A difficult question that scholars focusing on the study of Cuba face is how to adequately represent the complexities of its culture. As Alexandra T. Vazquez—a child of the Cuban diaspora—has noted in the Introduction to Listening In Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (2013), scholars have tried to find qualities that solidify Cuban culture into a definitive set of practices, often erasing the diverse identities that form Cuba’s national and international community. The strive to define Cubanidad also creates a false essentialism, and one of the solutions to this problem is Vazquez’s invitation to a detailed listening of Cuban musicality.
To listen in detail to Cuban music, according to Vazquez, is to consider “the ways that music and the musical reflect—in flashes, moments, sounds—the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present of Cuba as much as the creative traditions that impact and impart from it” (4). This theorization of listening is also a method that resists totality of academic argument, honoring the quality of being in a detail’s simplicity. This theoretical gesture creates room for more permutations of Cubanidad: “Totalizing attempts to define what and who Cuba is have long inspired possessive attachments to it. When approached through it’s details, and not via the overbearing bombast typical of any nationalism, Cuba offers creative furrows for being and belonging” (7). The greatest contribution of the introduction is the gift of a method that strives to resist totality, critiquing in praxis US imperialist forms of knowledge production.
A key suggestion of the introduction is that Cubanidad is a performance. Even the exiled queer novelist Severo Sarduy has pointed to the performativity of Cubanidad in De donde son los cantantes(1967), a novel that uses the logics of sound to theorize constructions of space in Cuba’s landscape. Sarduy also does two important things: he criticizes gender by exaggerating it on the body of his not-quite-human characters and communicates what he believes is the fragmentary quality of Cuban culture by composing seemingly unconnected scenarios. The logics of sound, Vazquez beautifully proves, was also a great tool for the now lesser known but very influential Cuban playwright Maria Irenes Fornés, who felt artistically “oiled” by the sounds of Olga Guillot’s Añorando el Caribe (23). What Vazquez is pointing readers to are the details, these logics of sound, that are often missed or dismissed by critics searching for more obvious markers of Cubanidad. Musical details and the logics of Cuban sound as performative tools for the construction of identity, fluid or otherwise, are the subject of Vazquez’s inconclusive study.
At the heart of Chapter One is a critique and reevaluation of the work that anthologies do. Tracing a brief history of the anthology and its function during colonialism and after the formation of nation states, Vazquez claims that anthologies have been an exercise in defining national boundaries. Examining Alfredo Rodríguez’s Cuba Linda(1996), a musical anthology as she puts it, Vazquez extends Cubanidad outside national boundaries, illustrating how Rodríguez’s music is in companionship with jazz in the US, for example, through a performative reflection of sound on the page. Sound migrates, and a sonic anthology would have to account how these migrations transgress and transform national boundaries.
Chapter Two begins with a discussion of the subversive intellectual and the difficulty she represents for the academy. On the one hand, the academy needs her subversive work, but it cannot deal with the weight of her messy, unstable methods and methodologies, needless to say the material she works with. For Vazquez, this notion of the subversive intellectual is embodied by the music of and recorded oral histories by Graciela Pérez, a jazz singer who would have traveled the world by the time she was in her twenties. The chapter, while centering on Pérez’s work and her relationship to Vazquez, offers us a meditation on the work that we as striving subversive intellectuals must do: “There are no prescriptive because the subversive intellectual leaves none behind. Which is not to say that there are no rules. Openness seems to be inarguable condition. One has to go beyond reliable critical locations, listen a little harder, feel comfortable with flexible theories. A willingness to become trained in their methods of insurgence, escape, and risk taking is required” (95). Vazquez prescribes intellectual vulnerability as a tool for destabilizing the violent totalities of our productions.
I leave you with an invitation to listen in detail to the work of Celia Cruz, Alexander Abreu, Krudas Cubensi, Los Van Van, and Orishas. Some of these artists were exhiled, some are queer, and some are bound to the island.
CeliaCruz , Yo Vivire
Abreu, Me Dicen Cuba
Krudas Cubensi:
Los Van Van, Amiga Mia
Orishas: Cuba Isla Bella
Abreu, Conga Pa' Cerrar
Tengan pa’ que se entretenga (Suggested outside materials)
The Rest I Make Up (A film about Maria Irene Fornés)
Lissette,
ReplyDeleteIn the specific context of your asking us to listen in detail to some of the artists you linked, I thought I'd take some of the ideas and practices we saw today (particularly in the context of "Cuba Linda") and see how that might reveal aspects of the video by Odaymara Cuesta and Olivia Prendes that I might not have otherwise caught. Two things in particular stick out, keeping in mind the importance of details over finding more traditional forms of meaning and totality.
