In his book Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas, Martin Munro broaches the question: ‘What is the relationship between blackness and rhythm in the Americas?’ (3). The study narrates and examines the violent historical processes and hotly contested discourses around rhythm and racial blackness in New World colonial and postcolonial contexts. Despite the book's broad historical overview and sweeping geographic scope, Munro illustrates expertly how the Enlightenment project and its colonial entanglements gave rise to the idea of innate African rhythmicity, setting the stage for a constantly shifting battle that is still being waged today. As he notes: ‘rhythm has almost become a taboo subject for critics wary of racial and cultural essentialism. But to ignore rhythm completely is to neglect a fundamentally important feature of circum-Caribbean aesthetics, history, and indeed contemporary lived experience’ (4).

Importantly, the book is neither a catalogue of diverse rhythmic patterns nor a search for African continuities, lineages, or ‘retentions’ in the Americas, but an exhaustively researched look at the ways in which discourses around rhythm and racial blackness shaped the histories of the circum-Caribbean. Indeed, Munro is not a music specialist but a scholar of Francophone Caribbean literatures. His deeply interdisciplinary and transnational approach brings together his own insightful disciplining in Caribbean literatures and intellectual history with a rare historical precision in the discussion of New World and Afro-diasporic racial politics. Although Munro is more concerned with discursive analyses of rhythm and race than with ethno/musicological analyses of musical practices and formal structures, his book offers us a welcome chance to interrogate the historical processes that brought African rhythmic sensibilities into contact with European, Amerindian, South Asian, East Asian, and countless other rhythmicities in the New World, from the first colonial encounters to the processes of dialogue and hybridization that characterize current postcolonial entanglements.

Munro's book is organized around historical examinations of rhythmic discourse in four geographical regions. Chapter 1 looks at Haiti from the revolution to the mid-twentieth century, Chapter 2 turns to Trinidad from the early nineteenth century to the 1940s, Chapter 3 focuses on Martinique from the 1930s to the 1980s, and Chapter 4 looks in detail at North American blackness and rhythmicity during the US civil rights era. Throughout, Munro builds his case that the idea of black rhythmicity was deployed in multivalent ways and in service to constantly shifting political aims, through ideologies ranging from the most dispassionate (pseudo) scientific, Euro- and logo-centric racialisms to Afrocentric and defiantly black cultural nationalisms, often strategically mixing and retooling these ideological frames to suit historically, geographically, and politically specific needs. He writes: ‘In each of the diverse though related and interconnected cases examined, rhythm is a contested concept that is sometimes vilified and repressed, sometimes glorified and valorized. As becomes clear, however, rhythm […] is a vital element in our understanding of where cultures in this hemisphere have come from and where they may go in the future’ (23). It is these contexts that constructed the ‘different drummers’ that Munro encourages us to hear throughout the book.

In his introduction, ‘Slaves to the Rhythm’, Munro gestures to the relentless processes of creolization that have shaped circum-Caribbean cultures while maintaining that African music was nonetheless central to the development of ‘the great traditions of music here, from kaiso to ska, soca to dancehall, belair to zouk, jazz to hip-hop’ (12). To his credit, Munro here performs a critical injunction against the binary of essence and non-essence that tends to bog down discussions of black music and rhythm. He purposefully misuses, or rather resignifies, the term ‘polyrhythm’ to invoke the constitutive rhythmic plurality of the New World – and, indeed, of Africa itself. By invoking the oft-essentializing musical term – ethnomusicological archetype of African rhythmicity par excellence – to instead describe the immanent rhythmic hybridity of New World musics, Munro explodes the conventional thinking about black rhythm and clears the way for a more historically informed look at rhythm and race in the Americas.

An important feature of his argument here is the idea that European folk rhythmicity was discursively suppressed in order to highlight the ‘primitive’ rhythmic qualities of African music. Focusing on the racial thinking of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur de Gobineau, he illustrates how such a shift cleared the way for a politics of racial difference premised in large part on the idea of biological rhythmic essence. By focusing on the historical processes that defined a black rhythmic essence and by resignifying the oft-essentializing term ‘polyrhythm’ to both centre and explode African rhythmicity, Munro implicitly answers Paul Gilroy's call for an ‘anti-anti-essentialist’ scholarship. Together his ‘polyrhythm’ and its ‘different drummers’ constitute a critical apparatus that moves past thinking in terms of the ‘contradictions’ and ‘paradoxes’ of black Atlantic processes. Instead, he foregrounds the Enlightenment discourses that produced this dualistic thinking in the colonial period and gained form in the doubly conscious subjectivities and creolized musics that are not themselves ‘contradictions’, but rather expressions of the lived experience, repetitive labour, and performative materiality of postcoloniality.Footnote ¹

