Playlist(s) Inspired by Carrie Mae Weems Talk

Hi folks!

I just wanted to drop these links, which hopefully both work.

I re-made my original Spotify playlist since it had since been amended to include some of my personal (and embarrassing, haha) additions. I've made this playlist both public and collaborative, meaning that anyone with Spotify and this link can add to it! I was thinking, if folks wanted to, they could add other songs that we've discussed in the course and as they come up, so that this playlist could function as a soundtrack for/later reminder of this wonderful course! (also, i couldn't remember which Stevie Wonder song she mentioned, so i just included my own personal favorite--but please add/correct me if you do remember!)

https://open.spotify.com/user/1230032730/playlist/3czGvMlp1yzrIAOiYcPhL1?si=kmJVy6dlTvO1m1bfKqRZcg

& In case people do not have Spotify, I've also made a youtube playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLccnNFeRcdfkV93WN5PvO1bPDzUUj3SS1

I took some liberties in including live stuff with various other features/tangentially related performances here, since I think it is interesting to compare the live performances to each other (i particularly was struck by the beginning bit of Aretha and Andy Williams (of all people) discussing how radically different their interpretations of "gentle on my mind" are, and Aretha's assurance: "don't let that bother you")

See you all next week!

-Jane

Blackness, Truth and Nothingness: The Thinking Voice(s) of Ruth Fernández and Lucecita Benítez in Puerto Rico’s Twentieth Century Musical Imaginary /Lana E. Sims

Taking from Heidegger’s essay, “What is Called Thinking?,” Fiol-Matta establishes the concept of the thinking voice, or “an event that can be apprehended through but is not restricted to music performance. It exceeds notation, musicianship, and fandom, although it partakes of them all. No artist owns the thinking voice; it cannot be marshalled at will or silenced when inconvenient” (173). Although the author expands on the thinking voice mostly in Lucecita’s chapter, I would also like to highlight the thinking voice manifested through Ruth Fernández as a token Black voice during the twentieth century in Puerto Rican society and as a political vehicle to promote an ideal of racial unity. Furthermore, appreciating the fact that Fiol-Matta’s conceptualization of the thinking voice is quite broad and abstract, I imagine it as also constituting an assemblage in which many contradictory phenomena can exist at the same time to create something that is not easily definable or articulable, but perhaps detectable at moments through musical performance. In this presentation, I focus on Ruth Fernández’s contradictory sociopolitical role as the first so-called authentic Black voice of Puerto Rico, who, while seemingly breaking racial barriers in society, was musically stifled by demands of the white elite, eager to be entertained, and at times, also seemed to internalize associations of blackness with the grotesque, cheap and undesirable. Similarly, I also talk about Lucecita’s constantly changing image, first as a model of mainstream American consumerism and later as the poster child of political dissonance, against her affirmations of truth and nothingness. In the end, I want to get us to think about what their thinking voice is trying to think through or transmit to us. What is your definition of the thinking voice? Is it detectable in the performances below?

In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye coins the term racializing assemblages, from Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualization of assemblage (or agencement in French) defined as “continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of spasmodic networks between different entities (content) and their articulation within ‘acts and statements’ (expression)….Assembleges are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on” (46). Weheliye defines racializing assemblages, on the other hand, as constituting components that create constructed racial categories that over time come to appear natural. I think that both the concept of assemblage, coined by Deleuze and Guattari, and the racial component that Weheliye adds to this are helpful in understanding what I perceive as the thinking voice in both singers. 

Throughout the chapter “So What if She’s Black?” Fiol-Matta constantly questions whether Fernández used racial discourse as merely an artistic and political tool or as a reflection of her own self-perception. Although in earlier interviews, even up until her transition into politics in the 1970s, the singer often claimed that she had never experienced racism, keeping with the ELA (estado libre asociado, or in English, commonwealth) discourse of Puerto Rico as a territory virtually devoid of racism. However, in later interviews, Fernández confesses to not even being aware of her blackness until one of her schoolteachers prohibited her from going on a choir trip simply because she was the only Black girl in the group. A passionate speech by her grandmother on perseverance in the face of racial prejudice then leads to her now infamous tagline “so what if I’m Black?” (104). Surely, Fernández knew that blackness—or racism— in Puerto Rico, although not talked about or recognized—represented a much graver issue than her “so what?” persona might lead one to think. Despite Fernández’s insistence on the fact that she did not just want to sing music that made people dance, but something that made people really stop and listen to her voice, which she managed to do by resorting to the semiclassical genre, her earlier releases of Afro-Cuban music, her musical interpretation of “Y tu abuela onde etá,” and her role in the Cuban operetta Cecilia Valdés as the slave woman Dolores Santa Cruz in the 1930s and 1940s, had clearly marked her as representing a certain cultural primitiveness, an “acousmatic blackness” as Fiol-Matta calls it (84). Even songs of black identity affirmation like “Yo soy la que soy” and “Yo soy mulata” strongly indicated her role as an Afro-Puerto Rican songstress commissioned by the ELA to diffuse the anti-Black racism prevalent in Puerto Rican society. As Fiol-Matta asserts, there is inevitably sorrow, pain and disappointment that constitutes her “So what if I’m black?” and her affirmative “I always make people want me” (103). Through this triumphant diva attitude is an assemblage of personal experiences, racial imaginaries and state business that does indeed leave a gap in the thinking voice. What exactly was her voice, what other voices were superimposed on hers, and is it even possible or productive to separate them?