1) The way that the editing and rapid cutting functions reminded me of "Cuba Isla Bella," and seems like both a gesture toward showing a wide swath of people, spaces, and objects that capture aspects specifically of Havana (considering the emphasized line of "Havana I love you, Havana I love you, " and other references sprinkled throughout), as well as a refusal to allow a sustained singular look at the artists, which plays well int othe politics of being looked at that plays into a lot of queer experiences. In the beginning, this is paired with a more quickly delivered sequence of lines beginning with "in each crevice a flower, in each shit a color," pointing to the incommensurability of any thing or space or marginal object, a kind of endless depth that itself pushes against some of the totalities that Vazquez is also challenging.
2) The fact that the artists are rapping seems to speak to the transnational in a way similar to what you emphasize as key to anthologies, and the challenges to national boundaries that Vazquez finds in jazz. Their focus on Havana becomes a means of detail-as-knowledge, rather than additive (as Professor Owens discussed), and that is only emphasized on their about page: "Hip Hop MCs, representing Womyn, Immigrants, Queers and People of Color action as a central part of world change."
While I lack mounds of cultural context for this work and want to acknowledge that I might be misinterpreting or misunderstanding, I did find this to be a useful means of engaging with some of the themes of the class.
Since class I've been thinking about Imani's distinction between listening IN detail and listening TO a particular detail, in which the former is a critical approach and the latter is a critical method (maybe). What does it mean for a musical detail to "reflect...the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present of Cuba” (4)? Which is in some ways a formal question—is race or geography a form, and if so how does form translate, and if not how does music *give form* to that idea? This helped me re-think Vasquez' Cuba Libre section because what's compelling, actually, contrary to an idea of listening to a single detail, that section "listens in detail" to a variety of details as they come together, so that no one component must bear the legacy of x (where x is any overwhelming shaping force) alone, even as Vasquez' work evades totality. This might help us think, too, about disability and access—not just access to the archival materials, but access to the details. If in class we theorized sound as falling differently on different ears or through vibrations, we can also think about how different technologies of sound—live performance, different media of capture—make available to a listener particular details. How does use wear out a record, for example, or a digital "remastering" generate new details whose temporality is neither new nor old but built out of both?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how much my comment will get to the meat of it, but to jump off of Sam's question--"is race or geography a form, and if so how does form translate, and if not how does music *give form* to that idea?"--I wanted to think about how racial ideologies can be and are imparted through conceptions of "everyday" things we take for granted. For instance, from Professor Reich's class, Black Time, and in reading part of Bliss Cua Lim's Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique for another class last semester, I've been thinking about how racial ideologies are wrapped up in Western interpretations of time, i.e. living in the past, backwardness, progressive linear (capitalist) time, etc. And of course, the same can be said for conceptions of space and geography, particularly if we think of geography as related to the studies protocol (Vazquez, 56) that Spillers talks about and, therefore, as a discipline that naturalizes its own methodologies until they become a "taken for granted, natural" way to view the world. In other words, in reference to the question Sam raised, I wonder if what music can potentially do--and I think Vazquez would say that that potential also depends upon our listening in/to detail--is "explode" (Vazquez, 66-67) these forms themselves. I think that from Vazquez's work we can certainly see that in particular circumstances music explodes dominant notions of geography and diaspora. In many ways, we get examples from Vazquez that show that music can even explode the generic lenses through which we read it (i.e. Vazquez's discussion of how Jazz Studies often codifies the genre in ways that exclude "the Spanish tinge" as something additional if anything).
ReplyDeleteI am persuaded by a methodology that invests a substantial amount of its energy and attentions toward what something does, as opposed to what something is. In class I noted the many descriptive variants used to explain, access, and expand on "listening in detail." These variants included nurturative, playful, indefinitive, fugitive, and fragmented, among others. We also employed phrases, our own and borrowed from Vazquez, such as “instructive failure” and “the practice of deferral.” All of these gesture toward what something does or is doing. Similarly, Liz’s presentation also asked us to abandon our teleological tendencies and attachments, and instead participate in the temporal thrum of music, dance, and performance. For one who cannot speak/understand (hear?) Spanish, I relied on other ways of engaging (listening to) the presentation. Meaning, I listened for the cues through the songs’ instrumentals, its moods and cadence. I participated through the cracks and fissures of my own experience. And while there is discomfort there—don’t we all prefer to understand than not to—I remember how Vazquez describes her methodology early on as a “method not invested in possession or clarification” (24). That is, Vazquez and Liz showed us the importance of attending to something that does, to immersing ourselves in uncertainty, and to relinquishing our demands on a controlled hermeneutics.
