Paul Gilroy, 'Modern Tones'
In: Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. Jointly published by the Hayward Gallery, the Institute of International Visual Arts and the University of California Press, 1997, pp. 102-109.
It has been observed that enslaved Africans were first coerced into the monumental edifice of Western culture through a doorway provided by the Christian church. The part that their musical creativity has played since then, in making that confinement endurable and negotiating ways out of it, has been less extensively commented upon. Tracking attitudes to black musics - sacred, secular and profane - through debates about modernity and aesthetic modernism is a difficult task because modern aesthetics have not just mirrored the principles of racial differentiation produced in other fields of equally specialised but less innocent knowledge. Modern aesthetics repeatedly produced and sanctioned the spurious truths of an unjust racial order. Blacks, 'negroes', appeared regularly in writing about the nature and essence of Western art. Racial difference was repeatedly cited where critics pondered the inability of non-Europeans to produce legitimate and therefore authentic art. These distinctions were often, though by no means always, expressed in the opposition between primitive and civilised. They became central to modern specifications of exactly what art should comprise. [1]
Black modernism, to which music was central, presents an interesting repudiation of these compromised aesthetic schemes. It was 'initialised' by the catastrophic violence of slavery that kept its progenitors at a distance from literacy and logo-centric selfhood, and shaped by the creative musical opportunities that were offered as partial compensation for forced exile from the world of writing. These characteristics should make it obvious that the distinctive patterns of culture and communication found in the transnational web of the modern black atlantic would not be dominated by literature. It may be less obvious that the black atlantic's world of sound would be so actively and consistently counterposed to the world of texts and that it could sometimes conscript the visual arts into struggles against the power of racialised rationality and imagination invested in writing and print technology.
[...]
Harlem would find a new role as the capital of a black world. It would localise aspirations towards nationhood even if a throughgoing alternative nationality was impracticable. From its first imaginings this work of cultural and political reconstruction was marked by conflict over its scope. Would it be something more than a narrowly American operation? Harlem, the great black metropolis, could nurture the life of an emergent people, provide a crucible for their cosmopolitan consciousness and their historic obligations, both to their own special nature and to the wider world. Harlem would form the majestic kernel of a novel modern enterprise, bringing new life to the race after the slumbers of New World slavery and the catastrophic shock of adaptation to impoverished life in America's cities. However as putative capital of the black world, it would have to be recognised as having significant ties to populations in other parts of the world. These groups were bonded together not by some conveniently automatic mechanism of race consciousness but by a novel sense of blackness as a hemispheric, indeed planetary, phenomenon.
[...]
However attractive the noble goal of cultural and communal consolidation was framed by the African-American elite, it was hard to square with the messy, conflictual and chaotic character of urban life. The city's growth created new Harlemites not only from the West Indies but from the South and other rural areas. That rich and volatile mixture yielded not pure, seamless or spontaneous articulation of black America's world-historic, national spirit. There was only an unstable blend for which Garvey's dynamic Ethiopianism would provide a contradictory expression in the political field. The cultural content of Garveyism was not critical, cosmopolitan or revolutionary. The Garveyites' martial music, pomp, costume and spectacular ritual represented a sustained attempt to quell, discipline and perhaps eviscerate a disorderly, black population. Their drilled uniformity invited Harlemites to measure up to the exalted behavioural and moral standards demanded by the obligation to reshape men, women and families en route to a comprehensive rebuilding of race and nation. Whatever their triumphs and qualities, work done by Garvey and his followers repudiated many of the defining qualities of a spontaneous 'low down and dirty' folk culture in favour of a commitment to racial uplift via the process of building and moulding character.
For the most part, as Garvey's political foes, the more respectable apostles of the 'New Negro' were only reluctantly bonded to their opponents' vision by seriousness, bourgeois propriety and an enthusiasm for complete rupture with the oppressive patterns of the past. [5] Their revolution led towards a different goal in which blacks would be reconciled to class and status hierarchies and other intraracial inequalities rather than having those divisions dissolved in the unanimity of shared and reified racial difference. Theories about black art and culture played a significant role in producing this outcome. There was a sharp divergence between those who emphasised that black music was a folk form in transition towards varieties of high cultural expression that could demonstrate the overall worth of the race, and others who saw it instead as a sophisticated urban and cosmopolitan phenomenon of an inescapably modernist type. The former view found confirmation in a reading of spirituals, while the latter turned instead towards jazz.
[...]
[1] 'How often we hear it said that a European Beauty would not please a Chinese or even a Hottentot, in so far as the Chinaman has quite a different conception of beauty from the Negro, and the Negro in turn from the European, and so forth. Indeed, if we look at the works of art of those non-European peoples ... they may appear to us as the most gruesome idols, and their music may sound as the most horrible noise ...' G.W.F Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, translated by B. Bosanquet (1886), Penguin Books, 1993, p. 50.
[5] '... by the evidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at last spiritually free, and offer through art an emancipating vision to America', Alain Locke, 'Negro Youth Speaks', in The New Negro (1925) Athenaeum, New York, 1968, p. 53.