Coinciding with Fernández’s declaration, “negra, ¿y qué?” in the making of the thinking voice(s) of these great woman singers is Lucecita’s “I am nothing.” Taken from an interview done in 1974, Fiol-Matta highlights the definition of nothing that the singer fervently implies, suggesting that “she was not legibility, but potentiality. She could not be generalized: She was singular” (3). Indeed, from the very start of her career in the 1960s Lucecita herself, as well as the molders of the music industry who tried to match the young pop sound with the political sentiments of the time in Puerto Rico (Operation Bootstrap, a burgeoning middle class). Her transformation from a youthful, girly and very moldable singer into a mature, melodramatic, and at times aesthetically “masculine” artist reveals just how much this notion of nothingness, a fluid, even rhizomatic identity, shaped her career and her public reception, often in very misunderstood ways. Due to her beliefs in truth and freedom across any and all boundaries, as manifested through her activity in leftist political groups and her public support for the Cuban Revolution, Lucecita was essentially blacklisted in the 1970s, her name slandered in the Puerto Rican press and her career—at least in a commercial sense—almost completely ruined. The 1980s saw a comeback, but only within the confines of the dominant cultural trends of the time, relegating Lucecita again to a place where her voice became nothing more than a source of pure entertainment, her next albums mainly targeting the middle-upper class crowd and the nostalgia market.  Lucecita’s notion of sonic truth, described by Fiol-Matta is “a moment of suspension when the listener was completely keyed into her voice, subordinating the social content, the symphonic arrangement, the conductor’s authority, everything to that moment of transmission and reception, creating a fugitive subjectivity” (212). One might say that this truth ultimately fizzled towards the latter part of her career. Just as the singer had stated years earlier, she could sing, but she could not speak (199). Much like Ruth Fernández, Lucecita did not just want her voice to be danced to, she wanted to call people’s attention, to create silences in the crowd, and to have them really listen. I think that it might be interesting to think of not just those heart-stopping performative moments as constituting the thinking voice, but to also consider those times of restraint and cultural conformity in both Fernández’s and Benitez’s careers as constituting a chain of performative assemblages in an untold racialized, feminine Puerto Rican history.

For the activity in class, I will have everyone watch the following three videos, the first, a live performance of Lucecita’s award winning “Génesis” at Carnegie Hall, and the last two, performances by Lucecita and Ruth Fernández singing in movies. I would like you to first ask yourself, based on Fiol-Matta’s definition, or your own thoughts and experiences: what is the/a thinking voice? What does it sound like, and what does it do? Can you think of any other artists who have iconic or even very little-known songs and performances that transmit your conception of the thinking voice? Secondly, can you perceive a thinking voice in the on-screen performances of these great woman singers? If so, what does it say? How does the intersection of voice, staging, and visuality affect your listening (in general, or compared to live performance, for example)?

 Lastly, if you care to watch the videos now to get a feel for both singers’ performance styles, please do so!

                                                        Lucecita Benítez – “Génesis”

                                                Lucecita Benítez – “Todas las mañanas”

                                               Ruth Fernández – “Yo soy la que soy”

Additional sources cited

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, 2014.

The Grain of the Voice: Listening to Blues Aesthetics (posted by instructor)

"Backwater Blues," Bessie Smith

"Strange Fruit, " Billie Holiday

Temporality and Evidence in Gayl Jones' Corregidora / Yasmine Anderson

Through its concern with historicity, the unboundedness of the past and its claims on the present, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora almost constantly performs a sort of temporal collapse; however, rather than doing so only to highlight history’s hold, it draws our attention to the subsumption of particularly located bodies under the wave of the slave trade and its reverberations. There are three examples I want to specifically point out here. 

