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Music and the Construction of Historical Narrative in 20Th and 21St Century African-American Literature

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Music and the Construction of Historical Narrative in 20Th and 21St Century African-American Literature 1 Orientations in Time: Music and the Construction of Historical Narrative in 20th and 21st Century African-American Literature Leisl Sackschewsky A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2016 Reading Committee: Sonnet Retman, Chair Habiba Ibrahim Alys Weinbaum Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English 2 © Copyright 2016 Leisl Sackschewsky 3 University of Washington Abstract Orientations in Time: Music and the Construction of Historical Narrative in 20th and 21st Century African-American Literature Chair of Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Sonnet Retman American Ethnic Studies This dissertation argues that the intersections between African-American literature and music have been influential in both the development of hip-hop aesthetics and, specifically, their communication of historical narrative. Challenging hip-hop historiographers that narrate the movement as the materialization of a “phantom aesthetic”, or a sociological, cultural, technological, and musical innovation of the last forty years, this dissertation asserts that hip-hop artists deploy distinctly literary techniques in their attempts to animate, write, rewrite, rupture, or reclaim the past for the present. Through an analysis of 20th and 21st century African-American literary engagements with black music, musical figures, scenes of musical performance, and what I call ‘musical-oral’, I hope to demonstrate how prose representations of music disrupt the linear narratives of progress that have dominated historicism in the white, western world. By creating a self-reflexive aesthetic that draws the past into immediate conversation with the present, teXts such as Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1926) to Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and “Solo on the Drums” (1947), Sonia Sanchez’s We a BaddDDD People (1971), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009), offer a new model for understanding slavery and the African past, MarXian 4 class theory, gender politics, intersectionality, political calls for solidarity, and the formation of post-soul aesthetics such as hip-hop. 5 Table of Contents Introduction...................................................................................................................................................6-29 Chapter One: Destabilizing Historical Stasis: Langston Hughes and the Deployment of Music as Metaphor in The Weary Blues……………………………………………………………………..30-74 Chapter Two: Richard Wright and Ann Petry: The Intersection Between Music and Politics in 1940s African-American Realism………………………………………………………………………75-122 Chapter Three: Performance, Memory, and the Affective Transmission of History in Ann Petry’s “Solo on the Drums”…………………………………………………………………………123-146 Chapter Four: Locating a Political Past: Music and the “Performative Politics” of Freedom in Sonia Sanchez’s We A BaddDDD People………………………………………………………….147-186 Chapter Five: The Writer as Jazz Ensemble: Fragmentation and Temporal Dislocation in Toni Morrison’s Jazz…………………………………………………………………………………………187-213 Chapter Six: Sampling in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor: The Use of Hip-Hop Aesthetics in Contemporary Black Fiction……………………………………………………………………………214-249 Conclusion............................................................................................................................................249-250 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………….250-27 6 Introduction This project began with the historiography of hip-hop. While it took almost twenty- five years after the music’s emergence for scholars to begin discussing its history and aesthetics, in only ten short years after Tricia Rose’s foundational Black Noise (1994)1, many of the definitive scholarly teXts of the movement had already been written.2 While these teXts engage with the artistry, social meanings, politics, economies and appropriations of the music, their narration of the music’s aesthetic innovations nearly always focuses on three aspects of its emergence: 1) the socioeconomic conditions surrounding hip-hop’s origins 2) the technological advances of early deejays 3) the relationship between oral culture and the signification practices of emcees. The first, and most familiar narrative hinges on sociological accounts of white flight, deindustrialization, Reaganomics, and the politics of abandonment. The major flaw in this historiography is that people are often reduced to features of their neighborhood, their art characterized as either a reaction to or rebellion against those socioeconomic conditions. Parallel studies provide in-depth, detailed, and generally thoughtful explorations of deejaying technologies and techniques, including the development of the break, sampling, and miXing. Finally, nearly every major argument about the history of hip-hop aesthetics links emcees to the 1 It should be noted that journalist including Bill Adler, Nelson George, Barry Michael Cooper, David Herskovitz, Greg Tate, and newspapers such as The Village Voice were all writing about the cultural intricacies of hip-hop before Rose’s book came out. I am starting with her because it is the first major intersection between hip-hop and academia. Also see hip-hop anthologies That’s The Joint (2012) and And It Don’t Stop (2004) for a more comprehensive history of hip-hop journalism. 2 While thousands of articles and hundreds of book have been written about hip-hop culture since Rose’s book, this dissertation emerges from the research that appears in the following teXts: S. Craig Watkins, Hip-Hop Matters (2005); Nelson George, Hip-Hop America (1998); Marc Anthony Neale; What the Music Said (1999); Houston A. Baker; Rap, Black Studies, and the Academy (1993); Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (2005); S. Craig Watkins, Hip-Hop Matters (2005); Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes (2009); Murray Foreman, The ‘Hood Comes First (2002). 7 history of signification practices outlined by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his classic 1985 text The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. While each of these approaches, to varying degrees, has informed my understanding of hip-hop historiography, they all lack a distinct sense of the ways hip-hop aesthetics are shaped by the intersections between African-American literature and black music—its forms, figures, scenes of musical performance, and descriptions of what I call ‘musical-oral’ settings.3 Unlike the practices of signifying and oral storytelling, hip-hop did not emerge from entirely oral or vernacular cultures. Similarly, while hip-hop aesthetics are informed by previous musical forms and the development of the turntable, it is not eXclusively a musical or technological innovation. What makes hip-hop unique is its incorporation of multiple genres forms, including the literary, in its eXploration of black identity and African-American historiography. By attempting to narrate what James Weldon Johnson calls the “conscious and unconscious art” of oral tradition, or what Ralph Ellison describes as music’s ability to sound the “indefinable aspects of eXperience” (198), I argue African- American authors created new models and methods for writing and rewriting the past through musical aesthetics. Sometimes foundational to the teXt’s narrative and other times one of many constructs, music becomes the vehicle for animating, reclaiming, rupturing, or reshaping the past in the present. This method of historical compression, which refutes linear and teleological representations of African-American subjectivity, informs both the content and aesthetic forms of hip-hop culture. 3 What I mean by “musical-oral” settings are any sites in which musical culture is deliberately linked with oral eXpression or vice-versa. While I understand that oral cultures of storytelling, folklore, and signifying are distinct in many ways from musical practice, it is my hope to point out how these genres have consistently overlapped and drawn from one another in African-American cultural practice across the 20th century. 8 Rather than reaffirming popular culture’s obsession with the ‘ghetto’ or simplifying the compleXity of African-American cultural aesthetics to the realm of technology or orality, the literary opens up hip-hop historiography to a wide range of African-American subject positions, both past and present. In teXts that range from Langston Hughes’ poetic volume The Weary Blues (1926) to Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor (2009)4, I eXamine how the persistent inclusion of musical forms assists in the transmission of aesthetic and cultural histories that stretch from the ancient past, to Africa, and across any number of points in the African-American past. These literary encounters with music offer an alternative African-American historiography, or a means of telling history and shaping cultural memory. It is my goal to observe not only how the past is shaped by the present in these texts, but also to note how the intersection between multiple genre forms could constitute a new direction in hip-hop historiography. As a number of African-American writers and scholars across the twentieth century have noted, African-American musical and oral forms have been engaged in a process of aesthetic replication and revision that stretches from the African past to the technologically saturated markets of the present. The only avenues for African American cultural 4 While this dissertation deals with only seven literary teXts, my
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