David F. Garcia's Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins is a dense but worthwhile read, theoretically rich and supported by detailed treatment of archival materials. The book seeks to illuminate a particular way of knowing and experiencing black music and dance in the 1930s–1950s, in which black music was linked to African origins. Garcia calls this ‘the logic of black music and dance's African origins’ (p. 3), a concept that was produced and reproduced by scholars, performers and activists during the period under investigation. The central premise of the book is that such logic served to spatially and temporarily distance this music and dance – as well as the black bodies who performed them – from Western civilisation's ‘modern’ present. Although the intentions of many of the historical actors featured in this book were anti-racist, Garcia argues that the discourse and performance of black music's African origins reinforced racism by reinscribing the binary between modern and primitive, white and black, and has been ultimately antithetical to achieving freedom from racial oppression.
Garcia draws from a wide range of archival materials that circulated in the USA, Cuba and West Africa, emanating from a wide range of historical actors. The book examines not only discourse but also phenomenological and ontological aspects of black music and dance. Garcia especially emphasises the process of how these ideas and experiences were constituted: a key concept is the idea of ‘becoming’, or how the diverse actions, interactions and affective experiences of those who practised and encountered black music and dance collectively imbued it with meaning.
To accomplish this, Garcia describes how the temporal and spatial distancing of black music and dance operated in multiple contexts as well as the social and political impetuses for each context. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits's scientific search for black music's African origins, for example, was linked not only with the social benefits he believed his research would have against racism but also with the rise of Facism in Germany. In the 1950s, on the other hand, Garcia argues that the debates around mambo music's purported African origins was rather linked with Western civilisation's crisis in the wake of World War II. Perhaps the most musicologically interesting chapter is chapter two, in which Garcia proposes the concept of ‘habitus of listening’. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieau's influential notion of ‘habitus’ – internalised norms and ways of acting based on the sum of one's past experiences and socio-cultural milieu – Garcia argues that modernity has conditioned both musicologists and laypeople to listen to music produced by black bodies in certain ways that project that music and those bodies in another place (‘the bush’) and time (the ‘primitive’ past). While this critique of the dichotomy constructed between African music and Western music is hardly new (e.g. Waterman Reference Waterman, Nettl and Bohlman1991), this chapter more specifically couches the issue in the assumptions of modern thought. For Garcia, racialised music and dance comprised a means by which listeners and observers could assure themselves of their subjective position in the modern present. Listening to black music as ‘primitive’ and projecting it into another place and time allowed listeners to distance themselves from it and thus coordinate their own place in relation to the world.
Garcia also examines the agency of racialised individuals in either reproducing or attempting to break free from racial logic. Chapter three follows the actions of performers such as West African vocalist Modupe Paris and African American actor Paul Robeson, who actively embodied racial stereotypes. According to Garcia, these case examples are indicative of the limits placed on racialised bodies, and here he invokes Judith Butler's concept of ‘abject beings’ (p. 127), those who are not permitted entrance into modern subjectivity. The following chapter, conversely, follows how historical actors have tried to break out of racial stereotypes. This chapter introduces Frantz Fanon's theory of disalienation – that is, how individuals can potentially be free from the racial regime – and Günther Stern Anderson's pathologies of freedom – how individuals’ choice of identification is actually not a choice but limited by how they are perceived by society. Garcia brings these theories to bear upon the actions and artistic output of anthropologist/choreographer Katherine Dunham, jazz musician Duke Ellington and abstract filmmaker Harry Smith. Although music and dance may potentially be a space for disalienation, Garcia's tracing of the reverberations of these artists’ actions in actuality reveals the difficulties in achieving true freedom from racial logic. If race is a constitutive element of modern thought, then disalienation is constrained by the persistence of modernity's conceptual framework.
Garcia's research is commendable for its breadth and its attention to detail. Meticulous treatment of the archival materials and their social and political contexts allows the book to mobilise theory convincingly. While the book's density is likely to be inaccessible for a readership outside of academia, the central argument has implications for the general public. The last chapter particularly encourages academics to engage in critical self-reflection on how they write about and teach black music and dance. Contemporary scholars and educators are often guilty of attempting to pick out perceived African elements from black diasporic musics and implying an evolutionary trajectory of these elements over time and space, thus reproducing racial dichotomies and distancing. This book should be convicting for educators who so often are complicit in advancing an ‘African origins’ paradigm and, indeed, is an advisable read for those who are studying and/or educating about racialised music and dance genres.
