It is now more than two decades since the publication of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, in which he urged cultural historians to exercise their geographical imaginations by looking beyond the narrow confines of the nation state and instead to focus on the ‘single complex unit’ of the circum-Atlantic world, a world within which black movement(s) demands critical attention. This Black Atlantic world is not ‘rooted’ in soil or blood but ‘routed’ though the settlements of the Atlantic rim, connected by transnational flows of traffic and trade between Africa, Europe and the New World including, of course, the trade in human beings which inaugurated the African diaspora. Such a focus, Gilroy argued, would need to foreground the role of those too often excluded from accounts of Western modernity, specifically the black people who had criss-crossed the Atlantic since the 16th century and settled in, and profoundly transformed, the cities of Atlantic Europe, the Caribbean and North and South America. Particular attention, Gilroy urged, should be given to the expressive cultures developed by Afro-diasporans, a ‘black metaculture’ which is also a ‘counter-culture to modernity’ within which music plays a central role. In his introduction, Gilroy cautioned that his book is to be read only as a provisional and early step towards what would need to be a much fuller account of Black Atlantic music culture, which needed to be written by a new generation.
In the intervening decades some have started to answer the call. The now-canonical Black Atlantic idea has be re-versioned in a range of new scholarship from the historical analysis of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013) to the art history collection Afro Modern: Journeys in the Black Atlantic (2010) to literary-theoretical disquisitions such as Alexander Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Reference Weheliye2005) and Kodwo Eshun's treatise on Afro-futurism More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Reference Eshun1998). This work follows Gilroy by recognising both the centrality of the sonic within emergent Afro-diasporic modernity and the huge impact the music produced by Black Atlantic culture – from jazz and blues to reggae, hip hop and dubstep – has had on global popular music. But so far this work has tended to focus on Afro-Diasporic cultural production in the West, and encounters (real or imagined) between Black Atlantic intellectuals and their European contemporaries. This strategy has successfully reinscribed black intellectuals like WEB DuBois, Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor and Franz Fanon into the modernist canon alongside the likes of Hegel, Levinas and Derrida, and persuasively encouraged us to consider the sonic modernism and post-modernism of black music makers like Lee Perry, George Clinton and Tricky as a valuable counterpoint to the theory of Walter Benjamin, Delueze and Guattari and Friedrich Kittler. What has thus far been missing has been work that completes the loop and traces the echoes of Black Atlantic music back to Africa itself. Jaji's book aims to do just that.
A Zimbabwe-born Cornell-educated assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Tsitsi Ella Jaji is biographically well placed to undertake such a task, and her new book brings a literary theorist's eye and a pianist's ear well-tuned to Black Atlantic modes to bear on five case studies drawn from across the ‘long twentieth century’, during which the continent struggled to free itself from colonialism. Based on extensive archival fieldwork in South Africa, Senegal and Ghana, Jaji analyses a series of encounters between Afro-Diasporans and Africans around the music of the Black Atlantic, examining how (and how well) it travelled and circulated within the cultural texts of continental Africa and in what ways it informed emergent forms of nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Jaji's debt to Gilroy – The Black Atlantic served as ‘both inspiration and provocation’, she writes (p. 7) – is evident in her contention that it is above all music that allowed Africans to ‘imagine and enact a sense of solidarity with black diasporic subjects in the Caribbean and the US’ (p. 2).
Jaji's five studies are arranged chronologically, moving from the impact of Pentecostal spirituals in turn-of-the-century South Africa, to the role of jazz in constructions of mid-century Negritude and nationalism in Senegal, then on to popular music consumption as articulated in glossy African women's magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, the meanings of American soul in 1970s Ghana, and the resonance of diasporic music in Afro-(post)modernism. This historical material is organised around the conceptual framework of ‘stereomodernism’. Here she is riffing on Gilroy's evocation of the ‘stereophonic, bilingual or bifocal’ (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993, p. 3) nature of Black Atlantic arts. It's a nifty coinage, linking, as it does W.E.B. DuBois's notion of ‘double-consciousness’ – the central psychological legacy of slavery and the diaspora, where blacks are in but not of the West, a doubleness which is both traumatic and productive – with the techno-materiality of stereo sound reproduction, invoking both music itself and the technological modes of its reproduction and circulation.