In Chapter 1, ‘Beating Back Darkness: Rhythm and Revolution in Haiti’, Munro focuses on Haiti as a space of colonial encounter and racial subjugation wherein rhythm was demonized as an expression of an uncivilized African essence. The greatest strength of this chapter is the author's nuanced analysis of early ethnographies and first-hand accounts of the music and dance of the creolized African and Roman Catholic religious practices of vaudoux. In these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, Munro locates the thinking that allowed French plantation owners and authorities to name rhythm as an essentially African characteristic. His examination shows how the French colonial fear of vaudoux's African rhythmicity was constructed through these accounts and, importantly, later appropriated as a tool of state repression by Toussaint L'Ouverture and this, the first black republic in the New World. Munro thus writes: ‘To learn about Haiti is to come to know paradox, to understand how its truth often lies in contradictions and disrupted logic’ (24). Just as the white colonial writer Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry described the drumming and dancing of colonial Haitian slaves as a ‘grotesque’ but powerful expression of natural abilities in 1796, so did the black post-revolution Haitian government seek to primitivize and repress vaudoux expressions as a central feature of their ‘civilizing’ project for its citizens. This despite ‘the crucial role that popular culture – dances, songs, drumming, religion – played in fomenting the spirit of revolt and common black identity that had helped the slave armies hold strong’ during the Haitian Revolution (28).

Ultimately, the author's goal here is to show the divergent and changing roles of rhythmic discourse, from the notable irony of how Haiti's black élites took on European views of rhythm as anti-civilization to the ways in which later indigenist movements selectively appropriated and recuperated such expressions as symbols of Africanness and black Haitian pride. Throughout the text, Munro gestures to the continuities, contests, and ongoing dialogue between the Caribbean and the United States. He illustrates in particular how the Haitian indigenist movement of writer Jean Price-Mars and others was largely fuelled in opposition to the increasing US paternalism, intervention, and neocolonial activity in Haiti during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining these transnational histories and flows, Munro is able to reinsert Haiti into the history of African-American music as well, noting how the swaying balanse of vaudoux practice likely influenced the terminology and feel of ‘swing’.Footnote ² While this expanded transnational frame is a much-needed development in jazz studies, Munro here runs the risk of overdetermining the relationships and re-essentializing a biologized African rhythmicity. Writing of the reception of jazz in post-First World War Haiti, Munro suggests: ‘Although jazz had arrived as a cultural aftereffect of the US occupation, it was of course the music of black Americans, and, even if few Haitian jazz enthusiasts seemed to realize it, jazz had evolved from strong Saint-Dominguan-influenced roots in the dances at Congo Square. Thus, the arrival was also a return, a homecoming of a much-traveled, much changed distant relative’ (73). Although Munro goes to great lengths to stress the vast difference between his ‘drummers’ here, the language of evolution and biological relation detracts from his otherwise trenchant historical analysis. Certainly, we need to think more about the prehistory of jazz – and about its transnational dialogue – but we need not do so in the pseudo-biological terms of ancestry that have for too long been barriers rather than aids in our understanding of the complex and world-changing emergence of jazz.

In Chapter 2, ‘Rhythm, Creolization, and Conflict in Trinidad’, Munro turns from Haiti to examine a ‘more classically colonial’ struggle over rhythm between the small, predominantly white élite and the island's large urban black population. Here too, though, Munro illuminates the nuance and contest over the idea of black rhythm from the first Spanish settlers through the influx of French creole plantation owners to the British, who ruled the island from 1797 until independence in 1962. Indeed, the idea of black rhythm in Trinidad was shaped largely by the disputes between the Roman Catholic French creoles and the Protestant British. Not coincidentally, these disputes were centred on the policing of African rhythmicity in the Trinidadian capital of Port of Spain during Carnival, the high-point of Trinidad's diverse cultural life and also the time that white élites most feared black insurrection.