The first is when Cat is talking to Ursa and she tells her about the white woman and man she works for. Cat says, “‘You don’t know what it’s like to feel foolish all day in a white woman’s kitchen and then have to come home and feel foolish in the bed at night with your man. I wouldn’t a mind the other so much if I didn’t have to feel like a fool in the bed with my man’” (64). Cat functions as the moving body that links the space of the kitchen and the bedroom as well as the bodies of her man, the white woman, and the white woman’s husband. This collapse works to establish Cat’s feeling of foolishness as an affective through-line. 

The second example occurs as Ursa’s mother is telling her about her conception.  After describing a scene of mounting sexual tension between herself and Ursa’s father, she says, “‘It was like my whole body wanted you, Ursa’” (116). In a moment that may work against the grain of our expectations, the novel gives us Ursa’s mother’s desire for Ursa. Ursa’s body fills the space we might expect her father’s to fill as the object of desire. Thus, the novel complicates traditional paradigms for thinking desire by highlighting the erotics of kinship and generational yearning.

In the third example, Ursa’s mother is speaking, but the story she is telling is that of Ursa’s Great Gram. Great Gram is talking through the voice of Ursa’s mother about the black man that is escaping while Corregidora is fucking her. She says, “‘He must’ve been fucking me while they was chasing after him’” (127) and later “‘And then somehow it got in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boy’s feets running. And then when he come, it meant they caught him…’” (128). I find this to be one of the most compelling examples of collapse. In one sense, we have the collapse of the actual speaker since Great Gram speaks through the body of Ursa’s mother, but we also have the narration of the collapse between the scene in bed and the escape scene outside, the moving body of Corregidora and the moving body of the black man escaping.  It is important to note that all of these examples are rendered through stories—Cat’s, Ursa’s mother’s, and Great Gram’s via Ursa’s mother—which allows us to think about the way in which these bodily and spatial subsumptions are made possible within the particular space of the story.  

In turning to look at how evidence and witnessing function in the novel, it is clear that stories told from one generation to another become a valuable evidentiary vehicle.  How do we think through non-legal evidence, evidence not validated by court systems or, on a broader level, by the knowledge legitimation practices of dominant culture? What evidence or evidences are permissible? What gets a hearing? Ursa remembers being told “‘They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to to burn what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood’” (72). What I find interesting here is that this quote comes close after the conversation where Sal tells Ursa that she can pass not for white but for, “Spanish or something” (70).  Therefore, the proximity of this memory to the conversation about passing between Sal and Ursa establishes a connection between passing and passing down. Ursa’s anxiety about the evidence that she does not visibly bear on her body as a potentially passing woman is connected to her anxieties about her inability to fulfill the genealogical call of passing evidence down. 

This is a very brief illustration of some of the themes that I find most compelling in Jones’ Corregidora, so I invite you to continue thinking through form, temporality, and evidence (as well as whatever else you’d like to!) in the comments.  How does the blues manifest itself in the textual space of the novel? I will be talking more about Roland Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” in my presentation and in relation to the activity, but does Corregidora foreground stylistic, temporal, dialogic, performative, expressive, affective, etc. modes that allow us to resist relegating our conversations to “communication, representation, expression, everything which it is customary to talk about” (Barthes, 182)?  If we were to attempt to unhinge ourselves from the definitions of permissible evidence most present in dominant culture, or even in the academy more specifically, and to instead look to Corregidora to give us a conception of evidence, what would that look like? What kinds of meaning-making structures would we come up against? 

Below are two of the songs explicitly mentioned in the novel:

Trouble in Mind, sung by Nina Simone (Jones, 44)

The Broken Soul Blues, sung by Ma Rainey (Jones, 159)

Upcoming Events: March and April 2019

Tues, March 19: DIANA TAYLOR (2 events)

Please note that Diana Taylor's main lecture and grad student workshop will take place onTuesday, March 19. See details below:

March 19, 2019 - 12:00pm to 6:00pm

Grad Student Workshop
12 - 2 pm •  William Pitt Union 527
Text: Performance, (Duke UP, 2016)

Main Lecture: Dead Capital
4 - 6 pm • University Club, Conference Room B

“Bom Retiro 958 metros,” a performance by Brazil’s theatre company, Teatro da Vertigem, leads us on a walk through São Paulo’s phantasmagoric world of things -things in a state of consumer glory, in use, in disuse, and in various stages of disintegration. This experiential piece challenges many of our assumptions about the desire to accumulate, transform, archive, and collect ‘things’ as we move through the underside of an immigrant neighborhood. What circulates? What remains, and what we assume disappears from culture?