Jaji likes stereomodernism as a conceptual tool because it can be applied not only to ‘intentional collaborations and collective improvisations’ (p. 18) but also ‘noise and static, reverberation and feedback and interference – those difficulties as objurgate as solid rock’ (p. 18). This ambivalence is welcome because it registers Jaji's scepticism to over-cosy notions of trans-Atlantic solidarity, and a recognition that, as Stuart Hall always said, there are no guarantees that music, or any other form of art or politics, just because it is ‘black’ will be able to leap all barriers and heal all rifts. ‘Listening at a geographic remove’, Jaji notes, ‘[leaves] some complexities opaque, mistranslated, even untranslatable’ (p. 2). Although she is interested in how black music can build affinity and solidarity across the geographically dispersed diaspora, this note of scepticism remains a subtle keynote throughout.
Inevitably, perhaps, for a first book based on a PhD thesis, the tone is a little uneven. The passages on South Africa, drawing on her deep knowledge of Pentecostal spirituals (she holds a degree in piano performance from Oberlin Conservatory) are dense and full of fascinating detail – for example, the discussion of the role founding President of the ANC John Langalibaklele Dube and his wife Nokutela, who had lived in the US and met Booker T Washington, played in popularising American spirituals in Africa and in transcribing the first ever Zulu Songbook (Amagama Abantu, 1911) that suggests that deep bonds of conviviality and solidarity around music across the Atlantic existed long before the predominance of recorded sound.
By contrast, her discussion of the ‘pirate practices’ of contemporary ‘Post (Pan) African cultures’ in a later chapter feels a little thin, too reliant on speculative Afro-Futurist literature and oddly silent on the actual music being made in contemporary Africa. A fuller discussion of sonic echoes between Africa and the popular music from across the Black Atlantic (reggae, hip hop, afro-beat or Jungle, perhaps) would seem to fit her overall thesis much better. These latter sections are also based a little too much on (albeit very good) readings of the way music signifies in African film rather than on discussions of musical examples.
The book comes into its own in the middle sections that concern how historic African American music – jazz and soul – plays within emergent African nationalist and pan-Africanist consciousness mid-century. The two central chapters concern, first, how the idea of jazz resonates within the poetry and statecraft of Senegal's great poet-president, and founder of Négritude thought, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and, secondly, how Soul music was received and understood in relation to Ghanaian nationalism in the 1970s. In both cases Jaji elegantly combines close textual analysis of poetry, film and musical events and, true to her ‘stereomodernist’ commitment to complexity, she draws out both the harmonies of trans-Atlantic solidarity and the missed cues and dissonance that attend the messy politics of postcolonial nation-building. Her discussion of Senghor's love affair with jazz is exemplary. Through a skilled exposition of his poetry and essays, Jaji establishes how (a particular, idealised) version of jazz comes to symbolise for the Paris-educated Senghor the essence of blackness, ‘the definitive form of Négritude’ (p. 92) and an ‘index of blackness’ (p. 68). Jaji is fully alive to the ironies: ‘Paradoxically … Senghor's adoption of jazz as a Négritude object par excellence was routed via the colonial metropole, and partially mediated through the Paris-based writers responding to European and Euro-American high modernism's craze for all things negre’ (p. 69).
Jaji applies this sceptical lens to Senghor's 1966 World Festival of the Negro Arts (FESMAN) in Dakar, where she argues that jazz was presented as an ‘over-determined signifier in discussions of blackness’ (p. 90). She cites the journalist Hoyt Fuller, who asked why a festival of black arts in the mid-1960s could find room for Duke Ellington but not Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis or LeRoi Jones, and her analysis suggests how a conservative, nostalgic, even essentialist Négritude could work hand in hand with US state department imperatives to ‘minimise the festival's potential for launching a more political pan-Africanism’ (p. 104). Jaji rounds off this passage with a lovely vignette: guest-of honour at FESMAN was the French writer and Minister of Culture Andre Malraux who, in his opening speech, praised Africa as the cradle of black artistic and musical creation, but posited the music of America, blues and jazz, as the supreme achievement of living black culture. The speech gave, as Jaji notes dryly, ‘the odd implicit suggestion that Africa had no music of its own to speak of’ (p. 90).
Paul Gilroy inaugurated Black Atlantic scholarship around twin poles – the recovery of a lost and vibrant ‘counter-cultural’ history that would change forever our conceptions of modernity and its futures, and a repudiation of overly fixed notions of racial or ethnic purity. From the start, Black Atlantic scholarship was to be alive to the inescapabilty of hybridity and intermixture, and remain alert to the fact that these processes are contentious, uneven and frequently paradoxical. With Africa in Stereo, Tsitsi Ella Jaji has, with admirable subtlety and a poet's ear, significantly extended the reach of Black Atlantic scholarship while staying true to this original, sceptical, complex, stereoscopic vision. That's quite an accomplishment.
