real or virtual spaces, where peers are confronted with each other (Boucher 

71). Also hip hop should not over-interpreted as a pathology of the city, urban violence 

may be turned into creativity by hip-hop, at least this insight is the motivation for street 

workers, and even police, to use hip hop as a pedagogical tool in “difficult” urban areas. 

Finally, the visual aspects must be mentioned: with their different styles graffiti 

and tags are “iconic texts” (Stemmler, Graffiti) that give new meaning and visibility to 

the “non-places” (Augé) of the city. Graffiti blurs images and letters while undermining 

the power of representation and its hierarchies. Hip-hop artists often spray graffiti 

on walls and already existing structures, and by doing this, they create an urban 

palimpsest. They are interested in engaging with the history of a place. Therefore 

memorials and public spaces are privileged areas for graffiti artists. 

Hip-hop culture is generally marked by its strong presence in media (TV, radio, 

commercials, internet) and fashion; the medialization of hip-hop itself is a driving 

force of its constant change. Artists constantly fight for the control of their image 

because hip-hop is all about visual agency: images of mainstream and commercial 

hip-hop are being transmitted via stereotyped images by MTV and the advertisement 

industry. Artists of the more “underground” or “conscious” arena of hip hop often 

point out that their images are taken away from them although they agree that these 

images are already being produced for a certain purpose. As a lived culture, as part 

of every day life on the very neighborhood all practices of hip-hop – rapping, writing, 

and breaking – create a “home.” It is not the territorialized connotation of the German 

term, “Heimat,” rather, it is a temporary or virtual home of shared experiences that 

can be very abstract and distant (Augé 108). It is a transitional place of belonging 

and connectedness with a transnational community often referred to as “hip hop 

nation.” “Home” seems to be the habitual practice of mobility itself, a symbolic habitat, 

a way of life. 

Hip-hop is not so much a cultural identity as it is a set of gestures, a nonrepresentational 

practice: although rap songs reflect every day life in many ways and 

although the lyrics are in many ways grounded in street life, they tell stories and have 

to be considered as rhymed fiction. The meaning of this poetry is being produced in 

the very moment of its performance. Similarly, graffiti art relies on instantaneity and 

context. Graffiti is more a “cry” (Milon) in the city than an argument, a longing for visibility 

in a majority society. Sampling, tagging, and signifying are hip-hop’s paradigmatic 

impulses, and may be called a lingua franca of the twenty first century (Tate 



4). 23 According to Arthur Jafa, the aesthetics of hip hop is characterized by “flow, layering, 

and ruptures in line” (quoted by Rose, Black Noise 38, 21–61). These three 

movements might be a linking element between its different forms of expression. 

Scratch consists of sound, repetition, and rupture. It defines an abstract space 

beyond ethnicity or nation. It creates a sense of belonging that is metaphorically figured 

in the “cipher” (Tate 4), a term used for the circle rappers form while free styling. 

U.S. hip-hop scholars James Spady, Samy Alim and Samir Meghelli have done extensive 

research on hip hop language and global hip hop culture. In their latest book 

they give a very precise definition of “tha cipha” and its cultural traditions: 

The cipha is where all (or some combination of) the Hip Hop cultural modes of discourse 

and discursive practices – call and response, multilayered totalizing expression, 

signifyin, bustin, tonal semantics, poetics, narrative sequencing, flow, metaphoric and 

hyperbolic language use, image-making, freestylin, battlin, word-explosions, wordcreations, 

word-pictures, dialoguing other voices, talk-singing, kinesics – converge into 

a fluid matrix of linguistic-cultural activity. (Spady/Alim/Meghelli 5–6) 

The cipha relates to the abstract concept of a global, or virtual, all-encompassing hiphop 

nation beyond the national. Its specific practices are deeply rooted in the local 

contexts of a place that might be (as in this case) the urban environment of Sevilla, 

Barcelona, or Granada with its specific history and culture, its class, race and gender 

hierarchies. This is why Spady, Alim and Meghelli call their recent book on hip-hop culture 

and consciousness Tha Global Cipha (2006). In a similar way the German linguist 

Jannis Androutsopoulos speaks of hip-hop as a global culture and its local 

practices. The relation of sound to a specific place, and the simultaneous opening 

towards a wider yet abstract concept, is characteristic for the participatory aesthetics 

or “inclusiveness of hip hop” (Rivera, Hip Hop 239). It offers a flexible pattern for 

the incorporation of jazz, funk, soul, salsa, as well as Arabic music. The examples of 

Latin Rap or Reggaetón in New York, but also the aforementioned example of Ojos de 

Brujo, are examples of how the notion of “African-American aesthetics” is being 

changed by cultural shifts (Black Belt 15). These appropriations with their multiple 

negotiations of a diasporic experience demonstrate that, within a span of thirty 

years, hip-hop has shown its ability to move from an essentialist position, i.e. a declaration 

of identity, to a more open-ended and poly-cultural, ever-changing combination 

of styles and attitudes that might be called a dynamic constructivism. 

During the last three or four years, it has become increasingly popular in parts of 

the Bronx, Brooklyn, and East Harlem, to listen to rap in Spanish or Spanglish, as well 

as to Reggaetón. Reggaetón is in itself a colonial vernacular of transnational communities 

in the Caribbean. 24 “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Spanish-speaking 

rappers […] began developing bilingual raps and made lyrical bridges between 

Chicano and black styles” (Rose, Black Noise 59). Hispanic rap contributes to the 

making of a very specific “Nuyorican” soundscape. The Puerto Rican immigrant’s 


experience prefigured the transnational quality of the Latin presence in New York 

(Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop 141). Being themselves an outcome of a century-old 

process of transculturation the Caribbean diasporic communities are a source of creative 

cultural innovation (Flores, Créolité in the “Hood” 283). They create linguistic and 

musical hybrids which renew the rap movement – a phenomenon which may be 

observed as well in the aforementioned “jiphop flamenquillo.” Latin rappers, or reggaetón 

artists from the U.S. East and West coast, give concerts in Spain, sometimes 

performing together, and Puerto-Ricans identify with their “Afro-diasporic Caribbean 

latinidad” (Rivera 255). The “Latinization” of Rap in the U.S. shows the transferability 

of this musical form that can be easily accessed all over the world as an “open 

source.” Today, performers of Latin rap travel “back” to Spain, one of the former colonizers 

of the New World, and find a new audience. 

Another outcome of such a formal dynamism is the fusion of flamenco and rap. 

Flamenco is precisely one of those local art forms that adapts and re-actualizes the 

global hip-hop culture. In the following, I will give a brief overview of the different histories 

of Flamenco and then show how the interpretation of flamenco shifted from an 

essentialist to a more constructivist notion that might help us understanding the new 

form of flamenco-rap. 

Flamenco – Rough-cut Poetry within a Cathartic Spectacle 

According to the anthropologist and flamenco scholar William Washabaugh, flamenco 

refers to the popular musical style that emerged around the mid-1800s in southern 

Spain, especially in and around the cities of Seville, Cadiz, Jerez, and Malaga. 

Flamenco artistry involves various forms of rough-cut poetry sung solo to percussive 

guitar accompaniment often in association with dance. Flamenco’s histories differ – 

just as with rap – depending on who is telling them. Within flamenco music, several 

elements of Andalusian cultures resonate together: the epic song traditions of the 

late Middle Ages, the Islamic, Jewish, Christian liturgies, and Romani influences 

(Washabaugh 32). Roma were the first performers of this Andalusian tradition that 

had its golden age as an all-encompassing human expression during the last half of 

the nineteenth century. According to this narrative, the “authentic” and “pure” flamenco 

has since been weakened by the romantic traveler’s exoticist tourist gaze and 

by the popularization of flamenco towards the end of the nineteenth century 

(Washabaugh 32). It was during this time that the term “flamenco” picked up its negative 

connotations as a music and dance of red light districts. 

Flamenco is considered to be the music of “Gitanos,” the Spanish ethnic group of 

Roma people. Roma were persecuted during the 300 years between 1492 and 

1783. 25 In this period they developed the core forms of cante gitano: tonás, soleares, 

seguiriyas, alegrías, bulerías (Washabaugh, Flamenco, 34). New forms of flamenco 

were later derived from Andalusian (e.g. fandangos, fandanguillos, malagueñas, 



granainas) and South American folk traditions (e.g. rumbas, colombianas, guajiras). 

These folk traditions had been re-introduced as an effect of the Spanish colonization 

of South- and Central America, and the Caribbean, from the mid-nineteenth to the 

beginning of the twentieth century (Washabaugh 35). 

Flamenco’s “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” character was very attractive for 

those who were in search for “another,” non-bourgeois Spain like the playwright and 

poet Federico García Lorca. In 1922, Lorca, together with the composer Manuel de 

Falla, and other notables from Granada sought to revitalize Andalusian flamenco by 

promoting the Concurso del Cante Jondo, a two-day contest of song held in the 

Granada’s Alhambra (Washabaugh 31). Instead of using the devaluating term “flamenco” 

they used “cante jondo” which means “deep song” in order to distinguish it 

from the commercialized, “lamentable” flamenco spectacles of the ópera flamenca, 

the cafés cantantes, or the bars (Lorca 221). Instead, Lorca insists on the “primitive” 

aspect of cante flamenco – obvious in the title of his essay “El Cante Jondo. Primitivo 

Canto Andaluz” – as a “survival” of Andalusian culture (Washabaugh 34). By initiating 

this “rehabilitation” of flamenco, Lorca and the other intellectuals who participated 

in the programmatic movement of the Generación de 27, re-invented flamenco 

completely. Like hip-hop flamenco is a “cathartic” spectacle. 26 Flamenco songs perform 

a “double catharsis,” exposing and relieving both the pain of the poor and the 

guilt of the wealthy bourgeois public. In this way, it knits together the elements of the 

bipolar society of the “new” Spanish nation state. 

To analyze flamenco as the voice of opposition and resistance might be the most 

interesting way of linking it to hip hop culture. The “songs of the outcasts” (Totton) 

tell about the experience of migration, denigration, and repulsion of an ethnic group 

within a mainstream society. Today flamenco is – very similar to hip-hop – a lived 

experience, a whole lifestyle. There is more to flamenco than music (guitar, rhythm, 

voice). Song, dance, and guitar are interrelated within the performance. Washabaugh 

argues that every flamenco performance, commercial or non-commercial, is 

a multidimensional, multi-accentual experience that almost always includes crosscurrents 

of political signification. […] Flamenco performances are knotted and snarled performances 

of complex meaning that deserve careful interpretation. (Washabaugh 31) 

Both, rap and Flamenco are often criticized for being commercialized and therefore 

non-authentic. 27 Mainly, this argument can be found in contemporary critical comments 

on hip hop videos. The American music critic Stanley Crouch criticizes them as 

part of a violent hedonistic black culture with “gold teeth, drop-down pants and tasteless 

jewelry [sic]” (Eakin). But you can also find these same kinds of criticisms of professional 

flamenco, which assert that commercialized spectacles have diluted the 

“Andalusian soul” of this music, or cloaked its “Gitano heart,” or blunted its oppositional 

edge, or intensified its power to delude the masses (Washabaugh 38). It is surprisingly 

and ironically the same Adornian disparagement of commercialized artistry 


that those critics share with the Spanish intellectuals of the 27-Generation mentioned 

earlier. 

I would like to argue that flamenco in itself must be considered a syncretistic construction 

of “the popular.” Popular music has become a source of inspiration for the 

avant-garde literature in Spain. During the late nineteenth century it became fashionable 

to read texts or visit operas that were set in rural areas and whose main characters 

behaved “wildly.” This was a general tendency in European romanticism that 

“invented” (Hobsbawm/ Ranger) folk cultures like flamenco. It was during the period 

of romanticism, between 1820 and 1860 that the most important rules of flamenco 

were developed. This art form is an attempt to revitalize traditional, agrarian cultures 

within the urban milieu of a modern, industrialized society (Steingress 67–9). In 

today’s flamenco rap, in a situation of historical and social change, the popular genre 

of cante flamenco is reinterpreted again – as a popularized urban street culture. 

The Cultural Matrix of Rap and Flamenco: Performative Aesthetics 

What are the cultural implications of the fusion between flamenco and rap? What 

happens if a musical form that seems to be rooted in a very specific local context 

appropriates a global and highly mediated culture like hip hop? And what if both bear 

a long tradition of cultural crossings, are “intersticial” (Bhabha) and highly mediated 

cultures themselves? In the following, I will present three aspects of the cultural 

matrix that constitute the sound syncretism of rap and flamenco: the performative 

aesthetics, the urban setting and the potential for cultural resistance. 28 

What is perceived as song in one context might be considered spoken word in 

another (Zumthor 160). Both genres – rap and flamenco – oscillate between these 

two extremes. Rap has its roots partly in African traditions: in the storytelling 

“chanté-parlé” of the griots in West Africa or the mvets bom in Central Africa (Arnaud 

56; Störl). Given its affinity to oral, verbal tradition, rap can be compared to flamenco’s 

vocality, i.e. the importance of the voice within in the flamenco performance. 

In his analysis of the African spoken song tradition as a pre-figuration of rap, musicologist 

Gérald Arnaud (56) from Cameroon compares rapping to the saeta (“the 

arrow of song”). This is the oldest (religious) type of “deep song” in Andalusia, which 

is usually sung without accompaniment during Easter procession. 29 In a saeta, a participant 

of the procession starts talking singing to the sculpture of the Virgin Mary. 

Far from being a simple listener or consumer of the music, which is played during the 

procession, s/he becomes a performer instead and enters a dialogue with the Virgin 

Mary, observed and acclaimed by the surrounding audience in the streets. Saetas 

have no musical accompaniment, but rely solely on the performer’s voice. The saeta’s 

creative pattern within the religious ritual, which integrates and localizes the individual’s 

expression, has a potential for cultural translation. 30 As illustrated by the saeta, 

flamenco may be analyzed in categories of form or setting on the one hand, and class on 



the other, since the saeta is sung in a specific performance context, and because of 

this, transgresses categories of class (similar to the carnival). Raps are told in imaginary 

dialogues, competitive “battles,” and slang. The first category concerns form or 

setting, the second is the linguistic category of code switching with its inclusive or 

exclusive effects (class and group identity). 

As in the flamenco performance, “tha cipha” (Spady/Alim/Meghelli) becomes the 

physical arrangement for the performance. “The Rapper’s voice is the voice of experience, 

taking on the identity of the observer or narrator”(Rose 2). Hip-hop critic Andre 

Willis points out that “rappers create their own raps, which is rare among pop vocal 

artists” (Adjaye/Andrews 167). I want to argue that both rap and flamenco depend on 

the constellation of a situation, hence they are “situationist” art forms. If the circumstances 

of the performance are changed, the musical meaning changes too. 31 No 

sophisticated equipment is needed, with human beat-boxing or clapping hands as a 

rhythmic structure and it can be practiced without any technical support. This is not an 

elitist culture, its techniques are available to everybody with skills; musical innovation 

depends much on style – the way a single artist performs his voice. 

The voice can be considered as a musical instrument in both rap and flamenco. 

Flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia points out that there is “[t]he voice first, then 

rhythm… all the rest comes after” (Totton 71). The rhythm of the human voice seems 

to be the most important in flamenco and rap. Both are characterized by polyrhythm 

and a special materiality of sound: speech, traffic noise e.g. is integrated in rap via 

samples. In flamenco we have a strong bodily presence in the sound with the clapping 

of hands (palmas) and the specific voice timbre of a certain singer. The boundaries 

between singing and speaking are fluid. As a result, the singer creates an 

ambiance, a new space that gives one the feeling of being at home, “chez soi” 

(Deleuze/Guattari 382). Sometimes the meaning of language may be of less importance 

than its poetic function and the voice almost becomes independent (382). In 

both rap and flamenco genres the verbal is linked to gestures in the performance and 

the gesture in musical performance is a social event (Swiboda). 

Both, rap and Flamenco share the oral transmission of popular proverbs, songs 

and expressions full of complex political, social and sexual rhetoric. Their meaning is 

grounded in a highly coded language or slang that is embedded in the discursive 

practices of lived experience. Their use of language is distinct from the “norm” and 

excludes speakers of the mainstream society. 32 Monika Sokol, who has done extensive 

research on the use of language and the function of code switching within rap 

music, points out that there are similarities in verbal dueling between rap and the 

coplas or flamenco (56). Rap is hard to understand for non African Americans 

because it uses vernacular, puns and so on. Flamenco verse is often sung in Caló. 

This is the language of the Andalusian Roma that combines elements of different languages 

like Romani, Spanish, and Arabic. Considered as a language of its own, it is 


almost impossible to understand for the Spanish-speaking majority. The complex 

metaphors of Caló are embedded in a cultural imaginary that is only shared by people 

who have the same experiences. 33 By utilizing this repertoire today, musicians 

actualize older meanings and combine them with the new. 

Another common characteristic of rap and flamenco is irony used as a strategy for 

survival of a minority group within a majority society. Flamenco, as a “heteroglossic 

and multi-voiced event” (Washabaugh 39), relies on a specific set of ironic social 

practices that had been developed in Spain during an almost 300 year period beginning 

from the year 1492. Starting with the conquest of Granada, followed by 

Inquisition and the monarchy until early nineteenth century, it was irony that enabled 

resistance to opposition and a – more or less forced – play with identities 

(Washabaugh). Rap, too, is a genuinely ironic practice. Its irony results from using 

words with a double meaning attributed to it. Henry Louis Gates has pointed this out 

as the “signifyin’ tradition,” a contribution of African Americans to the American narrative 

tradition (Adjaye/Andrews 19). Rap’s often-controversial irony – especially in 

the sexualized language of both male and female rappers or in gangster rap – is a 

constant source of public debate. 

It can be concluded that both genres depend on the circumstances of their very performance. 

The “immediacy” of magical art forms and practices can be found in both rap 

and hip hop. Their distinct qualities are grounded in performance, which is defined as 

a social and creative act, but that gains its particular meaning in the moment that it 

occurs (Zumthor 133). It relies on the uniqueness of a presence and on the situation 

as well as on the spontaneous interaction of public and performer. It is through the body 

that both performer and audience are grounded in time and place (Zumthor 134). 

The Urban Setting 

The city, or the urban context, is a common setting within rap texts. The first recorded 

rap with a political content was “The Message” (1982) written by Melle Mel (Furious 

Five) and performed by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It describes the living 

conditions in the Bronx in the late 1970s: 

Got a bum education, double-digit inflation 

Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station 

Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge 

I’m tryin’ not to lose my head 

It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder 

How I keep from going under. 

The metaphor of the city as a jungle leads to a complex critique of a chaotic cityscape, 

that takes you “to the edge” and which makes you “lose your head”: inflation, a strike 



that disrupts your routine, and, of course, public transportation. In the urban environment 

the fragmentation of space appears to go with a fragmentation of perception. 

The city is present as a stage, especially in contemporary hip-hop, where the urban 

environment is quoted as background and used as a guarantee for authenticity. 

The fact that hip-hop comes from the ghetto seems to be its number one point of 

reference. It is very obvious that beyond its value as party music hip hop has to do with 

segregation and disintegration, with missed urban policy and ethnical tensions. Postindustrial 

shifts in access to housing, demographics, and communication networks 

formed the conditions that nurtured hip-hop (Rose 26). The reference to “el barrio,” 

the block, the posse, the neighborhoods, the projects, the corners, or the street in general, 

seems to be a unifying element not only of hip-hop culture but flamenco as well. 

I want to argue that rap may be read as “street flamenco” and vice versa. This 

approach harks back to a time before sound moved indoors, before recordings, when 

music was embedded in every aspect of everyday life (Van Leeuwen 1). This urban 

experience, and the struggle for a voice, is transferred into other urban areas, as well 

as non-urban environments. Hip-hop “re-imagines the experiences of urban life and 

symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style and 

sound effects” (Rose 22). This means that the experience of urban life is transformed 

into a specific sound and this sound again becomes transferable into other 

contexts, away from where it originally occurred when recorded. The sound of the 

street – in rap as well as in flamenco – is reclaiming the cities’ public space. If graffiti 

uses the city as a screen for visibility, then noise, volume, and verbal expression 

become a symbol of the struggle for audibility. 

Increased migration into the metropolis has given rise to the growth of ethnic districts 

and communities. These communities share a language of self-parody and constructed 

tradition. This unites them so that we can think of New York City, for 

example, within its multiple relations to San Juan, because of its large Puerto Rican 

immigrant population. Sound cultures, like rap or flamenco, are movements against 

the territorializing drive of the nation-state. Interaction between urban spaces takes 

place within these “contact zones” (Pratt). Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, a Bronx born artist 

speaks of a hip hop as a “zone,” a “multilayered space” she lives in: “we are multilayered 

people in all what we do.” 34 Hip-hop seems to be “a virtual island where people 

with different experiences of migration meet,” as Enemigo, a rapper from Puerto 

Rico, puts it. 35 People migrating from rural to urban areas, within the boundaries of a 

nation state, will refer to hip-hop as helping to create a sense of “home” as well. This 

creates a sense of belonging in a new urban context, as we can see in barrios of the 

cities of Southern Spain as well. Music, although it often has its roots in rural traditions, 

is always radically transformed by urban dwellers. 

