Reflections on Joining the Americas: Project Kalinda and the Three Rhetorics

Reflections on Joining the Americas: Project Kalinda and the Three RhetoricsAuthor(s): George BrandonSource: Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 2 (1996), pp. 15-26Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177051 .

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Reflections on Joining the Americas: Project Kalinda and the Three Rhetorics George Brandon

Against a background of theoretical con- troversy and methodological dispute, researchers continue to unearth persisting links between the African continent and black communities of the New World in both the slavery and post-slavery periods. Furthermore, the post-emancipation cultures of blacks in the New World are not only related to Africa by the cultural knowledge that Africans brought with them into the crucible of slavery but they are also related to each other in significant ways and have been for some time. The evidence con- tinues to mount; and the historical picture gets clearer, richer, and more complex; but the contemporary political implications of these cultural facts remain as opaque as ever. This is just as true in black music as anything else.

The new initiative of the Center for Black Music Research, Project Kalinda, con- tinues the general direction of the Center while expanding its research contacts, col- lections, and performance activities. Project Kalinda expands the geographical spread of the Center's operating definition of black music and brings it into relationships with new communities and audiences. The out- ward symbols of this expansion are a grow- ing collection of recordings of music creat- ed by blacks in the Caribbean and Latin America, a new performing ensemble (En- semble Kalinda Chicago) specializing in black music genres from these areas, the publication of Kalinda! newsletter and of a brochure describing the program, and an upcoming conference in the Caribbean with special presentations on topics concerning

Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin musics past and present.

In Project Kalinda, the Center for Black Music Research becomes one location, and Project Kalinda one ongoing forum, through which individual studies can be brought together for comparison, correla- tion, and synthesis on one hand and for presentation to and participation from vari- ous black music communities on the other. While broad synthetic studies are depen- dent on studies of black musics in local communities and networks, I can only see research that attempts to comprehend larg- er units (i.e., ethnic groups, regions, nations, commercial or transnational networks, etc.) as adequate to the task of link- ing studies of black music and black communities to Africa and to each other across time and the Americas.

There are at least three general approaches such studies might take, each asso- ciated with a rhetoric of its own and with implications for theory, method, and cultural practice. These three approaches are cer- tainly not the only possible ones and are not necessarily mutually exclusive; initially they appear to overlap. Nevertheless, I will distinguish them (for they need to be distinguished) by their rhetorics and call them in turn the rhetoric of descent, the rhetoric of variation, and the rhetoric of interaction.

The statements of Project Kalinda pro- grammers, lecturers, and community sup- porters appearing in project publications manifest a number of stances in varying de-



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grees. Indeed, it was dealing with this fact- and with the abstracts of papers for the Caribbean sessions of the upcoming CBMR Conference scheduled for the Virgin Is- lands-that impelled me to elaborate the distinctions I am employing here. The reader should regard these reflections as my own halting steps toward a proposal for a methodological prolegomena for Project Kalinda and the work that lies ahead of it.

The Rhetoric of Descent

The rhetoric of descent looks at the similarities between black communities, cultures, or musics as the continuing effects of a common origin. The model for this process is biological inheritance rather than cultural transmission so that the similarities among black musics can be seen as a set of family resemblances. Offspring resemble their parents because they have inherited physical, emotional, or psychological traits from them. Like father, like son. While sharing any number of traits with both their siblings and their parents, descendants as individu- als may inherit some traits from their parents that their siblings do not have. Offspring are almost never the same as or different from their parents in precisely the same way; and even identical twins, who are physical and genetic replicas of each other, are not exact replicas of their parents.

The rhetoric of descent always has a privileged subject, one that centers every- thing and is therefore subject to essentialism, romanticism, or both. This privileged subject and centering point dons a number of guises. It could be the ancestor from whom all descend (to use the biological metaphor again); it could be the prototypical African music of which all the offspring are variants; or it could be the point of origin from which all the offspring have been dispersed.

Paul Oliver's Savannah Syncopators con-

tains some telling passages illustrating this rhetoric. In the following passage Oliver (1970, 86) states the initial perspective that frames his question:

It is clear from present knowledge that the processes of acculturation and encul- turation are both present in Negro music as we know it, with much of the blues containing elements that come essentially from the European dance and ballad traditions, and yet having a character that is distinct and special.

The notion of descent (here inheritance) provides an answer: "It seems possible that some of the distinctive elements have a history that extends far back into slavery and that they have within them, as this book has attempted to show, some features which may well be inherited from West Africa" (86). The question then becomes one of the prototypical African musical ancestor for the blues. The answer to this question is actually the major thesis for the entire book.

