With the publication of The Black Atlantic in 1993, Paul Gilroy opened a veritable Pandora’s box in regard to the formation of identity. It should be noted from the start that there can not be a singular “black subject” within such a framework as provided by the concept of diaspora. Consequently it is possible to view Gilroy’s work not as a search for an identity common to all forms of blackness, but rather he seeks to profile the structural features which serve to create a plurality of identities within a common discourse of resistance. He begins this essay by positioning the diasporic subject as within but not necessarily of modernity. Black identity is in this sense a doubling of consciousness, reflecting Wright’s elaboration of “a dreadful objectivity”. More precisely, he wishes to determine whether this multiply subjective space can be negotiated with the variety of other diasporic subjectivities.
Gilroy enters into his argument proper by elaborating the need for a more precise language for the politics of difference, which he reasons are currently mired in a dialectic between essentialist and pluralist discourse. The former is usually gender specific – 2 Live Crew as an example of a certain aggressively black masculinity (misogynistic at heart) – yet essentialism can also be found in “pan-African” or Afrocentric discourse. I cannot help but agree with Gilroy’s assertion that such a position is archaic, retrogressive, and politically sedentary. He goes on to suggest that such a position fosters elitism through the “leadership” of representation, which amounts to the ethical presuppositions of a minority group with the privilege to represent themselves in such a manner. Essentialist discourse looks for a merging of aesthetics and politics into a unified purity to achieve specific moral aims, and consequently it frequently denigrades or ignores the actual cultural consumption within black communities. Pluralism on the other hand attempts to allow all forms of cultural production, as differences of production and consumption are celebrated. In this capacity, there is no black subject per se, but only a subject called into existence by specific contexts. Gilroy’s only opposition to such liberal tendencies is that they remain powerless against “specifically ‘racial’ forms of power and subordination” (492).
Gilroy uses hip-hop culture to serve as an emblem for the larger process of evaluating texts for academic in- or exclusion. The Afro-American elite have appropriated hip-hop as essentially black in “an assertively nationalistic way” (493), and Gilroy finds this problematic, as he wishes to determine black expression as authentic (and hence worthy of critique) in terms of an ability to self-represent as well as an ethic productiveness. He finds the authentic in black music for precisely its commitment “to the idea of a better future” and “to supply a great deal of courage required to go on living in the present” (494-5). This utopian character is of course critical of capitalist structures, which themselves usually reflect an institutionalized racism. Utopian expressions represent a politics of transfiguration which emphasizes the development of new social relations and desires, and is in a very tangible way a key principle for modernity. Modernity, as descended from Enlightenment principles, stresses individual fulfilment as made exterior in society: the rational ordering and control of production, judicial and employment equity, etc. For the non-racialized citizen, such claims can be made in an overt manner, yet for the oppressed such expressions must be “deliberately opaque”. Consequently, the signs for such discontent are “wilfully damaged”, forever remaining as a language which cannot fully express itself, and yet creates new forms of expression by means of this silencing. There is a tension between the politics of transfiguration and the politics of fulfilment, and it is within this (overlapping) space that the doubleness of black consciousness can be found.
Music has an important place in Gilroy’s argument, for it demonstrates an aesthetics and a politics which unite and mutually create each other. In this sense, it is a “philosophical discourse which refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics” (496). Western rationality kept truth, beauty, and ethics as distinct categories, and yet the existence of slavery impoverished any claims to veracity and authority. Gilroy argues that black musical forms, on the other hand, signal the unification of ethics and politics into “a form of folk knowledge” (497). As such, it is not essentially racial but springs from a specific history and looks to a specific (utopian) future.
Here Gilroy briefly touches upon musical form to support his argument, and I believe that he is in fact weakest at this point. He states that a common trope of black music, antiphony – instruments or voices calling and responding to each other – is itself a utopic gesture, calling for the democratization of all participants and anticipating “new, non-dominating social relationships”. Yet antiphony is hardly exclusive to black, or oven to modern, musical convention, and indeed its roots can be traced beyond antiquity. It is a shame that Gilroy does not address jazz with any degree of authority in this section, as this music more fully exemplifies reason “reunited with happiness and freedom of individuals and the reign of justice within the collectivity”, as well as a later statement that “artistic expression ... becomes the means toward both individual self-fashioning and collective liberation”. This concept has an aural equivalent in improvised music, and more specifically, the ephemeral ‘swing’ which granted freedom to jazz players within the constraints of even large band conditions. That Gilroy is no musicologist is clear, and yet his argument does indeed hold merit. It is my belief that what is missing from his elaboration on the importance of music is the degree to which music represents an immanence experienced between subjectivities. Musical expression is fundamentally ‘now’, its history (ie: what has been played to reach a particular moment) is not an element of ‘the past’ except within the bounds of memory. Freedom in this sense is absolute, and yet music cannot exist without some preordained constraints, except in the most broad terms of solo performance. Jazz figures for all of these concepts, and even more specifically it is itself a historical development that will not be recreated.
By ending with his usual celebrity moment (ie: a citation of key concepts which made him famous) with a brief examination of the diasporic realities of black cultural production, Gilroy also misses a chance to tie his conclusion into the opening salvos of his argument. That the recordings of an American group can influence Carribean musical forms which in turn foster a genre such as hip-hop (on both sides of the Atlantic) demonstrates the degree to which the recording and transmission of music has changed its ontological nature. In hip-hop culture, the history of music is itself used as a totality to be brought back by means of the sample into a position of cultural immanence. It is here that politics and aesthetics find their honeymoon by means of a technological elopement, for hip-hop emerged from the urban ghettos (notably, involving asian, latino, white, and black peoples) as the only authentic voice of the subordinate. The instruments – sound systems, vinyl records – had been provided by western consumer culture to which they remained for the most part exterior. Hip-hop DJs used extant cultural artefacts – mostly recordings of white rock bands which were most frequently discarded and thus readily acquired – as musical tools to be appropriated. In my mind, I can see no more authentic – and indeed democratic – voice, either within politics or ethics, for the representation of the urban poor against the rampant consumerism which circumscribes their means for agency and self-representation.
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