New York, Berlin, Dakar, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Seville, Marseille, Algiers, Tangiers, 

etc. – hip-hop phenomena are linked to an urban environment but at the same time 


hip hop has been expanding to rural areas. Hip-hop video-clips, the lyrics of rap 

music, the body movements in break-dance – directly or indirectly they all refer to the 

origin in the urban metropolis. It replicates and re-imagines the experiences of urban 

life and symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, 

style and sound effects (Rose 22). Contemporary language tries to avoid talking 

about hip-hop as a “black music” and prefers the term “urban music.” This seems to 

be very interesting for a comparative analysis of flamenco-hip hop on both sides of 

the Mediterranean: “urban” in this context tries to make issues of race and ethnicities 

disappear. The “popular” art of flamenco in nineteenth century can be seen as 

a relocation of an art form characteristic of a disappearing traditional agrarian society 

within a modern, industrialized urban milieu. Today, by using flamenco verses with 

metaphors of nature within a scratched rap song, something interesting happens: 

there is “non-urbanity” cited in an urban context in which issues of gender, race and 

ethnicity are negotiated. The already “urbanized” flamenco is in a way re-urbanized in 

the new context of the post-industrial city with its new ethnic and racial divisions and 

segregational practices. 

Cultural Resistance 

There is an outsider-feeling both in hip hop and in flamenco. Several histories of flamenco 

and African-American music, such as blues, jazz, and rap, strengthen the argument 

that this kind of music is born out of a marginal position within a majority 

society and a melting of different musical and cultural traditions. In his liner notes of 

Miles Davis’ and Gil Evans’ album Sketches of Spain, recorded 1959 in a New York 

studio and originally released in 1960, Nat Hentoff, co-editor of the Jazz Review, 

emphasizes that Davis “can so absorb the language of another culture” and compares 

the “deep song” of flamenco with the “cry of the blues” (Davis 1997). He 

speaks of a “universal emotion of authenticity” (Davis 1997). Flamenco has often 

been compared with Jazz music’s potential for resistance. 

Both rap and flamenco have been considered outside the categories of Western 

definitions of music. Tricia Rose argues that rap in the beginning was considered a 

“style nobody could deal with” (Rose, A Style Nobody Can Deal With). Perceived as 

“black noise” (Rose, Black Noise) by the mainstream it became “rebel music” not 

only for the black population, but as well for the Puerto-Rican immigrants in the ghettos 

of the South Bronx (Rivera 2003). This tendency has a clear parallel in depictions 

of flamenco coming from “the poorest of the poor” (Totton 23). The flamenco artist – 

regardless whether he is of gypsy origin or an Andalusian peasant – is considered as 

a slave, an illiterate, or a homeless person by the majority (Totton 23). 

Histories of flamenco have been linked to histories of Jazz. Comparisons have 

also been made between black Americans and Roma because of the traumatic experience 

of racial persecution (Zern). If the U.S.-group Public Enemy raps, for example, 



“the nigga you love to hate,” they use the stereotype to express the ambivalent feeling 

of attraction and rejection that underlies racism and that can be called the fetishcharacter 

of stereotype (Bhabha 66–8). This same race dynamic appears in the 

“Gitanofilia” of current Flamenco discourses as a substitute for the “Maurofilia” in 

Andalusians “Golden Age” (Baltanas). The attributed, stereotyped violence of a marginalized 

ethnic group appears in the “gangsta” images of rappers as well in readings 

of patterns of social behavior amongst Roma. 

A very interesting similarity between rap and flamenco is their ability to overcome the 

boundaries of race or ethnicity and to unbind (social or geographical) place and music 

in terms of the audience. In both cases it seems to follow the pattern “Black music – 

white audience” (Kitwana) with all its economic implications. Rap music’s most devoted 

listeners consist of economically potent, young white listeners from the suburbs living 

far from the inner-city population (Rose, Black Noise 4) or overseas, for example in 

Japan. Flamenco gains a larger and larger audience among payos (the “non-Romani”), 

living in Madrid or the Northern Parts of Spain, but in Berlin or Tokyo as well, who definitively 

do not share the experience of the Gitano population. The social position of 

African-Americans in the U.S. and Roma within the Spanish nation-state has been and 

still is ambivalent. If a suburban kid listens to rap music s/he appreciates this art form 

and temporarily identifies with a “cool” street style. If a payo/paya listens to flamenco 

this is a very similar act of self-positioning that goes beyond the appreciation. 

The reception of rap and flamenco among “white” listeners and the fusions of both 

genres with other musical forms illustrates that they can be consumed away from the 

social context. This might show their ability to integrate and attract a wide audience 

beyond the limited spaces in which these musical forms originated. These musical forms 

mobilize social, racial and ethnic positions within society, albeit on an abstract level. 

Both groups – labeled payos by the Roma or “white negroes” by the hip hop community 

(Mailer) – document the ambivalent fascination for “insiders” to identify temporarily with 

“outsiders.” The outsiders have gone mainstream and rap has become the dominant 

U.S. pop culture beyond the color line: “hip hop has made ‘black’ into a political color for 

a whole new generation of African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, women, and 

white youth” (Scott 143). Maybe this will be the case with flamenco to which an ethnic 

minority has contributed and has gained a national and world-wide reputation. 

In contrast to the mobilizing forces of rap and flamenco as genres within the imaginary, 

they continue to be “articulations of difference” (Papapavlou) within a social 

system. Contemporary rappers inside and outside the U.S. often are immigrants, and 

the musicians who produce “flamenco nuevo” (“new flamenco”) often are of North- 

African origin, commuting between Morocco and Spain. The diasporic situation of 

those producing sounds like rap (Afro-diasporic) or flamenco (Romani) seems to play 

an important role. This marginal position can be taken over in counter-hegemonic 

discourse within majority society. 


Conclusion: Hybrid Style 

The overview of the features common to both flamenco and rap leads to the conclusion 

that from these musical forms, already hybrid themselves, a new genre 

emerges. This genre takes advantage of the cultural matrix of the – at first sight – 

different traditions. Flamenco and rap music, like other forms of popularized music, 

are subject to constant reinterpretation that explicitly aims to transgress national 

borders. According to Craig Watkins, “[h]ip hop is creating very interesting bridges 

across racial and ethnic communities” (Randall 2). The refashioning of diasporic conditions 

and migratory peoples contribute to a grounding of transnational formations 

in a specific place and time as Juan Flores, a New York based scholar of Puerto Rican 

and Black Studies puts it when talking about popular cultures. Flores refers to the 

concept of “hybrid cultures” that has been developed by the Mexican anthropologist 

Nestor Garcia Canclini. Transnational formations characterized by cultural hybridity, 

which is more than the mere fusion of cultural traditions, that results from the mutual 

influence between intersecting groups. There is also mixing and interpenetration of 

cultural domains themselves, the blurring of distinctions between high and low, 

between elite, folkloric and mass cultures.” (Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop 26). 

Articulations like the “jiphop flamenquillo” can be considered as hybrids in the aforementioned 

sense, as an appropriation of a global culture by a local surrounding, 

transgressing social and class boundaries and questioning the notion of high/low 

culture itself. The term “local” has to be understood not as a fixed, but as a contested 

and negotiated space (Bennett 52). Flamenco hip-hop re-contextualizes an 

urban Afro-American culture and recombines it with very different and hybrid musical 

traditions. The ethnical and political dimension of “black noise” is transposed to the 

Mediterranean area. It meets another dimension of cathartic art, an embodied “politics 

of passion,” flamenco. Both, rap and flamenco are musical expressions that are 

embedded, each in its own specific way, in the everyday life of an increasingly young, 

urban population in former “Al-Andalus.” 36 Rap and Flamenco are musical styles that 

integrate speech, music and other sounds, often in a public space or by creating a 

public space. Via symbols, ritual, connected histories and traditions new, transnational 

spaces are created. They establish a new relationship between place and identity. 

By this, the local space of former “Al-Andalus” – today politically more and more 

separated by the inequalities of a north-south-dichotomy – is appropriated, perceived 

as a cultural unity and “made habitable” (Bennett 69) by a new generation of musicians 

and a young audience. If Claude Liauzu, a specialist on Mediterranean history 

and culture, says that the Mediterranean still has to be invented (224) – the music 

of Ojos de Brujo is a contemporary attempt to invent it as an African-European- 

African-American space. 


Notes 

1. 2 Feb 2005 

�http://www.ojosdebrujo.com. � 

2. Spanish for rhythmically clapping hands. 

3. A “bastardized Barcelona with Black people 

and people from Brazil, from the Navarra region 

of Northern Spain, with Roma people and non- 

Roma people.” (Translations by myself, unless 

otherwise indicated). 

4. The expression “hip jondo” refers to the 

term cante jondo (“deep song”) Federico García 

Lorca and others invented to found a new genre 

in 1922. 

5. I use the terms “hybridity” and “hybrid” in 

the sense of Nestor García Canclini. The term 

“hybridity” refers to the fusion of cultural 

traditions resulting from the mutual influence 

among intersecting groups. In putting some 

emphasis on the process of reconversion, he 

describes the interpenetration of cultural 

domains, but also adds the blurring of age-old 

distinctions between high and low, between 

elite, folkloric, and mass cultures. 

6. 2 Feb 2005 

�http//www.ojosdebrujo.com�. 

7. In Caló, the Roma language, vengue means 

“energy”. 

8. Stylistic mixing has a long tradition as well 

in the history of classical music, jazz and pop 

music. Flamenco often served as a pars pro 

toto for the imaginations of “Spanish music” or 

simply ‘the popular’ There are many examples 

of European composers that incorporate 

elements of Southern Spain into their own 

avant-garde or modernist art such as Richard 

Schumann, Franz Liszt, Maurice Ravel or 

Georges Bizet. “Claude Debussy, Michail Glinka 

and Nikolai A. Rimski-Korsakov were looking for 

structures of ‘the popular’ not only in Russia 

or France but also in Andalusia,” as Lorca 

points out in his essay El Cante Jondo. Primitivo 

Canto Andaluz (203). Miles Davis, for example, 

works on flamenco elements on his album 

Sketches of Spain (released in 1960) or in the 


song “Flamenco Sketches” (1959). Elements of 

the flamenco aesthetics are used in 

contemporary pop music, for example in MTV’s 

“hip hopera” entitled Carmen (2001) the 

famous setting of Sevilla’s tobacco factory is 

moved to the streets of New York and an 

African-American Carmen expresses herself in 

rap. Songwriter Björk collaborates with 

flamenco artist Raimundo Amador for her song 

“So Broken” on Jóga (1996). 

9. For example on Primavera en Salonico. 

Sephardic Folk Songs with Savina Yannatou 

(1994) or on the album Primavera en Salonico. 

Songs of the Mediterranean (1998) of the same 

artist. 

10. The ud (or oud) is one of the most 

important instruments in Arabic and Islamic 

musical communities. This short necked, 

fretless instrument is a direct ancestor of the 

European lute. Probably the ud originated in 

Persia, but it has gained popularity among 

musicians across the Middle East, North 

America and southern Europe, especially Iberia. 

Generally, there are two main types of 

instruments: Turkish uds, usually crafted in 

Istanbul, and made from a very light wood 

which produces a bright tone; and Arabic uds, 

typically made in Cairo and Damascus. 2 Feb 

2005 

�http://www.si.umich.edu/chico/instrument/ 

pages/ud_gnrl.html�. 

11. “Bhangra is a form of folk music and 

dance that originates from Punjab. People 

traditionally performed Bhangra when 

celebrating the harvest. During Bhangra, people 

sing Punjabi Boliyaan lyrics, at least one person 

plays the dhol drum, and other people may play 

the flute, dholak drum, or other musical 

instruments. While Bhangra began as a part of 

harvest festival celebrations, it eventually 

became a part of such diverse occasions as 

weddings and New Year celebrations. Moreover, 

during the last thirty years, Bhangra has 

enjoyed a surge in popularity worldwide, both in 

traditional form and as a fusion with genres 

such as hip-hop, house, and reggae.” 16 May 

2007 �http://www.punjabonline.com�. 


12. English translation by Rob James: 2 Feb 

2005 �http://www.ojosdebrujo.com�. The 

expression “neighborhood taggers” refers to 

graffiti writing, a tag is the most basic writing of 

an artist’s name in either spray paint or marker. 

A graffiti writer’s tag is his or her personalized 

signature. “Aerosol nights” refers to the spray 

cans graffiti artists usually use. Because this is 

illegal it is practiced mostly by night. 

13. “The neighbors are murmuring in the 

windows:/they can’t stand listening to 

reggaetón every day!” (transl. Rob James, 2 Feb 

2005 �http://www.ojosdebrujo.com�. 

Reggaetón is a reggae-based dance music that 

was first performed by Panamanian artist El 

General in the early 1990s. It became very 

popular with Latino youth and spread to North 

America since 2000. Reggaeton blends 

Jamaican music influences of reggae and 

dancehall with those of the Caribbean, such as 

bomba and plena, as well as that of hip-hop. 

Starting in Panama, Reggaetón has given the 

Hispanic youth a musical genre that they can 

claim as their own. The genre’s influence has 

spread to the wider Latino communities in the 

United States as well as to Latin American 

audiences. See also Julian Henriques’ article 

on Jamaican Sound Systems in this volume. 

14. The Latino population in the U.S. is 

increasing in numbers and visibility. Today, 

approximately 26% of New York’s population is 

“Hispanic.” 

15. “These are two different things. […] 

Present yourself as flamenquito and you have 

already won.” Rincón 15. 

16. “There is no more ‘street’ in national rap 

than in flamenco.” (Rincón 13) 

17. 21 April 2007 

�http://www.hiphopassociation.com.� 

18. The Last Poets were modern day griots 

expressing the nation-building fervor of the 

Black Panthers in poems. According to Amiri 

Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), the Last Poets were 

rappers of the civil rights era. “With politically 

charged raps, taut rhythms, and dedication to 

raising African-American consciousness, the 

260 | Susanne Stemmler 

Last Poets almost single-handedly laid the 

groundwork for the emergence of hip-hop.” 

Ankeny, Jason. “Last Poets.” 15 April 2007 

�http://www.allmusic.com�. 

19. Interview recorded by the author 

22 Apr 2007, New York City. 

20. According to hip hop scholar Tricia Rose 

the break beat is “one of rap’s earliest and 

most central musical characteristics. […] 

Dubbed the ‘best part of a great record’ by 

Grandmaster Flash, one of rap’s pioneering 

DJs, the break beat is a section where ‘the 

band breaks down, the rhythm section is 

isolated, basically where the bass guitar 

and drummer take solos.’ […] Playing the 

turntables like instruments, these DJs 

extended the most rhythmically compelling 

elements in a song, creating a new line 

composed only of the most climactic point in 

the ‘original’ ” (Rose 73–74). For “scratching,” 

a technique created by DJ Grand Wizard 

Theodore, I “a rhythmic sound made from 

sliding a turntable needle back and forth on top 

of a vinyl record” (Westbrook 121). Human 

“beat-boxing” refers to “the ability to make 

instrumental sounds using the mouth” 

(Westbrook 121). See also Julian Henriques’ 

article in this book. 

21. Noise, as Massumi points out, is the 

condition of emergence of music. It is the 

unperceived substrate from which soundpatterning 

differentiates and against which its 

stands out. We hear the background noise of 

existence that is expression (Massumi 776). 

22. The production of space by sound in New 

York’s cityscape is a constant topic in 

postmodernist fiction, see for example Toni 

Morrison’s novel Jazz (for a brilliant analysis 

how Morrison relates sound to Harlem, “the 

City,” see Löbbermann). 

23. “Sampling” refers to the “use of other 

recorded music in the creation of a new of 

updated music” (Westbrook 120). For a 

definition of “signifying” see Gates. For a 

definition of “tagging” see endnote 12. 

24. It started with La Familia, Wu Tang Latino 

and Daddy Yankee.

25. For more details on Roma history see 

Anikó Imre’s article on world music and identity 

politics in this volume. 

26. Interview with the artist MC Protious 

Indigenious recorded by the author 21 April 

2007, New York City. 

27. See the debates on “realness” in hip-hop 

and on “flamenco puro.” 

28. For a different reading of hybridity and 

cultural resistance see Imre’s article in this 

volume. 

29. Processions in the streets of cities and 

villages in predominantly catholic Spain are the 

highlights of the Semana Santa, the “Holy week” 

during Easter. Statues and relics, often taken 

from churches, are decorated, put on display 

and carried by different fraternities during the 

procession, which mostly take place at night. 

30. This has been acknowledged by Miles 

Davis and Gil Evans in “Saeta” on the album 

Sketches of Spain (1960). Davis works and 

improvises on the topic of a Saeta. Instead of 

picking up the guitar, he takes up the voice of 

the saeta singer within the “noise” of the ritual 

marching band with his trumpet. 

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Hip Hop Nation and 

Gender Politics 

ABSTRACT 


Anikó Imre 

Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics 

This essay compares how hip hop is deployed in the support of local identity politics 

in the work of musicians from The Netherlands, Israel, Hungary and the United 

States. In each case study, the argument examines the paradoxical dialectic between 

authenticity and hybridity that characterizes contemporary world music. Particularly 

instructive are the cases where hip hop, an inherently hybrid, global musical form, 

provides the tools and expression for a masculinized, often militaristic form of 

authenticity to be constructed. In global contexts outside the United States, such a 

masculine identity tends to serve as a rallying point for nationalistic causes, which 

strategically render feminist critiques irrelevant. 

Introduction 

A recent documentary film festival I attended screened two films about hip-hop, one 

after the other. 1 The first one, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, made by former college quarterback 

and self-identified hip-hop fan Byron Hurt, interweaves direct commentary by 

the filmmaker and his interviews with African-American rappers such as Mos Def, Fat 

Joe, Chuck D, Jadakiss, as well as with critics, activists, and young rap consumers. 

The picture is bleak: the current state of hip-hop in the U.S. is devoid of the initial, justified 

anti-establishment anger and resistant spirit that propelled this musical form 

from inner-city ghettoes onto MTV. Instead, rich “white guys in suits,” as a critic puts 

it, those in charge of the global music industry, have consolidated a self-hating, violent 

Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics | 265

and disturbingly misogynistic rap culture, which is designed to appeal to a large white 

audience. Because this is the most lucrative package in which hip-hop sells, the rappers 

featured in the film, exhibiting attitudes from denial through irony to cynicism, see 

no other way but to continue supplying the mainstream music industry with what it 

rewards. 

The second film, Saz (Israel), by director Gil Karni, features Arab-Israeli rapper 

Samekh Zakhut, whose declared mission is to enlist hip-hop in the service of 

Palestinian nationalism. Hip-hop is to be reunited here with its original mission as a 

politicized artistic tool with which to negotiate – or, in this case, violently stage – 

social conflict. Only the ongoing debate between Samekh, who sees the Arab minority 

in Israel as increasingly marginalized, and his communist grandfather, who argues 

in favor of peaceful coexistence, introduces some ambiguity into the film’s apparent 

justification of Samekh’s anger. During the one-year period that the camera follows 

the rapper, he becomes increasingly successful. The film wraps up as he is boasting 

to his grandfather of a likely record deal that would shoot him onto the Euro-American 

market. The audience is left wondering what will happen to his commitment to the 

cause of Palestinian nationalism. 

Watching these two films about the politics of hip-hop side by side inevitably 

brings to the surface some of the contradictions embedded in “world music” today. 

It is a commonplace to claim, Steven Feld reminds us, that music’s deep connection 

to social identities has been intensified by globalization (189). However, hardly any 

further generalizations can be issued about this connection. Byron Hurt’s account of 

the American hip-hop scene confirms anxious narratives, which describe the commodification 

and cooptation of ethnic difference by the moguls of global entertainment 

media. Saz may inspire more optimistic projections, which emphasize the active, 

glocal reappropriation of pop music – in this case, African-American hip-hop – by young 

people around the world and celebrate the “endlessly creative conversation” among 

such reappropriations, which refuse to become trapped in a quest for authenticity 

(Feld 196). 

The two films display and solicit two markedly different approaches to very similar 

musical performances: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, set in the hub of the hip-hop culture 

others emulate worldwide, is informed by a gender-conscious critical perspective, which 

allows it to point to patriarchal ties between black and white men. Through its divideand-conquer 

mechanism, Hurt argues, the white media establishment can manipulate 

black men into violently asserting their illusory power over black women. The fact that 

black rappers inadvertently foreground their own sexual insecurity and lack of social 

power and that such performances revive racist stereotypes about black people is the 

source of the pleasure so many white boys take in hip-hop. Both the feminist critique 

and questions about the corrupting strategies of the music industry seem alien to 

Saz – something that can be safely generalized across worldwide adaptations of 

266 | Anikó Imre


African-American hip-hop. The political negotiations in which Samekh’s tendentious 

music engages, although overtly masculinist and militarized, are performed exclusively 

between an oppressive nation-state and the oppressed diasporic national community 

for which he volunteers to speak. 