Tues Mar 20 and Thurs Mar 21: Claudia Rankine (2 events)

Community Writing Workshop: Weds, Mar 20 @ 7pm at Alloy Studios (registration required)

Rankine and and Carrie Mae Weems:

Thurs, Mar 21 @7pm

Carnegie Library Lecture Hall
4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, 15213

April 4-6: Conference: Empire and its Aftermath: Transhispanic Dialogues on Diaspora. Multiple locations/times on campus. Click Link: Empire and Its Aftermath

April 11-13. Conference: Representations of Afro-Latinidad. (multiple locations on campus) 

Info in Link:Representations of Afrolatinidad Program and Registration

Henriques' Methodology of Listening/ Brittney Knotts

In Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques offers an invitation to "become a listener" (xvii). While the book is focused on dancehall, I am interested in Henriques' claim that "thinking through sounding is relevant well beyond the particular example of the Jamaican sounds system" (xxvii). Henriques goes on: "There is a distinct and different way of thinking expressed through sounding. This emerges from the intimate nature of the relationship between sound and embodiment, one that is only matched by that between vision and the disembodied mind…"(xxvii).  In this way, while paying attention to sound and sounding may involve images and calculation, it necessarily moves beyond these ways of knowing into embodied ways of knowing—or into "depths rather than surfaces" (xxix). Part of this depth work is the literal "sinking into sound" that brings the person/researcher not only into the deepest of bass/base but also calls for a complete immersion in subject and sound, an acceptance of relationality of which the person/researcher/sound scientist is inevitably a part.

 

In chapter one, Henriques makes a move from sound (n.) to sounding (v.) drawing from Small's concept of musicking and Mackey and Baraka's theories of subjugation of the verb into noun form. Henriques, bringing these scholars together, posits that "the movement from verb to noun can be considered as a process of subjugation, if not oppression" (35) (emphasis mine).  By reclaiming the verb form and all the actions that are encompassed therein, listening expands to include all variations of "black inventiveness," pointing to details that are not typically available for consideration in listening to sound alone (35). At the same time, Henriques is careful to differentiate sounding from musicking, though they do share characteristics. While musicking creates similar Latourian maps of relationships and vibrations beyond hearing, sounding "asks more questions, has a greater disruptive potential—because it escapes the bars and all the other confines of systems of musical meaning" (37). Part of this seems to be because sounding starts at a much smaller level—the vibrations themselves (whether material, corporeal, or sociocultural)—rather than the meta-vibrations of rhythm. Sounding is also decidedly unconcerned with discourse, as Henriques discusses in the preamble.

 

Finally, I want to consider how this basis of sounding and thinking through sounding is espoused as potential methodology in chapter four. Though the chapter starts with the lessons of listening shared between "prento" engineer and teacher, there are meaningful advances toward research methodology offered both through Henriques' understanding of the apprenticeship model as well as his own embodied research in Kingston. He understands his methodology as moving to projects beyond those concerned specifically with sound. He argues that listening implies "a mode of attention" or a way of "giving attention" rather than "simply responding to a stimulus" (100). This mode of attention, as mentioned above, eschews distance in favor of a "sinking into," a "coming forward" rather than a "sitting back" (102). It is through this process of coming forward that brings the researcher into embodiment, literally vibrating from the sonic dominance of the dancehall sounding. With a methodology focused on listening, "participation is simply unavoidable, attesting to listening as a two-way reciprocal process" (107). For Henriques, dancehall sound engineers are simultaneously his group of research subjects and the ideal listeners, occupying a central space between theory and practice, creating a form of grounded theory (more of this on 115). This seems to be Henriques' call for a methodology: an emplaced researcher, balancing monitoring and manipulating, someone as a bridge.

 

I wonder if we can take these ideas and put them together with any of the other readings from this semester or outside of our course. I am personally interested in the potentially liberatory potential of sounding (v.) in conjunction with Vazquez's theory of listening in detail as well as Campt's ideas of listening to "lower frequencies" of images, though I'm not quite sure these texts are asking us to do the same work (but maybe they are in some ways). I am also drawn to overlaps between Sarah Pink's work Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) and Henriques' methodology of listening. Like Henriques, Pink makes extensive use of Ingold and theories of embodied knowledge and learning, destabilizes viewing as the pinnacle of the sensory hierarchy, and is highly concerned with place (and how place is formed through social, sensory, and material contexts). Pink is also interested in participation as research strategy, though she seems to question how this form of knowledge can then be transferred back into the academy. With some of this in mind, I want to think about how we might "become a listener" both with other types of sound as well as with studies that are not grappling with sound as a main factor. How might we imagine Henriques' work expanding beyond the dancehall sound engineers of Jamaica?