Some of the richest analyses in this Trinidad chapter examine the racially trangressive play associated with the rural masking practices that would become central to Carnival in Port of Spain. Using first-hand accounts, Munro explains how before emancipation in 1833 slaves would use their time off at Christmas to flour their faces and visit the plantation house. In turn, the white creole planters would costume themselves as slaves and parody the drumming and dance of the slave Canboulay (creole for ‘burnt cane’) – a stylized performance of putting out a plantation fire – that would later become a feature of Carnival. Munro suggests that these and other racially transgressive performances served as palliatives for black Trinidadians throughout the nineteenth century. Musical performance served as a central cultural site for a people that had historically been denied a culture. He goes on to examine how the policing of public performances by the British colonial government in the 1870s and 80s signified a growing unease with the post-emancipation underclass or jamettes, who increasingly used the Canboulay, tamboo-bamboo bands, and other forms of disruptive street music as forms of social agitation well into the twentieth century.

Munro ends his examination of rhythm and politics in Trinidad with a look at the rise of steelbands as a direct outgrowth of jamette traditions. Surprising here is the absence of close engagement with Jocelyne Guilbault's work in Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidad's Carnival Musics. Guilbault's project is quite similar to Munro's in identifying the political contexts and trajectories that centre musics, foment national and racial identity, and create spaces for solidarity and/or contest. Indeed, Guilbault's Foucauldian analysis could have underscored Munro's larger ‘polyrhythmic’ argument and abated the biologizing language of ‘evolution’ that constantly threatens to disrupt such projects about ‘creolization’ and ‘hybridity’.Footnote ³ Furthermore, engagement with Governing Sound could have added ethno/musicological specificity to Munro's arguments about rhythm, both as discourse and as sonic practice.

Munro turns to Guadeloupe and Martinique in his third chapter, ‘Rhythm, Music, and Literature in the French Caribbean’. As the title implies, here his focus is almost exclusively on the discursive deployments of African rhythmicity in the literature and intellectual ferment of the Negritude and post-Negritude movements. Munro traces in detail the powerful rhythmic poetics and ‘racial mysticism’ of the francophone Negritude movement from Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas to Frantz Fanon's denunciation (and mockery) of such essentializing and broadly generalizing projects in his pivotal 1952 Peau noire, masques blanc. Munro explains how, despite the international political solidarity that Negritude fostered, Fanon was deeply critical and ‘keenly aware that the idea of innate black rhythmicity, along with Negritude's other related conceptions of blackness, did not come directly from an untainted African source but were, to a considerable extent, products of European thinkers’ (145). Fanon's mid-century disruption of Negritude's ideology of African rhythmicity thus sets the stage for a post-Negritude literature built upon the complexities and specificities of lived experience in circum-Caribbean histories.

Here (and in the final chapter) Munro's book builds to its primary conclusions, where his attention turns to literary and scholarly interventions that move beyond the essentialist/anti-essentialist framework for thinking about rhythm and race. He looks in depth at the shifting and nuanced poetic politics of Édouard Glissant, and his fellow post-Negritude and Créolité writers who rejected Negritude's ‘“obsession with the One” – a unified conception of self, race, and culture’ (207). Beginning with Glissant's concept of ‘Detour’, Munro explains how the post-Negritude thinkers developed and deployed an understanding of rhythm ‘as a polyvalent sign of alienation and resistance’ (my emphasis) that characterized the experience of black circum-Caribbean life and its reliance on indirect resistance. ‘Conversely’, continues Munro, ‘alienation and resistance are interpreted as polyrhythmic facets of Martinican experience’ (147) for Glissant. Instead of standing as a singular and iconic marker of Afro-diasporic identity, rhythm is refigured as a diverse cultural heritage that bespeaks the experience of black Atlantic dislocation, loss, movement, mixture, and absence.

The analysis here recalls Brent Edwards, who, writing with a similar set of concerns, suggests: ‘paradoxically, it is exactly such a haunting gap or discrepancy that allows the African diaspora to “step” and “move” in various articulations. Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because finally, in the body, it is only difference – the separation between bones or members – that allows movement.’Footnote ⁴ The ideas of ‘décalage’ (gap, discrepancy) and Stuart Hall's ‘articulation’ – discussed in this, Edwards's article that would anticipate the author's pathbreaking The Practice of Diaspora – both gesture towards the paradox of a polyrhythmic and rootless Afro-diasporic essence found in the differences or empty spaces at cultural conjunctures. Indeed, bringing these discourses together, it seems that Munro wants to suggest that rhythm is at once the cartilage that fills the gaps and ruptures of difference and the essential embodiment of the reality of circum-Caribbean diversity. As Munro notes, the polyrhythmicization of Afro-diasporic culture is a powerful force for political solidarity/movement. Explaining the Martinican intellectual's deep investments in jazz, salsa, reggae, and other hybrid musical forms as political forces, Munro writes ‘it is this exposure to outside (musical) influences that, in Glissant's view, offers the greatest hope for renewal and could allow “the creativity and solidarity that will make rootlessness more tolerable, make the present void more negotiable”’ (169).