I am interested in how the claim of “authenticity” returns to justify the sexual politics 

of hip-hop in performances and performer personas that are evidently derived, 

hybrid, transplanted. The sexism and misogyny that underscores performances of 

combative, “real” black masculinity has recently opened up hip-hop to criticism in the 

United States. However, such a model serves as inspiration and justification for hiphop 

performers around the world to become the authentic voices of their nations or 

other marginalized communities. It is perplexing that such performances, unlike 

those of African-American rappers, are seen as exempt from gendered critique, even 

though feminism has had so much to say both about the patriarchal structure of 

nationalism and the fragmentation of identity politics into the commercialized matter 

of individual choices. The alleged authenticity of political statements by hip-hop 

artists such as Samekh should logically be undermined by their derivative, staged 

and commercialized participation in performing world music. 

In particular, there is something profoundly contradictory in the alliance between hiphop 

and territorial nationalism. A migratory, hybrid musical form is employed to confirm primordial 

boundaries and blood ties. This connection works against what many take to be 

the logic of world music, hip-hop in particular. In her chapter in this book, devoted to the 

new musical mix of flamenco-rap, or “hip hop Andaluz,” Susanne Stemmler argues that 

the inherent hybridity, openness, and performative irony that hip-hop and flamenco share 

is amplified in their combination and creates a new space for social and political critique. 2 

Rap, in this account, is not only a highly politicized news channel connecting transnational 

communities of the “Black Atlantic” but is also a musical form that functions as an easily 

accessible open source. Hip-hop, then, provides a virtual home of shared experiences, 

a space of connectedness and belonging to a transnational community often called “hiphop 

nation.” In this sense, “home seems to be a habitual practice of mobility, itself a symbolic 

habitat, a way of life.” 3 According to Stemmler, hip-hop and flamenco are both sound 

cultures that act against the territorializing impulses of the nation-state. 

While this is a contagiously optimistic account, I would like to argue, with reference 

to transnational rappers such as Zakhut, that it overlooks the gendered, sexualized 

and racialized dimensions of hip-hop’s transnational migration. In the case 

studies I discuss, one can trace an unspoken, re-territorializing effort by ethnic or 

minority rappers who, similar to most African-American rappers, stake out their turf in 

the essentialist language of rather old-fashioned sexism and homophobia. Such blatant 

sexism goes hand in hand with territorial nationalism or militarism, undermining 

the celebratory ideal of a global hip-hop nation. Even in cases where rappers do not 

speak for a nation, discourses of nationalism and the interests of the nation-state 


permeate the construction of “authentic” racialized bodies on the global musical 

marketplace. 

The celebratory logic of world music often simply equates hybridity with resistance 

and labels a feminist critique frivolous. But a critical feminist approach is crucial to 

sorting out how Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean masculinities, constructed as 

objects of exoticizing emulation by transnational record and media companies, come 

to underscore nationalistic purposes. While my inclination is to critique a simplistic 

equation between hybridity and resistance, I would also like to resist other kinds of 

sweeping generalizations about “world music” and hold out the possibility that there 

may be versions, or at least moments of hip-hop music that could be seen to provide 

spaces of resistant expression in-between established state and corporate channels. 

In the last part of this essay, I will speculate about such moments in relation to 

versions of world music generated by Roma musicians in post-communist Eastern 

Europe. However, as I will argue, even the freshness and mobilizing power of such 

musical expression should not exempt it from a transnational feminist criticism of its 

implication in nationalism and (neo)imperialism. 

Israeli Eminem, Moroccan Minority Model 

In an age when no political expression remains untouched by global media entertainment, 

hip-hop has been increasingly adopted worldwide as the tool of resistance to a 

range of institutions. For instance, Kobi Shimoni, the “Israeli Eminem,” who also calls 

himself “Subliminal” to mystify his own hybrid persona, has risen to wide popularity 

since the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks failed in 2000 and violence has escalated in 

Israel. His music represents a sharp departure from traditional Israeli music, which 

has been “a mix of Hebrew-language rock and Mediterranean crooning” (Mitnick). 

Subliminal blends American hip-hop styles with traditional Hebrew and Persian music 

samples “layered with fat bass lines and catchy choruses,” evoking a Jewish history 

and tradition with Middle Eastern overtones. But the lyrics reveal a perspective that is 

identified as “patriotic” at best and violently anti-Palestinian at worst, announcing the 

claims of a divisive territorial nationalism in the “tough” macho language of L.A. 

“thug” rappers. Shimoni and his band all come from military backgrounds. The military 

also provides their widest fan base (“Q’s Interview”). The rapper says he sells “pride 

and a dose of reality” through his songs, which he considers his weapons. In the song 

“Divide and Conquer,” he sings: “Dear God, I wish you could come down because I’m 

being persecuted. My enemies are united. They want to destroy me. We’re nurturing 

and arming those who hate us. Enough!” (“Israel’s Eminem”). 

It appears that the name “Subliminal” refers less to the subtlety than to the ambiguity 

of Shimoni and his sidekick’s, Yoav Eliasi’s a.k.a. “Shadow’s” patriotic politics. 

They are directly supported and sponsored by the Israeli government. The rapper 

sells more than patriotic pride: he has a lucrative clothing line, under the logo TACT 

268 | Anikó Imre

or Tel Aviv City Team. All of the items, from caps to baggy pants, are decorated with 

a Star of David, which he claims to have rendered trendy, along with a stitching that 

reads, “The Architects of Israeli Hip Hop” (“Israel’s Eminem”). The cover of Shimoni’s 

second album, “The Light and the Shadow,” portrays a muddy fist menacingly clutching 

a silver Star of David pendant. In the song “Bottomless Pit,” violence appears 

self-serving, divorced from the national cause, as he warns an unnamed enemy: 

“Anybody who messes with me ends up in a coffin.” 

A similar, highly politicized set of identity negotiations between white national 

majority and, in this case, immigrant Muslim minority has been carried out by Ali B, 

perhaps the most popular rapper in the Netherlands. Unlike Shimoni, however, who 

gives voice to majority nationalism, Dutch-Moroccan Ali B has been welcomed by both 

Moroccan/Arab and Dutch constituencies. His career has risen amid increasing 

national tension over post-Cold War immigration, the European Union’s eastward 

enlargement, and the unresolved situation of guest workers that have settled in the 

Netherlands over the decades. Taxed religious and ethnic relations burst through the 

surface of the traditional Dutch national self-image of tolerance in November of 

2004, when controversial director Theo van Gogh was murdered by another Dutch- 

Moroccan, Mohammed B. Ali B, who raps mostly in Dutch but straddles both cultures, 

is seen in the Netherlands as a figure of great political relevance. His hybridity makes 

him both flexible enough to represent the Moroccan community and easy to appropriate 

as the poster boy for Dutch multiculturalism, used to keep in check resistance 

to the very process of fortifying borders and clamping down on immigration that his 

figure as an “alien” foregrounds. The music and entertainment media industry have 

been glad to tap into the interest created by yet another exotic identity mix, whose 

“authenticity” is enhanced by his controversial political position (Taylor). 4 

In both cases, it is in the rappers’ performance of African-American hip-hop masculinity 

that their perceived authenticity and political mobilizing potential lies. While 

their cultural politics is exploited by both the nation-state and the commercial media 

industry, their power to mobilize is formidable. This is particularly obvious in the case 

of Ali B, who is a frequent celebrity guest and topic of discussion in mainstream 

Dutch media. In his seductive music videos, such as “Till Morning” and “Ghetto,” he 

is typically featured as a ghetto rapper surrounded by a multiracial cast of dancers 

and singers. The lyrics of the songs address the sense of abjection that pervades the 

Muslim immigrant ghetto in a mix of languages. “Ghetto’s” chorus goes, 

This goes out to my Tatas in the [ghetto] 

My Toerkoes in the [ghetto] 

My Mokros in the ghetto [ghetto] 

This goes out to the Antis in the [ghetto] 

Malukus in the [ghetto] 



The Joegos in the [ghetto] 

[Ghetto living] 

These streets remind me of quicksand [quicksand] 

When you’re on it you’ll keep goin down [goin down] 

And there’s no one to hold on to 

And there’s no one to pull you out 

You keep on fallin [falling] 

And no one can here you callin 

So you end up self destructing 

On the corner with the tuli on the waist line just got outta the bing doin 

state time 

Teeth marks on my back from the canine 

Dark memories of when there was no sunshine 

Cause they said that I wouldn’t make it 

[I remember like yesterday] 

Holdin on to what God gave me. 5 

The video clip of the song “Zomervibe” (“Summer Vibe”) shows a less threatening but 

even more seductive side of Ali B’s, and, by extension, the Moroccan immigrant’s, 

seductive masculinity: It showcases the half-naked rapper in a sunny Mediterranean 

setting, surrounded by desiring white women on a luxury boat, basking in the glory of 

his celebrity life. It is likely that such images of successful, powerful immigrants mediate 

and positively alter the perception of the stereotypical violent Muslim to which the 

Moroccan minority tends to be assigned in Dutch mainstream culture. However, the 

same concerns emerge here, perhaps even more forcefully, that Beyond Beats and 

Rhymes raised: to the extent that hip-hop is a predominantly male and explicitly heterosexist 

genre, it seems that the empowering potential inscribed in its cultural politics 

remains limited to men who are, or aspire to be, rightful representatives of their 

communities. The lines of opposition and resistance presuppose and confirm a 

national, by definition male-populated field of action. One suspects that hip-hop’s sexual 

politics consolidates an alliance between men of national majorities and minorities, 

grounded in and serving binary gendered and sexual relations that have proven 

harmful, in which women have a choice between staying silent or engaging in the game 

like men. 

Todd Boyd writes: 

Ultimately, hip hop’s concern with cultural identity has been about affirming authenticity, 

in what would otherwise be considered a postmodern, technologically driven, 

media-dominated, artificial world. To “keep it real” means to remain true to what is 

assumed to be the dictates of one’s cultural identity. (23–24). 

270 | Anikó Imre


As Boyd readily admits, this quest for authenticity “often translates to one’s perception 

in the marketplace” and one’s relationship to capital (24). The tension around 

authenticity that is at the heart of the global migration of hip-hop is also captured by 

Stuart Hall in his description of cultural identities in his native Caribbean as a play of 

difference within identity. His description provides a model that helps to foreground 

the contradiction embedded in each of these global musicians’ performances: that 

between their own transnational, hybrid cultural and economic constitution and their 

supposedly pure representative politics, that enables them to rap for an allegedly 

homogeneous national or minority group. 

According to Hall, in a situation captured by Derrida’s “differance” on a theoretical 

plane, the “authentic” state of being from the Caribbean is continually destabilized by 

the historical, colonial ruptures and discontinuities that constitute Caribbean identities. 

While “being” of a certain essence is always “becoming” just like, in the deconstructionist 

model, absolute difference is always a sliding difference, on its way to new meanings 

without completely erasing traces of other meanings, imposing a single imaginary 

coherence on an area so obviously fraught with dispersal and fragmentation would be 

very hard. It is this evidence of imagined roots and positioned identities that makes Hall 

turn to “play” to evoke instability and permanent unsettlement, differences inscribed 

between, rather than within, identities. Besides the full palette of skin hues, he argues, 

the complexity of this cultural play can be most powerfully experienced in the play of 

Caribbean music (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora”). 

It appears that what maintains the authenticity of transnational hip-hop is precisely 

the hyperbolic performance of racialized, heterosexual manhood. From the point of view 

of feminist postcolonial and transnational theorists, this is a very problematic connection. 

In their work one finds the most acute critique of representation – of the violence 

involved in the act of speaking for the subaltern, even if the speaker has the best intentions 

(Spivak, Chow) as well as of the control over women by nationalistic discourses 

and technologies strategically employed by both the nation-state and transnational 

business corporations (Grewal and Kaplan, Kaplan et al., Marciniak, Mohanty). 

World Music and Post-Communist Romany “Authenticity” 

Hall’s point about cultural identities and musical performance has a more universal 

potential, which can serve analogically to contest the essentialist unity that nationstates 

impose on the identities they claim to contain within their state borders. It is 

also a useful lens through which to examine the alleged “authenticity” of world music’s 

politics vis-à-vis nationalism. The relationship between the two senses of play Hall discusses 

– diasporic dispersal and unsettlement on the one hand and musical play on 

the other – is especially relevant for the Roma. 

The Roma have been the most deprived and marginalized ethnic group in Europe 

for centuries. Popular opinion, reinforced by media representations and state policies, 


universally wraps the Roma in the imagery of Orientalism, judging them inferior, barbaric, 

tribal, nomadic and childish – that is, naturally incapable of rising to the level of 

civilized, rational, modern nationalism. Like children, the Roma are only good at playing 

music and dancing. The Roma, who first arrived in Europe in the 14th century, settled 

in Eastern Europe in large numbers because they were expelled from Western 

lands and forced back eastward. While in the eastern parts they were also kept out of 

the respectable professions that defined citizenship, they were tolerated as entertainers 

and were confirmed in this role as a result of the forced assimilationist policies 

of the Habsburgs (Kállai). For centuries, this imposed distribution of labor – 

reinforced by violent policies of segregation – has helped maintain a racist hierarchy 

at the heart of East European nationalisms. 

The situation of the Roma – which has only worsened since the fall of communism – 

has received increased political attention and media coverage in recent decades. 

Lashing out openly against the Roma after 1989 then was an almost predictable consequence 

of the liberation of racist fantasies suppressed under the manifestly “egalitarian” 

regimes of socialism. East European nations, having thrown off the “backward” 

Soviet yoke that had kept them in the past, considered it essential to prove themselves 

a hundred percent European by identifying and casting out any element that would throw 

suspicion on to their commitment to modernist progress (Iordanova 213–33). After 

1989, with capitalism gaining full force as a result of privatization, joint ventures, dwindling 

economic state support, and, above all, fast-growing unemployment, the Roma 

were the first to be forced out of employment and demonized as the hopeless ludic element, 

who are unwilling to work and study. 6 

One can also see, however, that excluding the Roma from the national body altogether 

will not help state governments purify the national self-image. Rather, it is precisely 

this unfavorable collective self-image, the result of long-term economic 

inferiority to the West, that has been projected onto the visibly different and initially 

nomadic Roma. Obeying a colonial logic, Eastern Europeans are so anxious to distinguish 

themselves from Gypsies because they are treated “like Gypsies” in the 

West. Indeed, in many representations, Romanians, Hungarians, or Serbs are not 

only indistinguishable from the Roma, but Gypsies often even stand allegorically for 

certain nations. Roma music, due to its ability to incorporate varied forms of musical 

expression while maintaining a strong connection to Roma identities, belies nationalistic 

efforts to maintain the barrier between Roma and mainstream national cultures. 

It is indistinguishable from folk music traditions in Hungary, Serbia, or Bulgaria, 

particularly when it comes to such countries’ touristic appeals (Sárosi). 

The Roma’s associations with musical entertainment and their ability to adapt different 

musical traditions have recently been revalorized as serious assets on the global 

media market that has invaded East European cultures since the end of the Cold War, 

as well as resources for a newly emerging Roma politics of identity. The decline of 

272 | Anikó Imre


socialism and the arrival of global television, particularly MTV, in Eastern Europe, also 

brought about a generational and ethnic shift in musical sensibilities. Rock continued 

to be harnessed in the service of nationalist sentiment, most notably in the Serb 

Turbo/Folk/Rock scene that had led up to and thrived during the Yugoslav wars of succession. 

7 But, to many in the younger generation, the violent purity and whiteness of 

such music pales in comparison with the cool and erotic energies of the African- 

American ghetto. Eastern European Roma have now come center stage as the local 

embodiments of the spirit of ghetto music. While Roma musicians have always maintained 

extended international networks regardless of the musical genre they pursued, 

during socialism, their activities were monitored and regulated by nation-states. States 

provided contracts and visas for foreign venues, and took credit for the achievements 

of “their” “good” Roma (Kállai). 

Since the fall of the Wall, the European popular music market has turned towards 

post-socialist Eastern Europe and the Balkans in search of novelty and originality. 8 

There is no shortage of neologisms that describe the varieties of world music transplanted 

into and growing out of East European soil: Along with Gypsy techno and Roma 

rap, one hears of speed-folk, Transylvania-pop, Balkanrock, and so on. Romany musicians 

have taken advantage of Western interest, easier travel, and international family 

networks to build transnational careers. 9 But it was the infiltration of Eastern 

Europe by world music, particularly by MTV, that had first shored up Roma musical talent 

and turned the East European ghetto, the place of the urban ethnic underclass and 

the site of Roma segregation of exclusion, into a resource for politicized pop music. 

The results of such a convergence are Roma rap bands, playing East European varieties 

of world music, which draw on the identification of Roma musicians with the rappers 

of the Black ghetto and are popular among Roma and non-Roma youth alike. 

It seems quite likely that hip-hop has introduced Roma voices into national cultures 

that had not been heard before. The image and sound flows of hip-hop help Roma rappers 

transform their own ethnicities by re-appropriating the image of the Gypsy musician 

formerly tamed by the state in the service of a transnational identity politics. There 

are many examples of such success stories. The band Gipsy.cz from the Czech 

Republic has recently made it onto the World Music Charts’s European Top Ten. Led by 

rapper “Gipsy” (Radoslav Banga), the band of Roma musicians perform in Romany, 

English and Czech and mix Romany sounds music with various pop styles. Gipsy’s first 

CD, Romano Hip Hop, released in 2006, has been distributed Europe-wide by Indies 

Scope Records. The title song was named “Song of the Year” by the readers of the popular 

Czech music magazine Filter. 10 Another Roma band, Fekete vonat, or Black Train, 

from the Eighth District of Budapest, the local “Harlem,” mixes standard love songs 

with social commentary about the Roma minority’s situation. 11 Some of their songs, 

such as “Ghettosoul,” consciously turn the poor district into a metaphorical space of 

budding Romany identity politics in the language of music (Fáy 24). “Our lyrics talk 


about our problems as Gypsies, and the problems of Gypsy people in general. This is 

one of the things that makes this music Roma rap,” the musicians say in an interview. 

And, “[w]e also try to attack everyday racism and throw back in the gadjes’ face what 

they say about us, Roma” (“Roma rap,” my translation). 

At the same time, when one takes a closer look at the ways in which most Roma 

rappers try to carve out new spaces of identity in Eastern Europe, their efforts seem 

to leave them suspended between global media and nation-state more often than 

allowing them to critique both. For instance, following Black Train’s success with both 

Roma and non-Roma audiences as well as abroad, the band signed a three-album 

contract with the Hungarian EMI in 1997. When making the third of these albums, 

however, a changed Hungarian EMI leadership refused to allow the band to record 

songs in Romany. A statement from the parent company, EMI London, summed up 

the situation succinctly: “It’s not good business to be racist.” 12 

Browsing the YouTube selection in Hungarian, one finds many hits for LL Junior, 

one of the most popular Roma rappers, whose song lyrics open this essay. His offerings, 

for the most part, are romantic songs, which infuse traditional Roma tunes with 

Afro-Caribbean influences. LL Junior was a founding member of Fekete Vonat but has 

also launched a solo career. He has also lent his voice to the successful animated 

2004 feature Nyócker/The District, in which his character plays a streetwise Roma 

teenage rapper. The singer is featured in numerous music videos, most of which are 

in Romany, some with Hungarian subtitles. In the Romany-language song “Korkorro,” 

he appears as a Latin lover, in white slacks, sleeveless shirt, suspenders and a hat, 

pining for a dark-haired girl in a red dress. The dance numbers that pepper the courting 

narrative increase the joint exotic lure of the Gypsy lover and the flamenco dancer 

almost to the point of camp. This is a marked departure from the image of the Roma 

buffoon, or “dancing slave,” in which Roma musical performances had been contained 

during the communist decades. While Junior taps into discourses of Gypsy 

romanticism, he remixes them – along with the music—to reassert a kind of racialized 

virility that is an object of transnational envy rather than national subjection. On 

YouTube, the narrative comments from viewers are partly in Romany, confirming the 

existence of a transnational Romany audience. Unsurprisingly, the Hungarian comments 

are intensely racist, infused with homophobic overtones. A few additional comments 

are in Spanish and English. For the most part, the latter express shock over 

the intensity of racism evidenced by viewers who identify themselves as Hungarian. 