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ReplyDeleteLike many of us, what I found most captivating about Vazquez’s book is her presentation of the very theory of listening in detail. As Lisette’s blog post points out, “The theorization of listening is also a method that resists totality of academic argument, honoring the quality of a detail’s simplicity.” Although, in my opinion, Vazquez seems to make listening in detail seem easy, even it means not coming to concrete conclusions or having all, or any, of the answers, I wonder how possible it is for us who are in academia to practice this consistently and successfully. I think that—traditionally—there is a constant pressure to feel as if an argument must have an authoritative and very finalized point in order to be legitimate, but this is exactly what Vazquez is pushing against. This resistance is quite a necessary attitude given the fact that really, any phenomenon that an academic may choose to theorize on, like Cuban music, race, history, political violence, the idea of nation, etc., can never have a finite or concrete definition because essentially, they are processes.
ReplyDeleteThis is very much true for a Caribbean country like Cuba, which from a U.S imperial standpoint, is romanticized as an exotic place stuck in time whose artistic production is also commodified to fit this discourse of exoticism. This notion of Cuba, as Vazquez talks about, keeps us from actually listening to what this music is saying, and thus the importance of her former professor’s question, “’But what do the musicians actually sound like?’”. She goes on to say, “to not listen to what the performers are doing—regardless of how they were packaged and traded on and off the island—would be to enact another kind of violence” (11). This definitely reminds me of Hartman’s article, the issue of the archive, and the harm and violence that attempting to rescue lost voices or stories does to such silenced subjects. By imposing a constructed identity—although implied as natural—on these entities, their meanings or purposes become misconstrued and sometimes completely eviscerated. I think it would be interesting to further discuss how we might be able to read these silences (which carry their own forms of communication) and dwell in the discomfort of not finding an immediate and clear response to what presumably lost voices or, on the other hand, very present and reproducible sounds, might be trying to tell us.
In reflecting upon the Vogel reading, Lissette’s performances, and the rich posts before me, I am struck first by the possibly frustrating necessity (“necessary evil”) that is articulating a working definition in a piece of scholarship, field, or course. As Lissette notes via Vogel, a definition can create a false essentialism (I also appreciate the critique of anthologies as exercise in defining/solidifying boundaries, national or otherwise). In terms of other instances in which I have encountered this negotiation of definition, I am reflecting upon the stark difficulty of mobilizing as a class to engage Afro-Pessimism and AfroFuturism -- which I understand to be somewhat foundationally undefined and undefinable -- without a common starting point of “working definition,” stress on the adaptability of the modifier “working.” Secondarly, at Julian’s book launch for “Histories of the Transgender Child,” they stated that they specifically did not define the parameters for “transgender” in this text, which is another alternative (and seems to have worked?). In terms of the function/practicality of non-definition in the Academy, Vasquez (as Lana rightly notes) generally thwarths (if perhaps at times in a self-sabotaging, that is to say wonderfully and responsiblyrisky, fashion) a traditional and constant “pressure to feel as if an s if an argument must have an authoritative and very finalized point in order to be legitimate” (Lana). I’ve been thinking this year about the role of refused, qualified, or mediated methodology -- refused, qualified, or mediated hermeneutics, mappings, metaphors -- in writing “about” materialities, affects, lives, and imaginaries which I don’t ethically agree with containerizing or “subjecting” to structural analysis or imposed logics.
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by details’ capacity to render implosion (to point towards, or function as, fissures). The “flashes, moments, sounds” of the text read to me (sound to me, feel to me) in terms of emergence and vital and vibrant materiality (re the latter, see Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter). I also find details’ role in archival practices (receptibility to the archive/archives) to be significant, as Campt will discuss. I appreciate Caitlin’s tracking of our class’ rhetorics regarding “listening in detail,” and the resulting suggested alliance between the playful and nurturative with the fugitive and fragmented (thereby also the “demonic,” see Katherine McKittrick Demonic Grounds : Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle).
I also want to take this time to affirm Sam and Yasmine’s respective analyses/incorporations of race as form and discussions of time (ie anachronism), respectively.