In the final chapter of Different Drummers, ‘James Brown, Rhythm, and Black Power’, Munro leaves the Caribbean to look in depth at the history of black rhythmicity in the United States. Here he focuses on James Brown's foregrounding of rhythm as a new and future-oriented musical style that nonetheless gets enmeshed in discourses of an essentialized African past by the prominent Black Arts author and theorist Amiri Baraka. Borrowing liberally from Anne Danielsen and Rickey Vincent for his discussion and analysis of musical sound, Munro argues that funk's ‘everything is on the one’ mantra and its musical practice of downbeat anticipation sonically encodes the forward-looking ideology of Brown and others.Footnote ⁵ Munro's argument from Chapter 3 continues to build here, as the author finds parallels between Glissant's response to Césaire and Fred Moten's more recent critique of Baraka and his influential notion of ‘the changing same’. Specifically, in Moten's work, Munro finds another model for a third way out of the essentialist/anti-essentialist double bind. Munro writes: ‘The new black music of the 1960s, Moten contends, was characterized less by retrogressive, essentialist gestures than by an effective dismantling of traditional binary categories. In this period, he says, a new kind of black art and thought emerged in which emotion and structure, preparation and spontaneity, and individuality and collectivity can no longer be understood in opposition to one another. Rather, the art itself resists any interpretation in which these elements are opposed; it resists any designation, even those of the artists themselves, that depends on such opposition’ (206). While readers of this journal might wonder what ‘the art itself’ is, Munro here makes important connections between African-American music and discourse and its circum-Caribbean counterparts. Moten's argument in his 2003 study In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition looks at those spaces of relation – the ‘break’ – that open up when one relinquishes the impulse of an ‘impossible return’ to Africa and instead lives with the ‘unpredictable, unfixed, impermanent formations of identity’ (207).Footnote ⁶ That is, there is radical potential in the space created when one eschews the poles of the self/other binary to live and create in the undetermined ‘relational’ realm.

At a composition colloquium on 6 April 2012 at the University of California, Berkeley, pianist Vijay Iyer gave a talk on composing for improvisers. Gesturing to Moten's work, Iyer noted how composition and improvisation are regularly conceived (and taught) as opposite procedures. From the outset he urged his audience of composer/improvisers and ethno/musicologists to instead conceive of all musical creation as improvisation, as even the most specifically notated and programmed music has improvisational elements. He thus implored us to imagine composition not as the opposite of improvisation but as the practice of creating environments and structures for musical improvisation. In short, form is the medium in which we improvise. The two are mutually constitutive of each other. Indeed, echoing Glissant and Moten's social implications for such an eschewal of binary thinking, he asked us to admit that daily life itself is improvisation and the world our structure. Certainly, some of us are better at it than others, but as Ralph Ellison wrote in his polyrhythmic 1970 classic ‘What America Would Be Like Without Blacks’:

In his conclusion, ‘Listening to New World History’, Munro amplifies Mark Smith's call for a more robust field of auditory history. Interesting here is Munro's seeming need to validate the political impact of music – and, indeed, the place of studying music and sound in historical disciplines. While the deficit of sonic discussion in Munro's book provides ample evidence that there is still much need for specialists in the music disciplines, his text performs critically important work in establishing interdisciplinary connections and clearing a space to theorize the constitutive hybridity of New World black musics while asserting the centrality of rhythm to circum-Caribbean identity without resorting to the white supremacist and Afrocentric essentialisms that named rhythm black.Footnote ⁸ The book is an important continuation of the interdisciplinary work of Paul Gilroy, Brent Edwards, and Fred Moten, and will be foundational for future scholarship in not only circum-Caribbean music studies but also Afro-diasporic, African-American, American, and world music studies.