As Black Train’s and LL Junior’s mixed success stories show, the new opportunities 

for travel, marketing and distribution outside the channels controlled by the state 

constitute a transnational opening for Roma musicians. However, national languages 

and racist discourses continue to permeate the distribution and reception of Roma 

music. As a result, Roma musicians invariably need to make allowances in order to 

be heard in their own countries. The local versions of the popular musical talent show 

274 | Anikó Imre


American Idol have provided rich case studies of the ambivalent relationship between 

Roma musicians and their nation-states. As I argued elsewhere, they provide the best 

illustration of the minefields that Roma entertainers, easily exploited by both commercial 

media and state politicians for the economic and political capital they represent, 

have to negotiate. 13 Romany singer Vlastimil Horvath won the 2005 season of 

SuperStar in the Czech Republic at the same time as Caramel, a.k.a. Ferenc Molnár, 

won Megasztár in Hungary. While these national winners’ ethnicity was at the center 

of public debates speculating about whether the rise of Roma stars will elevate the 

status of the entire minority, the singers themselves have been eager to shed the 

burden of representation. 14 

Embracing selected Roma musicians has long been a strategy employed by the state 

and the moral majority, with which to hand-pick and isolate from their communities 

“model” representatives of the minority, most of whom will remain all the more excluded 

from the national community. György Kerényi, long-time manager of the minority station 

Rádió C in Hungary, reminds us that urban Gypsy musicians have always been a part of 

the Budapest bohemian intellectual world. 15 It is easy to see how such tactics continue 

in the state’s and the national media’s management of Roma pop stars. 

Ibolya Oláh, who finished close second in the 2004 season of Megasztár, was officially 

chosen to represent Hungarian culture in the European Parliament in Brussels, 

where she performed a patriotic song in the spring of 2005. Unlike Gipsy or even LL 

Junior, whose hybridized Roma images are carefully calculated and cultivated, the 

YouTube presences of Oláh and Caramel reveal nothing about their ethnic origins. In 

the eyes of the global media world, these national media stars are represented as 

simply “Hungarian.” Oláh, an orphan girl with a spine-chilling, powerful voice, marched 

forward in the 2004 Megasztár race performing two kinds of music: one of her sources 

were popular songs from the Hungarian classical pop repertoire of the explicitly nationalistic 

variety, such as Péter Máté’s “Hazám” (“My Country”). The lyrics speak the sentimental 

language of patriotism from the position of the white male intellectual. They 

open with the metaphor of paternal lineage to confirm the genetic bond between family 

and country, patria and patriarch: “I can hear my father’s voice. You may not like 

this, but this is my country.” In Hungarian, the word used in the song for “country,” 

haza, joins “home” and “country” in one. The Gypsy woman, by definition excluded 

from both categories, is symbolically included on stage while performing the role of the 

model exception that confirms the rule about the bad minority. Oláh’s other choices 

consisted of international hits, mostly by black singers, such as Queen Latifah’s song 

from the musical Chicago, “When You’re Good to Mama.” Oláh’s ethnic difference 

became acceptable on the national talent show when removed by a degree of separation 

and colored by the image of the nurturing, mythical black mother. 

The embodiment of the doubly excluded, the Gypsy woman, has been fixed in subsequent 

appearances to demonstrate the state’s programmatic multicultural outreach 


and European generosity towards minorities: her performance of the song “Magyarország” 

(“Hungary”), has been employed to enhance the spectacle during the television coverage 

of the patriotic fireworks twice in 2005: on New Year’s Eve and on the state holiday 

of August 20th, the birthday of King Stephen, legendary founder of the Kingdom 

of Hungary. 

Caramel’s image and music have been similarly whitewashed and nationalized, 

with the singer’s voluntary participation. His hit song and video clip, “Párórára” (“For 

a Few Hours”), features the singer sitting on the grass in a baseball hat, baggy pants 

and a long shirt, absorbed in the timeless existentialist art of observation among 

people rushing by. Caramel moved audiences during the 2005 season of Megasztár 

with his performance of “Egy Elfelejtett szó” (“A Forgotten Word”), rendered classic 

by the Hungarian 1980s rock band LGT. The song was a cult item of the “rock revolution” 

that sustained youthful national opposition to the communist state and has 

become a nostalgic brick in the construction of post-communist national unity. The 

irony that the Roma were generally assumed to be the recipients of state favors and 

therefore allies of the Party leadership is erased in this performance along with 

Caramel’s ethnic minority status. The singer’s more recent rap song “Mennem Kell” 

(“I’ve Got to Go”) features the voice of a confident and well-to-do star on the rise. The 

clip shows Caramel, who is hardly an athletic type, emerging from an elegantly 

disheveled bed shared by a sleeping blonde bombshell. The song announces that the 

world is waiting for him and therefore he cannot be tied down by a woman. We see 

him enjoy the blowing wind and his new mobility while driving a Mercedes (emphatically 

emphasized by an otherwise gratuitous shot of the car). 

As Todd Boyd argues, hip-hop revisits the dilemma of assimilation in the United 

States: that of pushing for integration but constantly asking at what cost (22). Roma 

musicians face a similar dilemma, but, it appears, with even more limited choices. The 

continued racism of the post-communist state and moral majority and the co-opting 

seductions of the transnational media market leave a very narrow space in which to 

assert a positive Roma difference. Oláh can thus be employed by the state as an 

object of token exchange between Hungarian and Roma minorities as well as between 

the state and the European Union. Caramel, whose success is intimately tied to his 

rise on a national reality show, plays out the scenario of upward mobility that renders 

him indistinguishable from Hungarians and unthreatening in the patriarchal rivalry 

between majority and minority. 

The most extreme example of the dangers of double cooptation, by both state discourses 

and commercial media, is Roma singer Gyözö Gáspár, leader of the band 

Romantic. Gáspár’s music and declared intentions are barely concerned with identity 

politics. He wants his band to be the nation’s favorite, to be simply embraced by 

Hungarians and the Roma alike. It is no surprise that the first primetime television show 

starring a Roma in Hungary revolves around the non-offensive, slightly overweight 

276 | Anikó Imre


Gáspár: The Gyözike Show, in its third season on the commercial channel RTL Klub, is 

reality TV, which records the daily life of Gáspár and his family. While the fact that a 

Romany man and his family occupy precious primetime televisions space, attracting a 

large non-Roma audience, is a significant development, the family’s life in the expensive 

villa they inhabit more closely resembles the Beverly Hillbillies. The décor is in bad taste, 

family members constantly shout at one another in the stereotypical Roma dialect familiar 

from cabaret scenes, and most of Gáspár’s efforts to assert himself backfire in some 

ridiculous way or another. The show seems to confirm nothing but Gypsies’ inability to 

function as hard-working citizens. It displays the results of putting childish Roma entertainers 

in the china shop of an expensive house, comically performing a lifestyle that they 

will never be sophisticated enough to appreciate. The “real Roma” that this reality show 

delivers appear to be hopelessly hovering among various stereotypes. On the show, in 

live concerts and in his web presence, Gyözike seems eager to please by offering himself 

up for easy consumption and by dedicating his own life and music to consumption. 

Perhaps the most explicit of these consumptive performances is the song “Fogyni 

volna jó” or “It Would be Great to Lose Weight.” In a concert video on YouTube, 

Gyözike performs the song with two other Roma dancers, to the lukewarm applause 

of a predominantly gadje, or white, audience. The song’s message amounts to this: 

“It would be nice to lose weight but I like bacon and sausage too much.” Gyözike’s 

chunky appearance certainly underscores this message, providing for a depoliticized 

common ground with many out-of-shape Hungarians. On YouTube, the spectatorial 

comments on the clip, invariably in Hungarian, tend to express national shame about 

being represented in terms of such a performance in an “international” forum. 

Roma Rappers of The District 

The recent animated feature Nyócker – literally, “Eight district,” also translated as 

The District, constitutes a more promising solution to the dilemma of assimilation. As 

I will show, however, its critical postmodern stand towards both the nation-state and 

global media is undercut by its uncritical, retrograde gender politics. 

The film was produced in Hungary in a collaboration of Romany and non-Romany 

artists. It stars LL Junior in the role of Richie, the teen gang leader. The ghetto, the 

living space of the economically left-behind and institutionally excluded ethnic-poor 

classes, becomes re-eroticized in the film. The hip-hop culture of the African-American 

urban ghetto provides the inspiration and model of identification for the film. The real 

“Nyócker” in Budapest is the center of urban poverty, prostitution and drug traffic. 

The film’s carnivalesque storyline proceeds from a Shakespearean romance to a 

national and global social satire. It is populated by the urban post-socialist ghetto’s 

typical underclass characters: the white “entrepreneur”-pimp and the group of prostitutes 

he manages, the accented Chinese restaurant-owner and his martial-artsobsessed 

son, the alcoholic but charming Jewish plastic surgeon, members of the 


Ukrainian mafia, corrupt and dumb policemen, and, most prominently, members of an 

extended Roma family. 

The District rejects the idealized national homogeneity that earlier forms of antistate 

resistance assumed: it speaks in a mix of languages, including Russian, 

Hungarian, English, and, most important, Romany, mocking and subverting the ethical 

and political registers to which each had been assigned earlier. English, the language 

of American media imperialism, MTV, and the African-American ghetto 

constantly contaminates Hungarian. One the film’s greatest attractions are the hiphop 

numbers that interrupt the plot, performed for the most part by Roma musicians. 

The film’s very theme song, “Ghetto Star,” performed by LL Junior, announces: 

Listen to me! In case you don’t know, this is the District, the ghetto; if you don’t like 

it, too bad. You only know rough life from the news, but it is reality for us here, 

Hungarian reality… This is not the elite of Buda … you’re buried here in poverty 

instead. Corruption and lawlessness flourish, and the police couldn’t care less. You see 

flickering stars here, but they quickly become fallen angels. No good fairy, no three 

wishes. I’m telling you kids, this is Hungarian reality. 

Come and try it without worry. Believe me, it’s cool, that’s how the ghetto lives. 

Everyone’s a ghetto star. Come and be one yourself. That’s how we can make this a 

ghetto soul. [My English translation.] 16 

The film features a variety of musical styles, dominated by hip-hop. The most remarkable 

musical achievement of the latest “national” animated feature is that it buries the 

“official,” allegorically inclined tradition of anti-socialist rock music, and legitimizes on 

its grave a global hybrid adapted from “ethnic” world music, represented by Roma 

images and voices. The District’s entire plot capitalizes on the empowerment of Romany 

as “authentic” ghetto entertainers. The film’s rap duels between gadje and Roma teens 

are a testimony to this new, cool “black” power. The lyrics from the song “Watch Out!” 

(“Vigyázz!”) leave no doubt that Richie/LL Junior, is the guy to identify with. 

Tell me what you want from me and I won’t hurt you 

But if you pick on me, you’d better be tough! 

Here is the Gypsy force, the power is mine, 

We’ll find out who will win out. 

In the district I am the coolest kid, watch out! 

[…] 

The Gypsies are the blacks of Europe 

They will rule the district! 

This new voice of celebrating the hybridity of the ethnic underclass expelled from the 

nation into the ghetto is represented as a Roma voice that is no longer disconnected 

278 | Anikó Imre


from Romany identities. While the Roma’s status remains ambiguous, they are not 

dissolved altogether in a monolithic idea of the “we” that only nominally includes 

them. It is a metaphorical construction at least partially on Roma turf, controlled at 

least partially by Roma agencies, which provide apt metaphors for new kinds of hybrid 

communities within the nation precisely because of their own elusive transnational, 

multilingual identities. The District’s musical inserts represent a variety of pop musical 

styles and evoke as many representative geographic regions of pop music, from 

the South Bronx to the Caribbean to China. They also speak to the diversity and 

adaptability of Roma music and identities, reminding one of Stuart Hall’s Caribbean 

identities. 

While The District undoubtedly represents a new voice in the politics of Romany 

representation, in one aspect, such representation remains revealingly conservative. 

Let me turn to Stuart Hall once again for analytical tools: In his description of the 

“new ethnicities” that emerged in Britain in the 1980s, Hall identifies a shift in 

British ethnic politics from the initial Black struggle to come into representation in 

the first place, and to direct attention to relations of representation, towards a more 

complex concern with the politics of representation. The latter entails the recognition 

that the machineries and regimes of representation in a culture give “questions of 

culture and ideology and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics 

– a formative, not merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and 

political life” (“New Ethnicities” 375). While the earlier phase of ethnic identity politics 

is grounded in the binary desire to replace hegemonic, fetishizing, marginalizing 

representations with positive black images, the more recent one offers a more complicated 

mapping of diverse subjective positions, social experiences, and cultural 

identities, acknowledging the constructedness of “Blackness.” This new politics of 

representation no longer conceives of dimensions of gender and sexuality as fixed, 

subordinated to those of race and ethnicity (378). 

This perspective helps crystallize how far The District and, by extension, new popular 

cultural representations of Romany are willing to go in critiquing the state’s violent 

attempts to appropriate ethnic categories. While the film issues a democratic 

address, this address remains steeped in masculine, nationalistic principles. Even if 

one resists reducing representational critique to an “images of” approach, it is hard 

not to notice that when women in the film do not fade into the background or are absent 

altogether, they are arranged into age-old and rather crudely reproduced stereotypes, 

which are offered without any hint of the self-conscious mockery that accompanies 

ethnic stereotypes of men. The theme song, “Forog a pénz” (“The Money Rolls”) 

establishes the district’s trademark prostitutes as practically part of the neighborhood’s 

architecture, willingly and naturally ensuring the inhabitants’ proper masculine 

psychosomatic health. The cynical mantra of the film comes from Richie’s uncle 

Guszti, who advises his love-struck nephew, Richie, to make lots of money to get 


girls, or, as he puts it “pussy.” “Pénz és pina” or “money and pussy” is what everyone 

– and there is no doubt about the film’s selective gendered address in this choice, 

also posed to the viewers as a poll on the film’s website – ultimately needs in order 

to be happy. Love will follow once you have the other two, according to Uncle Guszti. 

While prostitutes are at least believable in a story about the eighth district, the 

total absence of mothers is less easily explained. Single fathers are not a common 

feature of Hungarian society in general, and particularly not of lower-class and immigrant 

families. The filmmakers do not appear to consider it necessary to explain 

where the mothers are. One suspects that mother characters would be an unnecessary 

baggage in a social satire focused on ethnic strife and politics – a playing field 

reserved for brothers and fathers. 

From a gendered perspective, the film’s musical register is equally ambivalent. 

While The District’s valorization of Roma rap undermines the nation-state’s ethnic hierarchy, 

it fails to criticize the gendered hierarchy of state-sanctioned anti-communist 

rock. In itself, this is not surprising, as it is characteristic of the very global trend on 

which Roma rap draws. In this view, The District in particular and other popular forms 

of Roma music in general never depart from “cock rock” of anti-communist rock movements. 

The only female performers who contribute their musical talents to the film are 

the sister rap-duo Ludditák (Luddites), two college students who carved out a loyal 

underground following who appreciate their untranslatable, sarcastic language games, 

often employed in the service of gendered, if not feminist, social critique. Their lyrics 

offer a humorous and sophisticated critical mirror of transitional Hungary, with a sensitive 

eye to the differences between urban and provincial transformations, reflecting 

on their own transition from a small village to the capital. They are especially keen on 

mocking pretentious masculine or macho attitudes, and rejecting the media-fabricated, 

seductive body image doubly imposed on young women by an advertising-driven image 

culture and local patriarchal tradition. For instance, their song “I’m so Pretty” announces 

(in my own literal translation), 

280 | Anikó Imre 

You’re killing me by saying 

I’m not pretty like Britney Spears 

But your ideal won’t do it for me 

I’m an MC girl, an MC girl. 

You want a tip-top girl, 

I want the hip-hop noise. 

Your figure is like King Kong’s, man, 

Your brain is like a ping-pong ball 

Screw it, I won’t be ascetic because of you. 

You dumped me like a rocket

But who cares, when your idol, 

Your ideal is too poor for me…17 Thamyris/Intersecting No. 18 (2007) 265–286 

Hungarian pop music criticism, a male-dominated territory that selectively welcomes 

male Roma rappers, is either openly hostile or sarcastic towards the Luddites, at best 

condescendingly allowing the “girls” into an underground sub-pocket of the national 

music scene. “A girl should not rap,” as one interview sums up what there is to know 

about them (“Sokan azt mondják”). As if internalizing the widely held opinion that they 

are impostors, the Luddites often talk about their own music in self-deprecating terms. 

At the same time, they also try to complicate this view by referring to ideas of gender 

without identifying them as such, however tentatively, as in this conversation: 

We’ve just completed a rap number, together with four other girls. Our contribution 

addresses the opinion that girls should not rap but stick to singing instead. This is a typical 

stereotype, that a woman should be beautiful, kind, smiling, and if she’s even a little 

different, we’ll deny her femininity. But I don’t understand why you couldn’t talk in 

masculine style just because you’re a girl. Feminine and masculine styles are not 

bound to whether one is a boy or a girl. You have your style and your biological sex, and 

there isn’t a necessary correlation between the two. (“Sokan”) 

The argument against nationalized authenticity grounded in the male body could not 

be made more clearly here. The Luddites’ own tough and combative lyrics announce 

the legitimacy of a new, less male-defined body image and persona, and may even 

empower a lesbian aesthetics, much more in line with gendered punk music than 

with “cock rock.” It is shocking then that after the producer of The District, Erik Novák, 

proudly takes credit on the online discussion forum for recruiting the Luddites for the 

project, in the first images of the film we recognize the girls’ faces on top of hooker 

characters’ bodies. The prostitutes’ bodies combine Barbie with pornographically 

large-breasted computer-game characters. The Luddites’ musical and linguistic talents 

are only put to use in a single short rap number, in which they exhaustedly 

bemoan the hardships of a prostitute’s work, striking various seductive poses. 

It appears that while the film has successfully complicated the relations of media 

representation through which Romany identities are inevitable filtered, the new space 

it opens up for ethnic negotiations not only remains a masculine space but might actually 

be conditioned on shutting out women. The players who animate the new national 

allegory are multicultured, multicolored, and transnational, engaging in new, perhaps 

even more democratic relationships made possible by the interaction between state 

politics and the consumer culture of global capitalism. However, gender and sexuality 

remain very much fixed in the essentialist categories promoted by the nation-state. On 

the one hand, the filmmakers criticize the state for its ethnic divide and conquer; on 

the other, they adopt the same divisive nationalistic strategies when it comes to the 

gender and sexuality. This amounts to a strategic separation of state from nation, 


assuming that the former is rotten but the latter still refers to a collective affiliation in 

which ethnic difference matters a whole lot more than gender difference. Whereas The 

District uproots and throws into play ideas of Romany authenticity and national primordialism, 

in the very same gesture, it imprisons women in discursive, representational 

ghettos. 18 

Hip-hop’s global migration opens up and renders problematic its twin claims of 

authenticity and political resistance. When hip-hop becomes a global open resource, 

unmoored from its Afro-American home, its effort to “keep it real” is thrown into relief 

as a specifically American construction. In order to reconstruct hip-hop’s authenticity, 

rappers need to reinvent and insist on the naturalness of the exotic, racialized male 

body borrowed from African-American performances, which are themselves enhanced 

and manipulated by the record industry for mainstream consumption. This act of reinvention 

rests on problematic imperialistic assumptions and is easily exploited by or 

willingly collaborates with the nation-state’s desire to pose as natural. The examples 

of rappers from Zakhut and Shimoni through Ali B, and Roma rappers Gipsy, LL Junior, 

Caramel and, most corrupted and least seductive of all, Gyözike, show rather ambivalent 

efforts at minority empowerment in relation to the nation-state and consumer 

culture. To account for this ambivalence, it is clearly not sufficient either to fall back 

on celebration or to cynically dismiss all of global hip-hop as always already co-opted. 

To analyze the enduring patriarchal strategies of nationalism and the nation-state, 

one needs to engage postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches. Such an 

examination should also ask whether African-American hip-hop’s “authenticity” itself 

is conditioned on the unspoken, taken-for-granted national privilege of Americanness 

and thus on an oppositional binary relationship with American nationalism. 

282 | Anikó Imre

Notes 

1. Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, 6–9 

April Olympia/Wa, USA. 

2. See Susanne Stemmler’s “ ‘Sonido 

ciudadísmo’: Black Noise Andalusian Style in 

Contemporary Spain” in this volume. 

3. See also Susanne Stemmler’s article in this 

volume. 

4. I am grateful to Christine Taylor, whose 

unpublished paper on Dutch multiculturalism 

and Ali B has provided the core of the 

information presented here. 

5. From Ali B’s official website: 

�http://www.alib.nl�. 

6. Commenting on the emigration of an entire 

Romany community who sought refugee status 

in Strasbourg in a highly publicized affair in 

2000, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor 

Orbán defended one of his openly racist, raging 

ministers who, in a twisted logic that is 

characteristic of anti-Roma racism, called the 

Roma traitors and liars, and declared that “our 

Roma compatriots” would not be discriminated 

against if they stopped being lazy and got down 

to work (“Hungarian Prime Minister”). 

7. This culminated in such absurd events as 

the televised mega-concert, complete with 

celebrities, staged to celebrate the marriage of 

“Ceca,” the star of Turbo Rock, to “Arkan,” the 

commander of the Serbian military (Barber- 

Kersovan, 77–78). 

8. German, Belgian, and Italian managers in 

the industry, in particular, take advantage of the 

new communication opportunities provided by 

the internet or satellite TV as much as star 

candidates from Eastern Europe. This is the 

way the Russian Tatu duo or the Romanian 

Cheeky Girls have made it in Europe – the latter 

ironically resurrecting the Dracula myth and 

emphasizing the lesbian connotations of the 

vampire image, offering all this in a 

combination of Hungarian folk melodies, rap, 

rock, and Gypsy techno. “Cigánytechno, 


balkánrock.” Népszabadság, 3 July 2003. 

�http://www.romapage.hu/ 

kulthirnews2.php?id�223�. 

9. Szalai, Anett. “Roma csillagok.” A review of 

an international musical festival, held in 

Budapest in August 2000, notes that most of 

the Hungarian participants were Roma. It also 

predicts that, similar to many of their 

predecessors, some of these Romani 

musicians will end up with contracts with wellknown 

Western bands. Klezmatics. 

“Filmszakadásig.” Magyar Narancs 12.30, 

2000: 27. �http://www.romapage.hu/rovatok/ 

kultura/hir/hirek.php?id�3097�. 

10. See �http://www.gipsy.cz�. 

11. Schubert, Gusztáv. “Fekete lyuk.” Filmvilág 

42.1 (1999): 16–18. “Roma rap: avagy 

beindult a Fekete Vonat.” Amarodrom. 

�http://www.amarodrom.hu/archivum/98/ 

vonat.html.� Fáy, Miklós. “Mit ér a vér, miszter 

fehér?” Filmvilág 42.1 (1999): 24.¨ 

12. �http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ 

balkanhr/message/2029�. 

13. Anikó Imre. “Play in the Ghetto: Global 

Entertainment and the European ‘Roma 

Problem’.” Third Text, 20.6 (2006): 659–70. 

14. Noémi Sümegi. “Romakép-zavar.” (“Troubled 

Roma Images”). Heti Válasz, 23 June, 2005, 

�http://www.romapage.hu/hirek/hircentrumforummal/article/75165/165�. 

15. Sümegi, op cit. 

16. Figyelj rám – ha nem tudnád-, ez itt a 

nyócker, a gettó és ha neked ez nem jó, akkor ne 

mondd, hogy frankó! Te csak a hírekból ismered, 

mi az a vadság, de nekünk ez az élet itt, az igazi 

magyar valóság.… Ez itt haver nem a budai elit, 

.. helyette itt a csóróság beterít! Virágzik a 

korrupció és a törvénytelenség, hatalmas itt a 

rendórségi érdektelenség! Itt is ragyognak 

felfényló csillagok, de ezek gyorsan el is bukó 

angyalok! Itt nincs jótündér és nincs három 


kívánság, mondtam már gyerekek nektek, ez a 

magyar valóság! 

Gyere csak, próbáld ki! (nyócker, nyócker) Nem 

kell beparázni! (ne, ne, ne) Hidd el jó, (nyócker, 

nyócker) így él a gettó! Mindenki gettósztár! 

(nyócker, nyócker) Gyere, válj azzá! Így lesz jó 

(nyócker, nyócker), ez a gettó – soul! 

17. Kinyírsz, mer’ csak szidni bírsz, 

Hogy nem vagyok pretty, mint a Britney Spears, 

de a bálványod nekem túl silány, 

én egy MC-lány vagyok, egy MC lány. 

Neked a tip-top csaj, 

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mint rakétának, az utam kiadtad, 

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az ideálja nekem túl silány… 

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Situating Sound: 

The Space and Time of 

the Dancehall Session 

ABSTRACT 


Julian Henriques 

Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session 

This research situates the multiple body of the Jamaica Dancehall “Crowd” (audience) 

in the intensities of the Sound System Session. This is a heterogeneous “acoustic 

space,” and discontinuous ritual time, in which sexual expression and orientation, 

and racial attitudes, diverge from Jamaican norms. This essay proceeds to account 

for the propagation of this temporality and spatiality in terms of the electromechanical 

processes of the Sound System “Set” (equipment), that is control, power and 

transduction. It looks firstly at the Sound Engineers’ sensorimotor engineering technique 

of compensation for monitoring and manipulating the auditory performance of 

the Set. Secondly it discusses the sociocultural procedures of the cutting and mixing 

of the music the Selector plays in the Session. The essay identifies these practices 

and procedures as the basic elements for many cultural, cybernetic, linguistic, or communication 

systems. In conclusion, it is suggested that for the Engineers’ and Selectors’ 

instrumental techniques to be affective and effective they have to be brought into a 

proportional relationship with the Crowd’s experience. The Crew does this through 

their embodied experience and expert evaluative judgment – which is considered as 

an example of analogical, rather than logical, rationality. 

Introduction 

Every night of the week huge stacks of speakers and massively powerful amplifiers, 

known as the “Set” of the Sound System, are assembled on the streets of inner-city 

Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session | 287

Kingston, Jamaica. These attract a substantial “Crowd,” or “Massive,” as the audience 

is called, who have, over fifty years established the “bashment,” or ‘Dancehall Session,’ 

as a unique, shared, popular, open-air event. 1 In Jamaica the Sound System is an 

emblematic musical instrument, technological medium, and cultural apparatus. For 

many Sound Systems – such as the world famous Stone Love – are a livelihood, for 

many more, a way of life. 2 The current genre Dancehall music is popular achieving 

international recognition, with Sean Paul, for example. Also the culture and technology 

of the Sound System has had a huge impact internationally on Hip Hop, Rap, 

Jungle, Drum & Bass, Garage, and currently in the UK, Grime. Sounds Systems have 

also been a powerful influence on DJ performance techniques, recording studio practices, 

and the pleasures of listening in Raves, Clubs and Carnival. 3 

The auditory sense has particular value and importance across Jamaican society, 

especially in the downtown ghetto areas of Kingston where Dancehall music originates. 

Here, the open windows and corrugated zinc walls make sonic privacy impossible. 

The tropical heat downtown pushes people out onto the streets. This makes for a rich 

cacophony: children playing, car horns, motor bikes, radio, television, church services, 

sound systems, cocks crowing, not to mention the occasional gun shot. This distinctive 

shared open-air sonic “levity” (form of life) also forms part of Jamaica’s rich 

African musical heritage. 4 The fecundity of traditional rhythms, like Kumina for example 

(Ryman), continues as a source for current Dancehall hits. 

The Phenomenon of the Crowd in a Dancehall Session 

The Dancehall Session is situated as a living, embodied place, a habitat, or even a 

habitus, to use Bourdieu’s (1992) term. 5 Within this the Crowd is immersed in an 

intensive auditory field, described as “sonic dominance” (Henriques). This is generated 

by the massively powerful amplifiers in the “bowl” of sound between the stacks 

of speakers (see Figure 1), as described below. Approaching the upper limits of the 

auditory sensory threshold, sonic dominance is experienced as a subjective and 

deeply felt all-embracing sensory environment. The Crowd’s sensorimotor experience 

of the Session in this way draws attention to its bodily, haptic, visceral and material 

experience of the medium of sound. This might be contrasted, for example, with privatized 

or individual listening, at more moderate levels, such as with an MP3 player, 

where the sound is, as it were, placed in the person, rather than the person in the 

sound. In the Session the sound touches the entire sensory surface of each of the 

listening bodies of the Crowd. But rather than accentuate the auditory sense alone, 

sonic dominance tends to merge sensory stimulation in a haptic multi-sensory flux. 

Intense auditory stimulation circulates, resonates and amplifies a sensory “ecology” 

of perception, to use Gibson’s concept (Gibson, Gallagher). 

The multi-sensory character of the Dancehall scene is evidenced by the value it 

places on style, fashion, attitude and dance moves, in addition to the music. All this 

288 | Julian Henriques


Figure 1 Erecting the Merritone Sound System speaker stacks, Skateland, 

Kingston, July 2002. 

is often literally enlarged in the Session, with live video cameras projecting images 

of members of the Crowd onto screens between the speaker stacks. The visual 

sense, the senses of touch, taste and temperature, and the kinetic sense of dance, 

share a combined intensity in the Dancehall Session that escapes ever being fully 

described, recorded, or reproduced. In the Session, the Crowd experiences a unique 

specific “thisness,” 6 that has to be experienced as such – by “being there.” As Merleau- 

Ponty put it: “The body is our medium for having a world.” The Crowd is pleasurably 


Figure 2 Screen, dancers and camera (bottom right) at Chuchu Benz August 

Town Session, June 2004. 

compelled to allow the aural to monopolize their attention. Csordas describes this 

somatic mode of attention as “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with 

one’s own body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” 

(Csordas 244). 

There is also a particular relational or inter-subjective quality to the intensities 

when one is listening in this manner. This has been described by Roland Barthes with 

reference to the interlocutors of patient and analyst. This kind of listening is 

Not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits such listening is supposed 

to develop in an inter-subjective space where “I am listening” also means “listen to me” 

[…] The injunction to listen is the total interpellation of one subject by another: it 

places above everything else the quasi-physical contact of these subjects (by voice and 

ear): it creates transference: “listen to me” means touch me, know that I exist. (Barthes 

245–51) 

In the Session, of course it is the sound itself that is listened to – the “speaker” 

being the Set’s loudspeaker. Such a state of listening can also be compared to what 

the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu describes as the “sonic envelope” experienced by 

the unborn baby in the womb (Anzieu). But for the Crowd this is a shared experience – 

as a multiple whole, assembly, 7 or a collective social body, in which many are one, 

and one is many (Canetti). What the Crowd may share with the fetus is a feeling of 

comforting warmth and security, and perhaps pleasure. The late Louise Fraser Bennett, 



co-founder of the Sound System Association of Jamaica, expressed this idea of the 

Crowd as a multiple whole, most eloquently. She described the Sound System’s crucial 

role as 

bringing together a set of people who shares the same habit and have the same way 

of life, the same movements, the same beliefs, the same heritage from that time to this 

[…] It brings a oneness, it brings together a people in one surrounding […] it generates 

a vibes that brings one generation to the other generation, breaking down social barriers. 

There is nothing in this world that can contest that level of the Sound System that 

brings so much components together. 8 

This intensive multi-sensory, multi-subjective relationship the Crowd has with the 

event of the Session – through sound – helps to generate a particular kind of spatiality, 

which is uneven, heterogeneous and contradictory. It is also full of feelings. 

This is evident, for example, in the confidence that the Dancehall Crowd has to assert 

its own rules and norms, as in a carnival parade, against those prevailing at other 

times and places. Dancehall culture positively asserts its own particular African inspired 

frame of reference to the female body and sexual display, against the specifically 

European conventions of modesty and propriety upheld in Jamaican middle class media, 

for example. This has an intensity that may urge one to apply a Marxist vocabulary, 

to describe the Crowd as being, a Crowd for itself, rather than merely in itself. 

For the Crowd the special kind of place and spatiality of the Session is one in 

which the norms of sexuality and sexual orientation can be inverted, in a manner consistent 

with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. Over recent years Dancehall 

artists such as Beenie Man and Sizzla have met press criticism and protest over their 

anti-gay lyrics, to the extent that their 2004 tour to the U.S. and UK was cancelled. 9 

The fact that this homophobia is part of the conservative and biblical inspired conventions 

of Jamaican society, does not, of course, offer any justification for such 

lyrical content. 10 What is particularly interesting then, is how within the event of 

the Session itself, such homophobic attitudes are in fact suspended. At any other 

place or time such “batty man” behavior would endanger the person’s life. In fact, 

such male sexual display, elsewhere considered “effeminate,” is quite central to the 

event of the Session, and Dancehall style itself. Examples of this include elaborate 

plated hairstyles, large fake diamond ear-studs, and the body-tight fitting trousers 

and T-shirts favored by dancers such as the late Boggle. The dancers I filmed at a 

Firelinks Hot Mondays Session in 2004 repeated a stereotypically camp “limp-wrist” 

gesture. Further at another Session I witnessed such “effeminate” males taking 

part, completely whole-heartedly, in the chanting of the same homophobic lyrics. 11 

The spatiality of the Dancehall Session is also a place where normal Jamaican 

racial attitudes and prejudices can be suspended. These commonly include not only 

chauvinism against islanders from the rest of the Caribbean, but also Afro-centric 

anti-white ideologies and religious beliefs such as Rastafarianism. Yet the Dancehall 


Figure 3 Dancehall Queen Stacey at Chuchu Benz August Town Session, 

June 2004. 

Session often appears, remarkably, to embrace racial diversity. This is indicated, for 

example, by that fact that the 2002 Dancehall Queen was the Japanese Junko 

“Bashment” Kudo, 12 and the winner of the 2005 World Cup Clash was the German 

Sound System Sentinel. 13 Both these highly competitive positions were awarded by 

popular vote from the Dancehall floors, in Montego Bay and Brooklyn, respectively, by 

almost entirely Jamaican Crowds. 

So how can these inversions and reversals of prevailing norms and attitudes be 

understood? The role of music in religious rites, to create trance and ecstatic (ex stasis, 

literally out of standing) states, has been described by ethnomusicologists (Rouget). But 

it is the work of Marshall McLuhan and his collaborators in the 1950s that is perhaps 

more useful for exploring the particular character of the space of sound. They made 

an explicit connection between sound and space, coining the term acoustic space. 

The essential feature of sound […] is not that it be located at a point, but that it be, 

that it fill auditory space […] Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. It is a 

sphere without fixed boundaries with ourselves in the center. (Williams 17) 

This lack of a “favored focus” characteristic of acoustic space – an absence of standardized 

structure, hierarchy or ‘normality’ – resonates with the reversals and inversions 

found on the Dancehall scene. Acoustic spatiality is to be found in the particular, 

irregular and living place, or habitus of the Session. 14 Describing what we would 

now call the pervasive and ubiquitous character of contemporary media, McLuhan 



identifies acoustic space as being “like the ‘mind’s ear’ or acoustic imagination […] It 

is both discontinuous and nonhomogenous. Its resonant and interpenetrating processes 

are simultaneously related with centres everywhere and boundaries nowhere” 

(McLuhan 71). By contrast, the topography of visual space is considered as rational – 

as distinct from embodied. 15 This is linear, generic and organized round the single 

perspective of a point of view – without reversals or inversions: 

Space perceived by the eyes when separated or abstracted from all other senses. 

As a construct of the mind, it is continuous, which is to say that it is infinite, divisible, 

extensible, and featureless. (McLuhan 71) 

And the particularly important qualities of acoustic space that make it useful for 

describing the Dancehall Session, is its tendency to evoke emotions: 

Auditory space has the capacity to elicit the gamut of emotions from us, from the 

marching song to opera. It can be filled with sound that has no ‘object,’ such as the eye 

demands. It need not be representational, but can speak, as it were, directly to emotion. 

(Williams 19) 

The limitations of McLuhan’s approach is, however, his tendency to essentialize and 

romanticize acoustic qualities and pre-literate oral traditions – rendering them strangely 

at odds with his theoretical ideas about historically specific technological mediations. 16 

As well as its particular spatiality, the Crowd’s auditory engagement with the Session 

also generates a particular sense of time. Again, this is an uneven, embodied and 

intense kind of temporality that appears to accommodate reversals and inversions. 

This moment-to-moment duration of the event of the Session necessarily involves 

movement, just as any sound, to be heard at all, requires a vibration of air molecules. 

Sound is always “in time,” requiring continuous propagation – and therefore often 

features rhythm and repetition. Repeating time is cyclical, called kronos by the 

Ancient Greek philosophers, though this does not mean that kronos is monotonously 

the same. 17 Indeed the opposite, as Lefebvre reminds us in his Rhythmanalysis of 

Mediterranean Cities: “Cyclical rhythms, each having a determined frequency or period, 

are also rhythms of new beginnings: of the ‘returned’ who is not opposed to the 

‘become’ […] Dawn is always new” [my emphasis] (Lefebvre and Régulier 231). 

Indeed in Kingston, Sessions are often named by the regular night of the week on 

which they are staged, as with the Firelinks’ Hot Mondays, or Stone Love’s Weddi 

Weddi Wednesday, for example. There is also a particular cycle to the duration of the 

event of the Session, which is mapped, from midnight to dawn the next morning, in 

the various styles, tempos, moods, and period of music tracks played by the Sound 

System’s Selector, as discussed below. 18 

Further to its cyclical time, the Session can be described as generating the metaphysical 

temporality, eternal timelessness, or aion, typical of sacred events (Deleuze, 

1990 162–68, Turetzky, 1998, Bogue). 19 The anthropologist of religion Marcia Eliade 

describes such temporality as the Eternal Return, the Golden Age, “‘in those days’ in 


illo tempore, ab origine” (Eliade 4), 20 or, as Fraser Bennett put it: “the same heritage 

from that time to this.” Eliade describes this as a special ancestral time, in which “all 

sacrifices are performed” as being: 

At the same mythical instant of the beginning [where] through the paradox of rite, 

profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds true for all repetitions, 

i.e., all imitations of archetypes; through such imitation, man is projected into the mythical 

epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed. (Eliade 35) 

This is not to suggest that the Session is a sacred place, though there are many 

connections between Dancehall and Church hall (Beckford). The Session is a moment 

for pleasure, and the hope for the satisfaction of desires. 21 Sound is used to make 

the Session a special liminal event, geared towards becomings, ritual transformations, 

rites of passage, and journeys over thresholds and across boundaries (Turner). 

But further it is equally important that such wishes are only fulfilled temporarily and 

in the particular place of the Dancehall Session. This allows the Crowd to go about 

their “normal” lives at dawn, and motivates them to return to the Session on another 

night, for another journey. The Session allows the Crowd, already a multiple whole 

in the moment-to-moment duration of the event, to become situated as a spatial 

multiple – different places at the same time, and situated as a temporal multiple – 

different times at the same place. 22 

So, rather than having to explain such reversals and inversions of such heterogeneities, 

the question becomes: what stops these multiples from simply flying 

apart? Both kronos and aion, as senses of time, are synchronized with the more 

familiar linear, accumulative or progressive sense of time. For Sound System this is 

a relevant consideration, for example, in respect to the technological equipment of 

the Set being “up to date,” or the Selector having “the latest” tunes to play. But in 

addition the auditory sense is critically important – particularly rhythm. Rhythm 

abounds in the Session: in the massively amplified stomach-churning bass-line, the 

syncopated beat of the music, the unique role of “riddim” tracks on the Dancehall 

scene (Marshall and Manuel), the particular tracks played, and the procession of the 

night through the different tracks the Selector plays. 23 And rhythm also holds 

together auditory and non-auditory material, as Turetzky reminds us: 

Rhythms group heterogeneous material elements together. In music such elements 

include pitch, volume, timbre, and other aspects of sound, but rhythms may take up a great 

variety of other material […] rhythms deploy parts of human bodies, their various motions. 

However rhythms, themselves, are always temporal intervals (that) become grouped 

together by distributing accented and unaccented moments. (Turetzky, Rhythm 124–25) 

In this way rhythm can be said to situate temporal and spatial material together. This 

is another of the points Lefebvre makes when he says: 

Concrete times have rhythms, or rather, are rhythms – and every rhythm implies a 

relation of a time with a space, a localised time, or if one wishes, a temporalised place. 



Figure 4 Bashment poster naming MC, Artist, Sound System and Videoman. 

Rhythm is always linked to such and such a place, to its place, whether it be the heart, 

the fluttering of the eyelids, the movement of a street, or the tempo of a waltz. (Lefebvre 

230, my emphasis) 

These rhythms generate the heterogeneous and uneven spatiality and temporality of 

the Dancehall Session in which the “object” of the event and the Crowd are situated, 

and indeed from which they are constituted (Fraser). 24 Space and time do not exist 

as pre-given abstract dimensions. As Fraser, Kember and Lury put it: 

The co-ordinates of space and time are not understood to be external to (relations 

between) entities. Change, that is, does not occur in time and space. Instead, time and 

space change according to the specificity of an event. The event makes the difference: 

not space and time. Importantly, motion and change are attributable to difference 

within the event. (Fraser et al. 3–4) 


The present investigation is concerned with the changing flux of relationships, 

processes, differences and becomings, rather than the fixed objects, structures, 

equivalences and being. So we now need to examine exactly how these rhythms are 

propagated in the performances, practices and procedures of the Crew and the 

Crowd, starting with the processes of the Set. 

Electromechanical Processes: Power and Control 

The Sound System Set is a multiple body, like the Crowd, but of technological 

component parts. As a phonographic apparatus the Set assembles amplifiers, 

pre-amps, FX boxes, equalizers, crossovers, mixers, mikes, cables, driver units, 

speaker bins, record and CD decks, mixing consoles and numerous other gadgets 

and devices. In contrast to the sensorimotor experience of the Session on the part 

of the Crowd, these operate in the electromagnetic and electromechanical milieux 

within its circuitry. To generate the rhythms and intensities required for sonic dominance, 

most Sound Systems today are capable of about 15,000 watts of music 

amplification. 

The operation of these Sets can be understood in terms of a pair of processes: 

those for control and information on the one hand; and those for power and 

energy, on the other. 25 This distinction between control and power processes is critical. 

The cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, gives the example 

of the energy of the pressure of water in the pipe and the control mechanism of 

the tap to turn the flow partially on, fully on, or off. And even more important is the 

relationship between these processes: “the combining of the two systems (the 

machinery of decision and the source of energy).” As Bateson tells us with another 

example, this 

[m]akes the total relationship into one of partial mobility on each side. You can take 

a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. The drinking is his business. But 

even if your horse is thirsty, he cannot drink unless you take him. The taking is your 

business. (Bateson 102) 26 

And there is a further process entirely critical for the operation of the Set – if the Crowd 

is to hear anything. This is the relationship between amplified electromagnetic signals 

within the Set, and the auditory sound waves in the Session itself. This requires a 

process of transduction, which takes place in the transductive devices of the loud 

speakers, built up as columns of boxes round the dance area (see Figure 1). 27 The 

MC’s microphone reverses this transduction process, converting of audible sound 

waves into electromagnetic signals for the Set to amplify. The cartridge is another 

transducer, converting the stylus’ vibrations from the mechanical indentations in the 

groove of the record, into an electronic signal. It is these power processes, and these 

of transduction, that the Engineers have to control – with their monitoring and manipulating 

practices, to which we now turn. 



Sensorimotor Practices: Monitoring and Manipulating 

The Sound Engineers who design, build and maintain the Sets have a particularly 

important part to play, given the crucial generative role for the spatiality and temporality 

of the Session attributed to auditory stimulation. The Engineers are responsible 

for the parameters, characteristics and qualities of the auditory output of the Set, 

as distinct from musical rhythms that it might be used to play. 28 For this they use a 

technique of compensation to fine-tune the output of the Set. “What’s the most 

important thing you learnt from [your teacher] John Jones?” I asked Denton Henry, 

Chief Repair Engineer for the Stone Love Sound System. 29 He replied with one word: 

compensation, and went on to explain why: 

He [John Jones] always tells me to compensate for this and compensate for that. 

If it don’t sound right use the condenser and the resistor to compensate to get the sound 

that you [spoken loudly] want to hear […] (You) either cut the bass, or to lift off the high 

frequency, cut the treble. With this now can juggle juggle. Compensation is a filter circuit 

[loudly]. You set it up for any frequency you want to hear. 30 

This technique requires both acts of monitoring, sensing, and listening for it to 

“sound right,” as well as manipulating, that is adjusting to “cut the bass, or to lift off 

the high frequency […] juggle juggle.” Describing compensation in this way identifies 

it as a sensorimotor technique – a practice that is both haptic, concerning sensory 

impressions and feelings, and kinetic, concerning bodily expressions and movement. 

All techniques require appropriate instruments or devices. With compensating these 

are the “gates,” crossovers or filters to restrict electromagnetic frequencies that may be 

manipulated by means of variable controls knobs or faders. “Back in the day,” Denton 

Henry told me, tuning the Set required digital dexterity – de-soldering one component, 

and re-soldering another in its place, 31 as each frequency had its own compensation 

circuit: “At that time when you tune it was fixed [loudly]. You couldn’t go out there and 

use the equalizer and vary it. No knob, couldn’t adjust it. Afterward now I put on rotary 

switch.” 32 Every component of the Set can be subject to compensation, from the needle 

on the record, to the positioning of the speaker stacks on the Dancehall floor. The 

Engineer listens, and then adjusts, monitors and then manipulates the value of one 

of the components. He monitors, he compensates, he listens again, and makes another 

adjustment, and so on. With the auditory feed-back of what he hears, as part of goalorientated 

cybernetic system as it were, gradually the Engineer closes the gap between 

what he is hearing and that for which he is listening. 33 Then the tuning is complete. 

So what is the sonic goal the Engineers are trying to reach? “Clarity,” “bounce,” 

and “sweetness” are some of the key terms I heard used to describe the sonic qualities 

for which the Engineer aimed their fine-tuning. But most import of all was “balance.” 

Denton Henry told me “I put balance between the bass, the mid and the top.” 

Further, Horace McNeal explained how: “I listen for everything I know in the tune supposed 

to come out of my box. If I don’t hear what I know in it I not stop tuning, 


Figure 5 Stone Love Set under repair, Skateland, Kingston, July 2002. 

turning, push down this, carry up this, until I hear what I want.” 34 Thus the Engineers 

fine-tune their Sets to produce the very best sound they are capable of producing, 

just as a musician tunes their instrument. 35 

But how does the Engineer know when the tuning is complete? How does he know 

the desired sound is “supposed” to be? Compensating clearly requires qualitative 

evaluations and personal subjective judgments. This means that the technique 



cannot be considered as a sensorimotor practice alone, but also has to be included 

in the sociocultural milieu. Sound Engineers have to professionalize their listening, 

develop specialist skills and expertise (Levin), to become connoisseurs of sound, so 

to speak. They have to listen with understanding, sensitivity, knowledge, sympathy, 

appreciation and discrimination to the fine grain details and nuances of sound. Such 

listening, it was found, has been developed through an apprenticeship system 

between the generations of Jamaican Sound System Engineers. 36 This achieves the 

aural sophistication critical for the way they engineer, which is almost entirely “by 

ear,” rather than with reference to technical manuals, I was told by Horace McNeal. 

And as his teacher Denton Henry told me, it was his own teacher, John Jones, who 

“shape[d] my whole listening.” 37 These listening skills are evidently passed from generation 

to generation of Engineer. 

This makes the critical distinction between hearing and listening in terms of evaluation. 

As Jonathan Sterne emphasizes in The Audible Past: “Listening is a directed, 

learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not 

simply reducible to hearing” (Sterne 19, my emphasis). Barthes put this important 

point as follows: 

Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act. It is possible 

to describe the physical conditions of hearing (its mechanisms) by recourse to the 

physiology of the ear; but listening cannot be defined only by its object or, one might 

say its goal. (Barthes 245) 

Further than the object of hearing, it is of course the listening subject that is required 

to define the practice of listening. This inter-subjective character of the Engineers’ 

listening, like that of the Crowd, does not make it any the less a personal, subjective 

and embodied issue. This point was by DJ Squeeze, who told me, while tuning up his 

Set, what he was listening for was “my harmony with the sound.” 38 

Sociocultural Procedures: Cutting and Mixing 

From the Crowd’s point of listening in the Session, it is the Selector’s music, rather 

than the Engineer or the Set itself that absorbs their attention. The Selector is so-named 

as the Crew Member whose job consists of choosing the vinyl records from the record 

box, and placing them on the turntable, while the MC (Master of Ceremonies) “chats” 

on the microphone. 39 In the sociocultural milieu of the Dancehall Session, the procedure 

brought into play here is cutting between different pieces of music. Mixing is the 

other procedure by which the Selector accomplishes a smooth transition from one record 

to the next, through the entire musical flow of the night. 40 This is achieved by means 

of the device of the faders on the mixing desk. This pair of procedures resonates 

both with the processes of the Set, and those of sonic engineering. Furthermore, the 

music producer in the studio is also entirely familiar with the cutting procedure, as he 

or she selects one particular music multi-track to adjust in his or her mixing. 


One important feature of the relationship between the cutting and mixing pair is they 

are practiced together in the same spatial and temporal event: as selecting and mixing, 

cutting and pasting, sampling and splicing, for instance. The second feature of cutting 

and mixing is that they are always situated at the same event in time. There is only ever 

a re-mix, never a pristine un-re-mixed mix, as it were, for the Engineer, Selector or 

Record Producer to listen to (it may be the Crowd’s wish to deny the material fact of 

this re-mixing that is their own fleshly corporeality that motivates their journey for the 

ab origine, the perfect time before time). Though inseparable in practice, cutting and 

mixing can be analytically isolated. As an abstract process, cutting involves separating, 

dividing things up, sorting, fragmenting, dis-aggregating, parting, tearing, splitting 

the whole, differentiating, creating boundaries, making a choice and analyzing. Mixing 

by contrast is a process of combining, amalgamating, aggregating, bringing things 

together and synthesizing. It tends to be much easier to do than undo, like mixing 

sugar in a coffee for example, or recording two instruments onto a single audio track. 

Mixing, as a power process, generates intensities, feelings and energies. 

Two features of cutting and mixing are remarkable. One is their ubiquity. The cut 

and mix, for Hebdige, means identifying the present era of popular music: “Cut ‘n’ 

mix is the music and the style of the 1980’s just as rock‘n’roll and rhythm‘n’blues 

formed the bedrock for the musics and styles that have made such an impact on our 

culture since the 1950’s” (Hebdige, Cut ‘n’ Mix 10). Cox and Warner, discussing DJ 

culture of the 1990s, identify these same two processes: 

DJ Culture has worked with two essential concepts: the cut and the mix. To record 

is to cut, to separate the sonic signifier (the “sample”) from the original context or 

meaning that it might be free to function otherwise. To mix is to reinscribe, to place the 

floating sample into a new chain of signification. (Cox and Warner 330) 

The second remarkable characteristic of cutting and mixing is how they play a part in 

all manner of different communication systems. The cutting and mixing pair can be 

described as elemental linguistic procedures, as they are by Roman Jakobson, in Two 

Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances. He states “speech 

implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic 

units” (Jakobson 58, my emphasis). Cutting takes place in the paradigmatic or 

metaphoric relationship between units of language system (see also Gates). Mixing 

is the syntagmatic or metonymic combination between linguistic units. As with every 

particular tuning of a Set, every particular linguistic utterance is made from a mixing 

or combination of both paradigmatic selection and syntagmatic combination. In 

System and Structure Anthony Wilden makes this point as follows: 

Metaphor and metonymy are not linguistic processes: they are communicational 

processes. Selection from the code and combination in the message must and do 

occur in any communications system whatsoever, whether in the genetic code of the 

DNA molecule, or in the organism, or in the life processes of bacteria, or in a social 



system […] All communication in systems of communication – ecosystems – involves 

an axis of selection and an axis of combination. (Wilden 351–52, my emphasis) 

Identifying cutting and mixing as elemental procedures – in both sound engineering 

and language use – suggests that both non-representational communication systems, 

like the Sound System, and representational ones, such as a language system, 41 can 

be understood as operating in a similar manner. 42 

Situating sound: ratio and kairos 

But the operating characteristics of communication systems, whether linguistic or 

electromechanical, are not sufficient to account for how they are used, or what for. 

While compositional rules may prescribe what counts as correct selection and combination 

for linguistic – and indeed musical – performance, it is the Engineers’ and 

Selectors’ embodied personal judgment that has to be at the heart of any understanding 

their performance in the Dancehall Session. In each case, it is suggested 

here, qualitative judgments are being made on the basis of the proportional relationship 

between subjectivities of experience on the one hand, and the objectivities of 

the situation on the other. This is a relationship of the continuous analogue variation 

of sensation, rather than the distinct diacritical differences of a communication system. 

It concerns the material as distinct from the ethereal aspect of sound (Henriques). 

Auditory propagation needs to be an energetic power process before it can be controlled 

for the purposes of communication. The linguistic equivalent of such material 

processes is the prosody of vocal production of an utterance – the aspect of language 

that formalist approaches find easiest to overlook. This is what gives every utterance 

and every speaker, and every instrumentalist, their unique individual tone. Indeed the 

Engineers, and some of the Crowd, consider a Sound System Set, with its particular 

components and power and control settings, as having its own character, or distinctive 

voice. Such particular qualities of sound cannot be reduced to the technologies 

their production requires, any more than the elements of a language system are sufficient 

to account for what it is used to say, or the mechanisms of hearing could gave 

an adequate account of listening. 

The Engineers’ recognition of the correct sonic quality of “balance,” for example, 

can be identified as an example of a proportional relationship, or ratio (Critchlow). 

Other examples of such spatial relationships include the golden section in architecture, 

or the musical octave in sound, that is an intuitive recognition of balance or harmony 

(Bass). 43 Bateson’s cybernetics also provides a grounding for this emphasis on 

the importance of relationships, both from its origins in the study of biological organisms, 

that is fleshly bodies, and from his definition of information as “news of difference” 

(Bateson, Mind and Nature 69) and “differences that make a difference” 

(Bateson, Mind and Nature 99). 44 Information is thus not an object, or a statistical 

probability, isolated in the material physical world of quantities, but a human evaluative 


elationship. As Bateson explains: “difference, being of the nature of relationship, is 

not located in time or space” (Bateson, Mind and Nature 98, my emphasis). 

Nevertheless, such relationships have to be tangible by means of the medium 

through which they are expressed – sound in the case of the Sound System. 

The Selector’s skilled judgment as to exactly which tune to play when, provides 

another example of his or her embodied, intuitive and subjective evaluation of the 

proportional relationship between the subjective feelings of the Crowd and the objective 

fact, so to speak, of what they have in their record box. This is a temporal proportional 

relationship that will always escape rules. The key quality to any such live 

performance is the performer’s sense of timing, being “in time,” on the beat, or “ridding 

the rhythm” as would be said. This is timeliness or the opportune moment, or kairos 

(χαιρóς) at the heart of every particular improvised performance, or interpretation 

(Onians 343–51, White). The term kairos describes the entirety of the Session, as 

rhetorical scene, in the moment-to-moment proportional relationship between aion, 

or timelessness, and kronos, or cyclical time. Such embodied evaluations make the 

literally vital link between the subjectivies and objectivities of the Session. It is the 

Crew and Crowd’s embodied know-how that forges a chiasm, to use Merleau-Ponty’s 

term, holding the elements of different practices together. This is a proportional relationship 

between electromechanical, sensorimotor and sociocultural milieux: for the 

Crew between ear and hand, monitoring and manipulating, cutting and mixing. For the 

Crowd this is between body and mind, haptics and kinetics, music and dance as their 

experience of the rhythms and intensities of sonic dominance, resonating with their 

multiple bodies. 

The spatiality and temporality of such proportional relationships – as ratio or 

kairos – can be identified as an example of analogical rationality (Critchlow). Analogy 

and metaphorical thinking (Lakoff and Johnson, Johnson) requires such relational 

qualities, as is recognized to some extent in the selecting or metaphorical axis of 

302 | Julian Henriques 

Communication Axis 

System METAPHOR METONYM 

SET control power 

electromechanical transducer amplifier 

ENGINEER monitoring manipulating 

Sensorimotor ear hand 

SESSION cutting mixing 

Sociocultural intensities “groove” 

Language paradigmatic syntagmatic 

Figure 6 Axes of communication for Engineer, Set and Session.


communication. This may be distinguished from what is more familiar in theory that 

is the logical rationality of representation, quantities, discrete differences and calculation. 

This research has concerned itself with situating sound in practice: the 

Crowd’s embodiment in the heterogeneous time and space of the Session, the 

Crew’s procedures along the axes of communication – as well as their proportional 

evaluations. One of its aims has been to investigate how both analogia and logic are 

equally important aspects of rationality, or logos. 


Notes 

1. This paper is part of a larger research 

project on the music, culture and technology of 

the Reggae Sound System in downtown 

Kingston, Jamaica. The research material on 

which it is based comes from my observation of 

Sessions and in depth interviews with Owners, 

Engineers, Selectors, MCs and Crowd (audience) 

and Followers (dedicated fans) mainly of the 

Stone Love Sound System, as well as 

observation and filming the Dancehall scene up 

to 2004. 

2. Stone Love is the particular Sound System 

that I have researched most closely. See 

�http://www.imexpages.com/stonelove/compa 

ny_profile.htm�. 5 July 2005. See also Cooper 

(1993, 2004) Katz (2000), Chude-Sokei (1997), 

Bradley (2000), Stolzoff (2002), Salewicz and 

Boot (2001) Bakare-Yusuf (2001), Stanley-Niaah 

(2004) and Hope (2006). For the British Sound 

System culture see the somewhat less recent 

chapter five of Gilroy (1987) and Hebdige (1979, 

1987). 

3. Those friends and colleagues I would 

particularly like to thank for their helpful 

comments, encouragement and inspiration 

include Couze Venn, Steve Goodman, Jeremy 

Weate, Bibi, Bakare-Yusuf and David Morley. Also 

I would like to thank my interviewees for sharing 

their knowledge and insight, particularly the late 

Ms Louise Fraser Bennett, Winston “Weepow” 

Powell, Horace McNeal, DJ Squeeze, Denton 

Henry and Hedley Jones. 

4. As researched by Cheryl Ryman (1984), Olive 

Lewin (2000) Garth White (1984) and Fernando 

Henriques (1953). 

5. The aspect of situating resonates with Guy 

Dubord’s and others inspiration for the 1960s 

French “Situationists” political movement, and 

with the latter “happenings,” as unique live, oneoff 

events (Knabb). 

6. The idea of “thisness” is attributed to the 

medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus who 

contrasted the haecceity of a particular quality of 

an object with their quidtitity, or “whatness.” 


7. The term assembly resonates with the 

character of the Dancehall Crowd, as Mazzio 

notes in the entirely different context, of the 

Renaissance experience of theatre. “A word used 

as often as ‘spectator’ and ‘audience’ to 

describe playgoers in the Renaissance was the 

‘assembly.’ A word worth reintegrating in the 

sensory dimensions of theatrical experience, 

because it implied not only a coming together of 

persons, but a physical touching of bodies in 

space” (Mazzio 87). 

8. Bennett, Louise Fraser (Press Secretary for 

the Sound System Association of Jamaica). 

Personal interview. 26 July 2002. 

9. See BBC reports and others at Freemuse 

website. Freemuse Website 12 January 2006. 

�http://www.freemuse.org/sw7765.asp.� 

10. Gary Younge. “Troubled Island.” The 

Guardian. 27 April 2006, 14 June 2006 

�http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/ 

Column/0,1762156,00.html.� 

11. This was at one of the longest established 

and most mixed, in terms of age, Sessions 

“kept” at Rae Town in downtown Kingston on 

Sunday nights. 

12. Bashment Vibes Website. 25 February 

2006. �http://www.bashmentvibes. com/ 

pro_junko.htm.� 

13. For a report of the event see Glaat.com 

Website 12 February 2006. �http://www.claat. 

com/article/articleview/1032/1/25/.� 

14. Romanyshyn (1989) distinguishes 

between the medieval city as an example of 

higgledy-piggledy auditory spatial layout, as 

distinct from the wide open perspectives of 

Parisian boulevards as an example of visual 

space. 

15. This idea of the rationalisation of vision was 

first explored by Ivins (1938) and more recently 

Latour (1986).

16. For a useful critique of McLuhan in this 

respect see Classen. Further Sterne (15–19) 

provides a pointed analysis of the shortcomings 

of what he terms the “audio-visual litany” which, 

although targeting McLuhan’s contemporary 

Walter Ong, is equally applicable to McLuhan’s 

position. 

17. For a seminal discussion of Hegel and the 

Western philosophical tradition’s abhorrence of 

the idea of repetition see Snead. 

18. The Sound System Crew has highly 

specialized, principally Selector, who selects the 

records, DJ or MC who talks on the mike, and the 

FX responsible for sound effects (Campbell). 

19. This suggestion clearly requires much more 

detailed and substantial investigation than the 

space here allows, and indeed is part of my 

ongoing research. 

20. Deleuze (1997 159, note 12) refers to 

Eliade in his discussion of his concept of 

Repetition in Itself. 

21. Ernst Bloch would describe this as a utopia 

(Zabel) and Michel Foucault (1986) a 

heterotopia. 

22. In a structuralist theoretical framework this 

would be considered as “diasporic” and 

“syncretic” respectively. 

23. Rhythm as both as a patterning of flows, 

and a particular feature of Dancehall music, is 

central to my research concerns. 

24. This could be theorized in terms of 

metastabilities, that is the persistence of nonequilibrium 

over time (for Simondon’s use of this 

see Hansen), or with the concept of the climax of 

an ecologically stable and mature communities, 

such as desserts or Tropical rain forests 

(Clements, Roughgarden). 

25. This distinction also parallels mine between 

ethereal and material aspects of sound 

(Henriques). 

26. It should be noted also that Bateson’s 

discussion of this point is in the context of a 


discussion of how even control processes 

require what he terms “collateral” energy. 

27. The process of transduction as a 

relationship between different milieux has been 

important for Simondon, see Simondon (1992) 

and MacKenzie. 

28. Women play a crucial role on the Dancehall 

scene in numerous important respects, but 

none, as far as I have found, have become 

Sound System Engineers. I therefore refer to 

Engineers with the male pronoun. 

29. During this research I tended to make the 

assumption that there was a homology between 

the Sound Engineers’ understanding or know-how 

of their own practices and my own theoretically 

informed conception know-what about their 

practice (for a discussion of this distinction see 

Varela, 1999). Of course this need not be the 

case, but it is important that the status or 

veracity of what they say is questioned. The 

Sound Engineers might have all kinds of motives 

for thinking or talking about what they do the way 

they do. 

30. Henry, Denton. Personal interview. 24 June 

2004. 

31. Currently the graphic equalizers and variable 

crossovers with their own visual displays offer 

the Engineer an even finer degree of control. 

Also, as DJ Squeeze with his Skyy [sic] Sound 

System showed me on his mobile Sound System 

truck, Thunder, different mixes can be digitally 

stored ready for use at different venues. 

32. Henry, Denton. Personal interview. 24 June 

2004. 

33. A cybernetic system may be homeostatic, 

maintaining a system’s stability across varying 

conditions, as with the thermostat maintaining a 

consistent room temperature, or a steam engine 

governor maintaining a constant speed across 

variations of load (Bateson, Mind and Nature 

103–09). This discipline was defined by Norbert 

Wiener as “the science of control and 

communication, in the animal and the machine” 

(Ashby: 1, Wiener, Heylighen 1993) and 

developed with respect to social theory by 

Gregory Bateson. 


34. DJ Squeeze (a.k.a. Mr Glenworth Samuels). 

Personal interview. 22 June 2004. Unlike of the 

other interviewees, DJ Squeeze is has no official 

connection with Stone Love. Since the mid 

1990s he has owned and operated his mobile 

sound truck Skyy [sic] Sound System and since 

2002 owner and CEO of Magajamz Radio 

Station. 

35. This suggests that the mediating processes 

of fine-tuning, are as important for phonographic 

re-production (Weheliye), as they are for 

“original” sonic production. See also Eshun 

(188–89) for a critique of Benjamin’s famous 

concept of the “aura.” 

36. As is detailed in my ongoing PhD research. 

37. Henry, Denton. Personal interviews. 24 June 

2004. 

38. DJ Squeeze (a.k.a. Mr Glenworth Samuels). 

Personal interview. 22 June 2004. 

39. In other popular music genres, besides 

Reggae and Dancehall, the roles of the Selector 

and the MC are both performed by the DJ. 

40. As with the variable control knob facilitating 

the compensation that could previously done by 

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The Contributors 

Carolyn Birdsall is a Ph.D.-candidate at the 

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis 

(ASCA), where she is writing a dissertation 

about sound and music during Nazi Germany. 

More specifically, this research project tries 

to expand the analysis of the Nazi period to 

consider the “soundscape,” investigating 

case studies that raise attention to issues of 

sound, landscape and power, sound technology 

and modernity, identity formations, voice, 

hearing and corporeal perception. 

David Copenhafer received his Ph.D. in 

Comparative Literature in 2004 from the 

University of California, Berkeley. He has 

taught in both the Departments of Music and 

of Comparative Literature at the University of 

Pennsylvania. He is currently writing a book 

on the philosophy of music and resides in 

Berlin, Germany. 

Soyica Diggs is an assistant professor of 

English at Dartmouth College whose work 

focuses on African America drama and performance. 

Her book project, From Repetition to 

Reproduction: African American Performance, 

Drama, and History, argues that African 

American drama demonstrates ways of interpreting 

historical evidence embedded in black 

performance (e.g. cakewalking, singing the 

blues, and delivering a sermon). “Historicizing 

the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight” is derived 

from its fourth chapter. Soyica Diggs contributed 

entries to North American Women’s 

Drama Collection and Encyclopedia of the 

Harlem Renaissance. 

Julian Henriques studied Psychology at 

Bristol University and worked as a policy 

researcher and journalist before becoming a 

television researcher. Then as a producer and 

director he made documentaries for London 

Weekend Television, BBC Television Music 

and Arts Department and with his own production 

company Formation Films, for 

Channel 4 Television. He has been a senior 


lecturer on film and television at the 

University of the West Indies, Kingston, 

Jamaica and is currently the convenor of the 

MA Script Writing programme at Goldsmiths 

College and course leader for Music as 

Communication. Recent publications include 

“Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound 

System Session” in Michal Bull and Les 

Back, The Auditory Culture Reader. 

Anikó Imre is an assistant professor of Critical 

Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts of the 

University of Southern California. As a threeyear 

postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam 

School of Cultural Analysis, she participated in 

a collaborative project on globalization, the 

media and the transformation of identities in 

the new Europe. She has published articles in 

Screen, Camera Obscura, Framework, Third 

Text, CineAction, Signs, and various book collections. 

She is editor of East European 

Cinemas, published in Routledge’s Film 

Readers series (2005), and co-editor of 

Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, 

forthcoming in Palgrave’s Comparative 

Feminist Studies series. Currently, she is completing 

a book entitled Identity Games: 

Globalization and the Transformation of Post- 

Communist Media Cultures. 

Sylvia Mieszkowski took her first degree and 

Ph.D. in comparative literature. Funded by the 

Graduiertenkolleg für Geschlechterdifferenz & 

Literatur at the university of Munich, she published 

her thesis on dysfunctional tales of 

seduction as Teasing Narratives. Europäische 

Verführungsgeschichten nach ihrem Goldenen 

Zeitalter. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2003. 

Having spent some time as an ASCA post-doc 

in Amsterdam, she is now an assistant professor 

for English literature at the university of 

Frankfurt/Main and working on her second 

book called More Than Meets the Ear. Sound 

and the Fantastic. She was one of the organizers 

of the Sonic Interventions conference in 

2005. 

The Contributors | 311

Fred Moten teaches American and Ethnic 

Studies at the University of Southern 

California. He is the author of In the Break: 

The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition 

(U of Minnesota P, 2003); and two chapbooks, 

Arkansas (Pressed Wafer P, 2000) and 

I Ran from it but was still in it (Cusp Press, 

2007). He is currently working on a book, 

also to be published by Minnesota called 

Stolen Life. 

Mahmut Mutman teaches cultural and critical 

theory at the Department of 

Communication and Design, Bilkent 

University. He has published several scholarly 

articles on Orientalism, postmodernism, feminism, 

nationalism, media and film, in various 

academic journals. 

Marisa Parham is an assistant professor at 

Amherst College, where she teaches classes in 

African-American literary and cultural studies, 

American popular culture, and Anglophone literatures 

after colonialism. She earned her Ph.D. 

from Columbia University in English and 

Comparative Literature, and is currently completing 

a book manuscript entitled Haunted: 

Memory, Space, and African-American 

Modernity. 

Joy Smith is a Ph.D. candidate at the 

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, 

University of Amsterdam. She is researching a 

dissertation, on Dutch-Caribbean literature, 

cultural memory and postcolonial identities in 

the Netherlands. Her article, “Diasporic 

Slavery Memorials and Dutch Moral 

Geographies” in the volume Migratory 

Aesthetics, is forthcoming at Rodopi Press 

(2007). She was one of the organizers of the 

Sonic Interventions conference in 2005. 

Susanne Stemmler is Postdoc-Fellow at the 

Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin. She 

312 | The Contributors 

studied German, French and Spanish language 

and literature and was a lecturer for 

Media and Culture Studies. She received her 

Ph.D. with a dissertation on Topographies of 

the gaze. A Phenomenology of 19th century 

Orientalism in French Literature (published 

2004). She has published on visual and 

hybrid cultures and is co-editor of Romania 

Raps: Hip-hop Cultures in France, Spain, Italy, 

Algeria, Cuba and Latin America (2006). 

Website: www.metropolitanstudies.de 

Milla Tiainen, Licentiate of Philosophy, is 

Research Scholar in the Department of 

Musicology, University of Turku, Finland. She is 

currently completing her Ph.D. entitled “A 

Thousand Tiny Voices: Transformations of Sex 

and Corporeality in Opera”. In addition to several 

articles, she is the author of the book 

Säveltäjän sijainnit (Locating the Composer, 

2005), published by The Research Centre for 

Contemporary Culture at the University of 

Jyväskylä, which combines feminist musicology 

and cultural studies. She has also edited an 

anthology on re-theorizations of authorship in 

music and theatre. 

Marijke de Valck is an assistant professor at 

the Department of Media Studies, University 

of Amsterdam. After completing her Ph.D. on 

international film festivals (cum laude) in 

2006, she worked on a project for the Royal 

Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences while 

teaching Film Studies. Her publications 

include an anthology on Cinephilia: Movies, 

Love, Memory (2005) and a monograph Film 

Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global 

Cinephilia (2007). She was one of the organizers 

of the Sonic Interventions conference in 

2005.

Index 

A 

Abbate, Carolyn, 154, 160, 165–66 

Abel, Samuel, 165–66 

Abraham, Nicolas, 108, 116, 129, 130, 

143–44, 207–08 

Abrams, Harry N., 309 

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 15, 25 

Accord, Clark, 214, 216, 235–36 

Adjaye, Joseph K., 253–54, 261 

Adorno, Theodor W., 20, 32, 39, 51–3, 171, 

191 

Ahmed, Jamilah, 168 

Aisha, 107, 113, 115 

Ali B., 269–70, 282–83 

Ali, Abdullah Yusuf, 115 

Alighieri, Dante, 179 

Alim, Samy, 249, 253 

Allen, Lewis, 196 

Alter, Nora, 80, 83, 85 

Althusser, Louis, 22, 103, 107, 116, 223, 

225, 229, 236 

Amador, Raimundo, 259 

Amidon, Stephen, 122, 144 

Anaya, Rudolfo, 55 

Anderson, Laurie, 149 

Andrew, Regina, 198 

Andrews Sisters, The, 53 

Andrews, Adrianne R., 253–54 

Androutsopoulos, Jannis, 249, 261 

Ankeny, Jason, 260–61 

Annibale, Picicci, 142 

Anzieu, Didier, 290, 306 


Appadurai, Arjun, 284 

Armstrong, Louis, 172–80, 185–86, 188–89, 

190–91 

Arnaud, Gérald, 252, 261 

Arndt, Susan, 123, 236 

Arom, Simha, 40 

Asad, Talal, 115–16 

Ashby, William Rosh, 306 

Ashton, E.B., 53 

Augé, Marc, 248, 261 

Austin, Joe, 262 

Aydemir, Murat, 232 

B 

Back, Les, 18, 20, 25 

Badiou, Alain, 115–16 

Baird, Jay W., 80–3 

Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi, 304, 306 

Baker Jr., Houston A., 25, 198, 207–08, 

212–13, 215, 219–20, 236 

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 233, 236, 291, 306 

Baldwin, James, 23, 193–95, 197, 205–08 

Baltanas, Enrique, 257, 261 

Banga, Radoslav, 273 

Baraka, Amira aka Leroi Jones, 47, 54, 

200–01, 207–08 

Barany, Zoltan, 15, 25 

Barber-Kersovan, Alenka, 284 

Barthes, Roland, 109, 290, 299, 306 

Bass, Steven, 301, 306 

Basso, K.H., 26 

Bateson, Gregory, 296, 301–02, 305–06 

Index | 313

Bathrick, David, 73, 83 

Battersby, Christine, 148–49, 166 

Beauchamp, Ceola J., 208 

Beauchamp, Edgar, 208 

Beauchamp, Keith, 208 

Beckford, Robert, 293, 307 

Beenie Man 291 

Begley, Adam, 123, 144 

Behnken, Klaus, 83 

Bendix, Regina, 215, 236 

Benjamin, Walter, 110 

Benko, Georges B., 85 

Bennett, Andy, 258, 261 

Bennett, Herman, L., 43–4, 53–4 

Bennett, Louise Fraser, 290 

Benson, Christopher, 208 

Berchtold, Josef, 81, 84 

Bergeron, Katherine, 190 

Bey, Ali, 208 

Bhabha, Homi K., 226, 234, 236, 252, 

257, 262 

Bijsterveld, Karin, 15, 25–6 

Birdsall, Carolyn, 21, 57–86, 311 

Bizet, Georges, 259 

Björk 259, 264 

Black Belt, 262 

Black Panthers, 260 

Black Train 274 

Blackmer, Corinne E., 161, 166 

Bloch, Ernst, 305 

Boggle, 291 

Bogue, Ronald, 294, 307 

Boot, Adrian, 304, 309 

Born, Georgina, 164, 166 

Bosma, Hannah, 165–66 

Bost, Suzanne, 91, 100 

Boucher, Manuel, 248, 262 

Bourdieu, Pierre, 288, 307 

Bowen, Michael, 89, 100 

Boyd, Todd, 270–71, 276, 284 

314 | Index 

Bradley, Loyd, 304, 307 

Brady, Mary Pat, 43–4, 49, 53–4 

Braidotti, Rosi, 147–49, 151, 152, 156, 158, 

159, 163, 166 

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 12, 25, 219–20, 

231, 236 

Braudel, Fernand, 243–44, 262 

Bray, Abigail, 150, 166 

Brecht, Bertolt, 51 

Bronfen, Elisabeth, 131, 144 

Brown, Wendy, 53 

Bubenden, Friedrich, 74, 82 

Buchanan, Ian, 166 

Buck-Morss, Susan, 64, 83 

Budach, Gabriele, 263 

Buisson, Matthieu-François-Régis, 142 

Bull, Michael, 17, 18, 20, 25 

Burwell, Tom, 198 

Butler, Judith, 138, 144, 151, 154, 166 

Byrd, James, 197 

C 

Cage, John, 88 

Campbell, Andrew C., 305, 307 

Campbell, Bruce B., 80, 83 

Canetti, Elias, 290, 307 

Caramel aka Molnár, Ferenc, 275–76, 282 

Carter, Erica, 80, 83 

Caruth, Cathy, 130–31, 144 

Caton, Steve C., 15, 25 

Chandler, Nahum, 43 

Cheeky Girls, 283 

Cheng, Ann Alin, 14, 25 

Cherry, Gordon E., 85 

Chion, Michel, 148, 166 

Chow, Rey, 271, 284 

Chuck D, 245, 265 

Chude-Sokei, Louis, 304, 307 

Clarke, Kenny, 41 

Classen, Constance, 305, 307

Clayton, Martin, 152, 166 

Clément, Catherine, 164, 166 

Clements, Frederick Edward, 305, 307 

Cloonan, Martin, 63, 83 

Clouzet, Jean, 51, 54 

Cohen, John, 51, 53 

Colebrook, Claire, 150–52, 156–57, 162, 166 

Coleman, Ornette, 33–4, 37–8, 40–1, 53 

Collins, Bootsy, 48 

Collins, Loretta, 215, 216, 236 

Coltrane, John, 37 

Cook, Nicholas, 164, 166–7 

Cook, Susan C., 152, 166 

Cooper, Carolyn, 212–13, 219, 307 

Copenhafer, David, 22, 143, 171–92, 232, 

236, 311 

Courbin, Alain, 25 

Cowart, David, 123, 131, 144 

Cowley, John, 53 

Cox, Christoph, 300, 307–08 

Critchlow, Keith, 302–03, 307 

Crouch, Stanley, 51, 54, 251 

Csordas, Thomas J., 290, 307 

cummings, e.e., 89, 100 

Currid, Brian, 66, 81, 83 

Cusick, Suzanne G., 152, 166 

D 

Daara J 244 

Daddy Yankee, 261 

Davies, Carole Boyce, 228, 236, 238 

Davis, Miles, 100, 256, 259, 264 

de Certeau, Michel, 104, 116 

de Falla, Manuel, 251 

de la Isla, Camarón, 245, 

De Landa, Manuel, 150, 156, 164, 167 

Delany, Samuel R., 47, 54 

de Lucia, Paco, 245, 253 

De Man, Paul, 178, 191 

De Vries, Hent, 115–16 


Debussy, Claude, 259 

Deleuze, Gilles, 110, 115–16, 147, 151–52, 

156, 158–62, 167–68, 253, 262, 293, 

305, 307 

DeLillo, Don, 22, 119, 124, 132, 135–37, 

141, 142, 144 

Derrida, Jacques, 109, 110, 115–16, 270 

Descartes, René, 105, 106 

De Valck, Marijke, 11–28, 236–37, 312 

Di Prete, Laura, 129, 130, 143–44 

Didi-Huberman, George, 262 

Diggs, Soyica, 23, 193–209, 232, 236, 311 

Dimendberg, Edward, 84 

Dimitriadis, Greg, 243, 262 

Dissanayake, Wimal, 284 

DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, 260 

DJ Squeeze aka Samuels, Glenworth, 299, 

304–06 

Djebar, Assia, 110–13, 116 

Dolphy, Eric, 41 

Donne, John, 31, 49, 54 

Dorham, Kenny, 33 

Douglas, Susan, 15, 25 

Douglass, Frederick, 34, 51, 54, 193–95, 

207–08 

Doyle, Laura, 51, 53 

Du Bois, W.E.B., 193, 195, 198, 207–08 

Du Plessis, Susannah, 214–16, 232, 235 

Dudley, Shannon, 39, 40, 42, 51, 54 

Dumas, Henry, 32, 35, 41, 54–5 

Dunn, Leslie C., 153, 167 

Duns Scotus, John, 304 

Dylan, Bob, 41, 52 

E 

Eakin, Emily, 251, 262 

Echols, Alice, 51, 54 

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 13, 14, 25, 44, 51, 

53–5, 190 

Edwards, Sam, 34 

Index | 315

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 46 

El General, 260 

El Payo Malo, 243 

Elfferding, Wieland, 72, 83 

Eliade, Mircea, 294, 307 

Eliasi, Yoav aka Shadow, 268 

Ellington, Duke, 41, 89, 100 

Ellison, Ralph, 22, 171–2, 180, 185, 187, 

190–91 

Eminem, 268–69, 284 

Enemigo, 255, 264 

Eng, David, 208 

Engel, Gisela, 144 

Epping-Jäger, Cornelia, 80, 83 

Eshun, Kodwo, 306–07 

Ette, Ottmar, 262 

Evans, Gil, 256 

Everist, Mark, 167 

Eyerman, Ron, 14, 25 

F 

Faada Freddy, 244–45 

Fat Joe, 265 

Faubus, Orval E., 32–3, 46 

Fáy, Miklós, 273, 284 

Fekete Vonat, 274 

Feld, Steven, 25, 242, 262, 266, 284 

Felderer, Brigitte, 83 

Fenton, Stephen, 25–6 

Ferdinand II of Aragon, 243 

Fido, Elaine Savory, 228, 236, 238 

Fink, Robert, 153, 167 

Fischer, Conan, 68, 80, 84 

Flores, Juan, 246, 250, 258, 262 

Flores, Lola, 243 

Florian, Karl Friedrich, 76 

Foster, Hal, 54 

Foucault, Michel, 35, 51, 55, 80, 84, 205, 

208, 307 

Fox, Robert Elliot, 213, 232, 236 

316 | Index 

Franklin, John Hope, 197 

Fraser, Mariam, 295, 307 

Freud, Sigmund, 22, 108, 115, 119–20, 123, 

130–31, 135–39, 143–44, 154, 203–05, 

207–08 

Frick, Wilhelm, 82, 83 

Frith, Simon, 262, 284 

Fritzsche, Peter, 80, 84 

Fuhrmeister, Christian, 74, 80, 83–4 

Full Nelson, 243 

Furious Five, 246, 254 

Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 82 

G 

Gallagher, Cormac, 143 

Gallagher, Shaun, 288, 307 

Garcia Canclini, Nestor, 258–59, 262 

Garcia, Matt, 44, 55 

Garcia-Lorca, Federico, 35, 51, 55, 251, 259, 

262 

Garner, Margaret, 235 

Gáspár, Gyözö, 276–77 

Gatens, Moira, 157–58, 167 

Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 25–6, 51, 190, 

213, 220, 232–33, 254, 261, 301, 307 

Gates, Nathaniel E., 284 

Gaunt, Kyra D., 248, 262 

Gebesmair, Andreas, 284 

Gehring, Petra, 25–6 

Gelpi, Albert, 100 

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 100 

Genosko, Gary, 167 

Geralds, Yolande, 208 

Gess, Nicola, 26 

Gibson, James Jerome, 288, 307 

Gillespie, Dizzy, 36 

Gilroy, Paul, 13, 25–6, 32, 55, 212–13, 237, 

246, 262, 30 

Gipsy, 273, 275, 282 

Glaser, Marlies, 213, 237

Glinka, Michail, 259 

Glissant, Edward 12, 25–6, 213, 231, 237 

Glombowski, Friedrich, 81, 84 

Goebbels, Joseph, 62, 65, 81, 82, 84 

Goldberg, David Theo, 235, 237 

Göle, Nilüfer, 26 

Goodman, Steve, 304 

Göring, Hermann, 76, 79, 83 

Gordon, Collin, 84 

Gorra, Michael, 121, 144 

Grandmaster Flash, 254, 260, 264 

Grewal, Inderpal, 271, 284 

Grier, Pam, 99 

Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 207–08 

Grossberg, Lawrence, 284 

Grossmann, Stefan, 80 

Grosz, Elizabeth, 147, 151–52, 156, 

158–60, 162, 164, 167 

Gruber, Malte C., 144 

Guattari, Félix, 110, 116, 151–52, 156, 

158–59, 161–62, 167, 253 

Guy, Will, 25–6 

Gyözike, 277, 282 

H 

H2O, 246 

Hall, Stuart, 154, 167, 271, 279, 284 

Hansen, Mark, 305, 307 

Hartman, Saidiya, 14, 25–6, 205, 208, 

217–18, 232, 237 

Hayles, N. Katherine, 306–07 

Haze, 242, 245, 264 

Hebdige, Dick, 300, 304, 307 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51 

Heidegger, Martin, 106 

Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian, 18 

Henriques, Fernando, 304, 308 

Henriques, Julian, 23, 83–4, 260, 287–311 

Henry, Denton, 297, 299, 304–06 

Hentoff, Nat, 256 


Herbert, Trevor, 166 

Herding, Klaus, 80, 84 

Heylighen, Francis, 305, 308 

Higgins, Billy, 52 

Hill, Donald R., 53–4 

Hill, Jack, 100 

Hilmersdorff, Constans, 82 

Himmler, Heinrich, 83 

Hitler, Adolf, 63, 65, 72, 80–1, 84 

Hobsbawm, Eric, 71, 84, 252, 262 

Hofer, Andreas, 68–9, 82 

Hoffmann, Heinrich, 81, 84 

Holcomb, Roscoe, 41, 52–4 

Holiday, Billie, 196 

Holloway, Karla F.C., 195–96, 207–08 

Holquist, Michael, 236 

Holzmeister, Clemens, 70 

Homer, 20 

Hope, Donna P., 304, 308 

Horkheimer, Max, 20, 26 

Horvath, Vlastimil, 275 

Hoving, Isabel, 213, 232–33, 235, 237 

Hughes, Langston, 198 

Hume, David, 111 

Hung, Chang-Tai, 81, 84 

Hurston, Zora Neal, 233, 236 

Hurt, Byron, 265–66 

Hutcheon, Linda, 165, 167 

Hutcheon, Michael, 165, 167 

I 

Ibn Hisham, 110 

Ibn Sa’d, 110 

Ihde, Don, 57, 59, 60, 79, 84 

Imre, Anikó, 23, 261, 265–86, 311 

Infantry, Ahante, 54 

Iordanova, Dina, 272, 284 

Irwin, William, 233, 237 

Isabella I. of Castile, 243 

Ivins, William Mills, 304, 308 

Index | 317

J 

Jadakiss, 265 

Jafa, Arthur, 249 

Jaggar, Alison M., 166 

Jakobson, Roman, 300, 308 

James, Rob, 260 

Järviluoma, Helmi, 147, 167 

Jay, Martin, 84 

Jay-Z, 52 

Joe, Jeongwon, 148, 167 

Johnson, Barbara, 51, 54, 237 

Johnson, Bruce, 63, 83 

Johnson, Bunk, 51 

Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 198 

Johnson, Mark, 302, 308 

Johst, Hanns, 72, 74, 76, 82, 84 

Jones, A. M., 39 

Jones, Gayle, 207–08 

Jones, Hedley, 304 

Jones, John, 297, 299 

Jones, LeRoi aka Amiri Baraka, 47, 53, 

200–01, 207–08, 260 

Jones, Nancy A. 153, 167 

Junior, 242 

Junko ‘Bashment’ Kudo 292 

Jurna, Nina, 214, 236 

K 

Kaes, Anton, 80, 84 

Kafka, Franz, 110 

Kage, Jan, 247, 262 

Kállai, Ernö, 272–73, 284 

Kaplan, Caren, 271, 284 

Karni, Gil, 266 

Kassabian, Anahid, 148, 167 

Katz, David, 304, 308 

Kauffman, Robert, 40 

Kaufman, Bob, 87–91, 100 

Keil, Charles, 42, 52, 54 

Keizer, Arlene, 232, 237 

318 | Index 

Kember, Sarah, 295, 307 

Kerényi, György, 275 

Ketama, 245 

Khadija, 108, 113, 115 

Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 103, 108–09, 113, 

115–16 

King, Martin Luther, 247 

King, Nel, 54 

Kingsbury, Henry, 164, 167 

Kittler, Friedrich, 25–6 

Kitwana, Bakari, 257, 262 

Klages, Mary, 234 

Klemfeld, Hermann, 83–4 

Knabb, Ken, 304, 308 

Knauff, Michael, 75–6, 84 

Koepnick, Lutz, 73, 80, 83–5 

Koestenbaum, Wayne, 25–6, 165, 167 

Kofman, Sarah, 119–20, 134, 144 

Kohli, Amor, 91, 100 

Kolesch, Doris, 26–7 

Kolinski, Mieczyslaw, 40 

Kopelowicz, Guy, 51, 54 

Koshar, Rudy, 80, 84 

Kramer, Lawrence, 152–53, 167 

Krämer, Sybille, 26–7 

Krauss, Rosalind, 51, 54 

Kristeva, Julia, 154, 165, 167 

Kun, Josh, 54 

Kuti, Fela, 48 

L 

L.A. Sunshine, 246, 264 

La Excepción, 242 

La Familia, 261 

La Mala Rodriguez, 242–43 

Lacan, Jacques, 119–20, 122–23, 131, 

134–39, 142–43, 145, 154–55, 165 

Lachmann, Renate, 142, 145 

Lacoue-Labarthe, 106, 109, 113, 116, 

181–3, 191

Laitmon, Steven, 208 

Lakoff, George 302, 308 

Landry, Donna, 117 

Laplanche, Jean, 208 

Laqueur, Thomas, 140, 145 

Last Poets, The, 246, 260 

Latour, Bruno, 304, 308 

LeBon, Gustave, 63, 84 

Lee, Vernon, 144 

Lefebvre, Henri, 60, 84, 294, 308 

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 115 

Leitch, Vincent B., 236 

Leitner, Bernhard, 16, 26 

Leonardi, Susan J., 153, 165, 167 

Levin, David Michael, 299, 308 

Levin, Simon A., 308 

Levinas, Emmanuel, 22, 103, 105–06, 109, 

115–16 

Lewin, Olive, 304, 308 

Lewis, David, 115–16 

Lewy, Guenther, 15, 26 

Liauzu, Claude, 243, 258, 262 

Lindenberger, Thomas, 62, 84 

Lionnet, Françoise, 228, 237 

Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 49, 54–5 

Liszt, Franz, 259 

LL Junior, 274–75, 277–78, 282 

Löbbermann, Dorothea, 261–62 

Locke, John, 306 

Lole y Manuel, 245 

Lomax, Alan, 52, 54 

Lomelï, Francisco, 55 

Loomba, Ania, 235, 237 

Lord Invader, aka Rupert Westmore 

Grant 21, 31–2, 42, 46–7, 49–51, 

53–5 

Ludditák, 280–81 

Ludin, Hanns, 80 

Lury, Celia, 295, 307 

Lyotard, Jean-François, 105, 116 


M 

Macaco, 242 

Mackenzie, Adrian, 305, 308 

Mackey, Nathaniel, 25–6, 35, 50, 54, 213 

MacLean, Gerald, 117 

Madonna, 165 

Mahler, Gustav, 181–3 

Mahmood, Saba, 25–6 

Mailer, Norman, 257 

Manalo, Armando, 190 

Manuel, Peter, 294, 308 

Marciniak, Kataryna, 271, 285 

Marina, 244–45 

Marley, Bob, 247 

Marshall, Wayne, 294, 308 

Marx, Karl, 109 

Marx, Wilhelm, 70, 82 

Massignon, Louis, 107–09, 112, 115–16 

Massumi, Brian, 157, 160, 164, 167, 260, 

262 

Máte, Péter, 275 

May, Robert M., 308 

May, Stephen, 25–26 

Mazzio, Carla, 304, 308 

MC Protious Indegenious, 261, 264 

McCann, Eugene J., 64, 84 

McClary, Susan, 152, 154, 167 

McCoy, Joseph, 206 

McLeod, Cynthia, 129, 232 

McLuhan, Marshall, 60, 80, 216, 293, 

308 

McNeal, Horace, 297, 299, 304 

McPherson, Eve, 15, 26 

Meghelly, Samir, 249, 253 

Melle Mel, 246, 254, 264 

Menchaca, Martha, 43–4, 53, 55 

Mensah, E.T., 48 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 80, 85, 289, 302, 308 

Meyer, Michael, 67, 85 

Middleton, Richard, 166 

Index | 319

Mieszkowski, Sylvia, 22, 119–46, 232, 

236–37, 311 

Miller, Jacques Alain, 142, 145 

Milon, André, 248, 263 

Mingus, Charles, 21, 31–41, 43–4, 46–51, 

53–5 

Mingus, Sue Graham, 33–5, 37, 55 

Mitchell, Joni, 41, 51 

Mitchell, Tony, 246, 263 

Mitnick, Josuah, 268, 285 

Mittig, Hans-Ernst, 80, 84 

Mohammed B., 269 

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 271, 285 

Molnár, Ferenc aka Caramel, 275–76, 282 

Monson, Ingrid, 52, 54 

Montag, Walter, 116 

Moraga, Cherie, 43 

Morley, David, 304 

Morris, Adalaide, 230, 237 

Morrison, Toni, 206–08, 235, 261 

Morton, Jelly Roll, 35, 51, 55 

Mos Def, 266 

Mosse, George, 79, 82, 85 

Moten, Fred, 21, 25–6, 31–56, 190, 196, 

199–200, 207–08, 212–13, 237, 312 

Moynagh, Maureen, 237 

Mozart, W.A., 160 

Muhammad, 103–04, 107–08, 113 

Mulroy, Kevin, 44, 53, 55 

Mulvey, Laura, 143, 145 

Munchow, Michael, 117 

Mundy, John, 148, 168 

Murray, Albert, 14 

Muse, John, 190 

Mutman, Mahmut, 22, 25, 103–18, 234, 

237, 312 

N 

Naficy, Hamid, 284 

Nair, Supriya, 226, 235, 237 

Napoleon, 68 

320 | Index 

Naylor, Gloria, 207 

Nel, Philip, 122, 145 

Nelson, Cary, 284 

Nemo, Philippe, 115 

Neptune, Harvey, 38, 45–6, 53, 56 

Nettl, Bruno, 164, 168 

Neus-van der Putten, Hilde, 214–15, 232, 

235, 237 

Nicosia, Gerald, 100 

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 100 

Nieto, Oscar, 245, 263 

Nolan, Mary, 80, 85 

Norfleet, Dawn Michelle, 246, 263 

Novák, Erik, 281 

Nuñez, Gerardo, 245 

O 

O’Meally, Robert, 91 

Ochoa, Ana Maria, 242, 263 

Ojos de Brujo, 242–44, 249, 258–59, 

264 

Oláh, Ibolya, 275–76 

Ombre, Ellen, 23, 211, 213, 219–22, 

228–32, 235, 237 

Ong, Walter, 212, 219, 232–33, 237 

Onians, Richard Broxton, 302, 308 

Orbán, Viktor, 283 

Ortiz, Fernando, 244, 263 

P 

Pabst, G.W., 82 

Padillo, Genaro, 44, 53, 56 

Papapavlou, Maria, 257, 263–64 

Parham, Marisa, 22, 87–100, 312 

Parker, Charlie, 180, 185 

Patton, Paul, 117 

Paul, Gerhard, 64, 66, 81, 85 

Paulin, Tom, 124, 145 

Pausch, Marion, 213, 237 

Paust, Otto, 67, 69, 81

Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 44, 53, 56 

Perkins, Kathy, 198, 207–08 

Petrus, Martin, 263 

Pichler, Cathrin, 16, 26 

Picicci, Annibale, 142, 145 

Picker, John M., 20, 25–6 

Pickthal, M.M., 115 

Pihel, Eric, 246, 263 

Pinch, Trevor, 15, 25–6 

Pisters, Patricia, 148, 168 

Plato, 113 

Plonitsky, Arkady, 116 

Poizat, Michel, 154, 168 

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 208 

Pope, Rebecca A., 154, 165, 167 

Potter, John, 165, 168 

Powell, Winston ‘Weepow’, 304 

Pratt, Mary Louise, 255 

Pratt, Ray, 285 

Priestly, Brian, 36–8, 55 

Probyn, Elspeth, 168 

Protevi, John, 117 

Public Enemy, 245, 247, 256, 264 

Puello, Ariana, 242 

Q 

Quayson, Ato, 12, 26, 213, 221, 233, 237 

Queen Latifah, 275 

R 

Radek, Karl, 80 

Radio Tarifa, 244 

Raimundi-Ortiz, Wanda, 255, 264 

Ramet, Sabrina Petra, 285 

Rand, Nicholas T., 143–44 

Randall, Kay, 258 

Ranger, Terence, 252 

Raspa, Anthony, 53 

Ravel, Maurice, 259 


Ray, Sangeeta, 237 

Razaf, Andy, 172, 174 

Reckin, Anne, 219, 221, 231, 236–37 

Redmond, Eugene B., 54 

Redmond, Patricia, 54 

Reed, Ishmael, 233, 238 

Régulier, Catherine, 293, 308 

Reid-Pharr, Robert, 35, 51, 56 

Reinhardt, Mark, 235, 238 

Rich, Adrienne, 88, 100 

Richmond, Dannie, 36–7 

Rimski-Korsakov, Nikolai A., 259 

Rincón, Reyes, 242, 245, 263 

Rivera, Raquel, 246, 249–50, 256, 263 

Roach, Max, 33 

Robinson, Cedric, 44, 52, 55 

Rohlehr, Gordon, 38, 42, 52, 56 

Rollins, Sonny, 50 

Romantic, 276 

Romanyshyn, Robert D., 304, 308 

Roots, The, 22, 91 

Rose, Theresa, 167 

Rose, Tricia 13, 25, 27, 246–47, 249, 253, 

255–57, 260, 263 

Rosenberg, Albert, 82 

Ross, Diana, 247 

Rothmund, Paul, 82 

Rouget, Gilbert, 292, 308 

Roughgarden, Jonathan, 305, 308 

Rucker, Ursula, 22, 87–8, 91–100 

Rudder, David, 42, 49, 53 

Rühle, Günther, 82, 85 

Rushdy, Ashraf, 197, 205, 207–08 

Rutherford, Jonathan, 284 

Ryle, Gilbert, 207 

Ryman, Cheryl, 288, 304, 308 

S 

Said, Edward, 104, 115, 117 

Saldaña-Portillo, Maria Josefina, 43, 53, 56 

Index | 321

Salewicz, Chris, 304, 309 

Samuels, Glenworth aka DJ Squeeze, 300, 

306 

Sárosi, Bálint, 272, 285 

Schafer, Murray R., 15, 25, 27 

Schäfer, Wilhelm, 82 

Schäfers, Stefanie, 82, 85 

Schlageter, Albert Leo, 57–61, 64, 67–72, 

74–83, 85 

Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 80, 85 

Scholl, Inge, 82 

Schreiner, Florian, 26 

Schubert, Franz, 76 

Schubert, Gusztáv, 283, 285 

Schulz, Manuela K., 26 

Schumann, Richard, 259 

Schwarz, David, 154, 168 

Schwarz, Henry, 237 

Scott, Jonathan, 257, 263 

Sean Paul, 288 

Seidler, Vic, 18–9, 25, 27 

Serres, Michel, 142, 145 

Shadow aka Yoav Eliasi, 268 

Shakespeare, William, 25, 277 

Shakir, M.H., 115, 117 

Shamdasani, Sonu, 117 

Sharpe, Jenny, 232, 235, 238 

Shimoni, Kobi, 268–69, 282 

Shohat, Ella, 285 

Siirala, Meri, 168 

Sillitoe, Alan, 89–90, 100 

Silverman, Kaja, 119, 120, 135–37, 143, 

145, 148, 168, 202–05, 207–08 

Simondon, Gilbert, 305, 309 

Sizzla, 291 

Skrandies, Timo, 263 

Smart, Mary Ann, 154, 168 

Smith, Bruce R., 25, 27 

Smith, Joy, 23, 211–38, 312 

Smith, Mark M., 25, 27 

322 | Index 

Smith, Patricia Juliana, 161, 166 

Smith, S.J., 25, 27 

Smudits, Alfred, 284 

Snead, James, 190, 217, 232, 309 

Sokol, Monika, 253, 263 

Solie, Ruth A., 152, 166, 168 

Sólo los Solo, 242 

Souaiaia, Ahmed E., 15, 27 

Spady, James, 249, 253, 263 

Spears, Britney, 284 

Spencer-Brown, George, 309 

Spicer, Edward, 43, 53, 56 

Spillers, Hortense, 197, 207–08 

Spinoza, Baruch, 107 

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 108–12, 117, 

271, 285 

Stace, 32 

Stam, Robert, 285 

Stanley-Niaah, Sonjah, 304, 309 

Stein, Gertrude, 123 

Steingress, Gert, 252, 263 

Stelarc, 149 

Stemmler, Susanne, 23, 241–264, 267, 283, 

312 

Stephen of Hungary, 276 

Sterne, Jonathan, 16, 27, 80, 85, 123, 145, 

299, 309 

Stewart, Garrett, 142, 145, 230, 238 

Stolzoff, Norman C., 304, 309 

Störl, Kerstin, 252, 263 

Stolze, Ted, 116 

Stolzoff, Norman C., 304, 309 

Strachey, James, 143–44, 208 

Strauss, Emil, 82 

Strobl, Gerwin, 72, 85 

Strohmayer, Ulf, 65, 85 

Sümegi, Noémi, 283 

Sutcliffe, Anthony, 82, 85 

Swiboda, Marcel, 253, 264 

Szalai, Anett, 283

T 

Tabari, 110 

Tarantino, Quentin, 93, 100 

Tarnas, Richard, 306, 309 

Tasso, Torquato, 130 

Tate, Greg, 248–49, 264 

Tatu, 283 

Taylor, Cecil, 33 

Taylor, Christine, 269, 283 

Taylor, Robert R., 70, 85 

Thomas, Helen, 168 

Thompson, E.P., 81, 85 

Thompson, Emily, 16, 27 

Thöne, Albrecht W., 80, 85 

Tiainen, Milla, 22, 147–68, 312 

Till, Emmet Louis, 194, 199–201, 205–06 

Till-Bradley, Maime, 205 

Till-Mobley, Maime, 208 

Tobin, Elizabeth H., 80, 85 

Todorov, Tzvetan, 142, 145 

Toomer, Jean, 198, 207–08 

Torok, Maria, 108, 116, 144, 207 

Totton, Robin, 251, 253, 256, 264 

Treacherous Three, 246 

Treichler, Paula A., 284 

Trommler, Frank, 76, 85 

Truax, Barry, 25, 27 

Tsou, Judy, S., 152, 166 

Tuan, Yi-Fu, 64, 85 

Turetzky, Philip, 293–94, 309 

Turner, Victor, 294, 309 

V 

Vahrenkamp, Richard, 74, 85 

Välimäki, Susanna, 154, 164–65, 168 

van Bellingen, Wouter, 16 

van Gogh, Theo, 296 

van Kempen, Michiel, 232–33, 237 

Van Leeuwen, Theo, 255, 264 

Varela, Francisco J., 305, 309 


Vattimo, Gianni, 115 

Venn, Couze, 304 

Vermeersh, Peter, 25, 27 

Vernallis, Carol, 148, 168 

von Blomberg, Werner, 82 

von Hornbostel, Erich, 39 

von Schillings, Max, 82 

W 

Wadud, Amina, 25, 27 

Wagner, Frank, 83 

Wagner, Richard, 75 

Wagstaff, Gregg, 147, 167 

Wall, Cheryl, 200, 207–08 

Wall, Jeff, 171, 187, 190 

Waller, Fats, 36, 171, 174 

Warner, Daniel, 300, 307–08 

Washabaugh, William, 244, 250–51, 254, 

264 

Watkins, Craig, 258 

Watkins, Glenn E., 67, 85 

Weate, Jeremy, 304 

Weheliye, Alexander 12, 27, 186, 191, 195, 

207–08, 217, 219–20, 233, 238, 309 

Weidenhaupt, Hugo, 82, 85 

Weigel, Sigrid, 25, 27 

Wessel, Horst, 81 

Westbrook, Alonzo, 260–61, 264 

Westmore Grant, Rupert, see Lord Invader 

Wheelock, Gretchen A., 165, 168 

White, Eric Charles, 302, 309 

White, Garth, 304, 309 

Wiener, Norbert, 305, 309 

Wilden, Anthony, 300–01, 306, 309 

Willard, Michael Nevin, 262 

Williams, D. Carleton, 292–93, 309 

Williams, Tony, 100 

Williams, William Carlos, 41, 52–3, 56 

Willis, Andre, 253 

Wilson, August, 207 

Index | 323

Wilson, Olly, 40–2, 51, 56 

Wilson, Rob, 284 

Winchester, Rakel, 243 

Wolters, Rudolf, 82 

Woweries, F.H., 66, 81 

Wu Tang Latino, 261 

Y 

Yalim, Burcu, 115 

Yannatou, Savina, 259, 264 

Young, Iris Marion, 166 

Young, Robert J.C., 235, 238 

Younge, Gary, 304 

324 | Index 

Z 

Zabel, Gary, 305, 309 

Zakhut, Samekh, 266–67, 282 

Zern, Brook, 256, 264 

Zielinski, Siegfried, 62, 85 

Zimmermann, Michael, 15, 27 

Zimra, Clarisse, 238 

Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 115, 117, 119–20, 135–36, 

143, 145 

Zumthor, 252, 254, 264 

Zur, 243

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