But, it is my contention, not from the "West Africa" that has been assumed in most writings on jazz and related subjects. To summarise, it seems to me that the whole conception of music in the rain forest regions, and especially in the drum orchestras, has little to with the folk music of the American Negro, what- ever it may have to do with jazz.... In contrast to the music of the drum-dominated tribes of the coastal regions, the music of the savannah Sudanic regions appears to have been of a kind that would have accorded well with the Scots and English folk forms and been accept- able enough to have survived among the slaves. (86-87)

In the following passage Oliver takes the rhetoric of descent to one of its possible extremes. Here he attempts to correlate physical traits (mainly facial features) that he dis- cerns among African-American blues



Reflections on Joining the Americas 17

singers with geographical areas in Africa (West African rain forest vs. sub-Saharan savannah) to buttress his case for the savannah origins of inherited blues traits.

To the observer without the benefit of statistical analysis the physical types represented among blues singers are by no means typically West African rain forest, and neither are they consistent within the group. There is little relationship to one type, American Negro or otherwise in say, Leroy Carr, Roosevelt Sykes, Big Joe Williams or Clifton Chenier. On the other hand, some singers, like Big Bill Broonzy, Little Son Jackson, John Lee Hooker, or Sunnyland Slim have features which could merge easily enough among the Ashanti or the Yoruba. Most striking to me, however, is the predominance of certain physical characteristics among a large number of blues singers which re- late closely to those of savannah peoples. The high cheek-bones, long features, narrow jaw-lines and, frequently, straight noses, of a surprisingly large number of blues singers has been previously unre- marked, although applicable to many of them.... Such descriptions could well apply to a large number of blues singers, whose presence in the regions stretching east from Senegal for 1,500 miles would not be physically out of place. (91-93)

This is an equation of physical resemblance = descent = cultural transmission, which is not only subjective and unscientific (which Oliver actually admits) but borders on being outright racist.

Diasporic rhetoric is a subspecies of the rhetoric of descent. It is the rhetoric of descent that privileges Africa as the ancestral homeland and explicates from that center (see Drake 1975.) This is a powerful and compelling rhetoric, but it has an obverse that seems equally compelling-the contributionist rhetoric. Although statements in Project Kalinda's publications reflect a variety of stances, it seems to me that descent

rhetoric dominates and that the contributionist variety of descent rhetoric is the one which has been most prominent in the publications put out by Project Kalinda so far.

In the contributionist rhetoric, the center shifts from apical ancestor(s) to a specific superior descendant and its relationship to other descendants. (In the case of Project Kalinda, this specific descendant is black music of the United States.) Once some historical connection has been substantiated, family resemblances are considered contributions to the culture of the centering group. In the absence of a substantiated historical connection, similarity acts as a trope for one. The narrative is that of a privileged subject for whom other musics are significant only to the degree that they are thought to have contributed to the development of its genres. Sibling or ancestral musics that have not "contributed" to the center disappear from the narrative. Phrased as investigating the contributions of Caribbean and Latin American musics to African- American music means that, for example, Winti music from Suriname Maroons or folk forms of Afro-Peruvian music or Afro- Ecuadorian music won't appear in the narrative since, to my knowledge, no one has ever claimed that any U.S. black music genre derives from any of these sources.

The black musics of the Americas, while traceable ultimately and at least in part to African musics, have changed nonetheless and show characteristics that do not belong to the African musics from which they derived. But time is not the only factor that brings change. The brute forces of displacement and migration promote change. The process of adapting to new social, cultural, and political environments promotes change. Change itself brings on more change. How, then, do we think about these black musics and the aesthetic codes lying behind them? The rhetoric of descent does not have an answer to this question



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other than to trace the differences to another possible ancestor-Europe.

The Rhetoric of Variation

Much research has been oriented toward the musics of nationally based ethnic groups (Suriname Maroons, Afro-Cubans, jazz as a music of U.S. blacks,Jamaican reggae, etc.). This approach shares its origins with, and usually goes along with, the implicit assump- tion that for each of these groups there was but a single musical system or music/culture that was relevant. To assume that each of these monocultural, nationally based, ethnically defined groups is also culturally uniform is entirely consistent with this point of view but projects an ideal of cultural puri- ty that is at odds with history and reality. Multicultural societies could only be seen as somewhat exceptional cases, culturally impure because they are tainted by contact between cultures and by the odor of history. When employed to discuss the black cultures of the Americas, this eventuates in accounts of black subordination and black music that are, as Paul Gilroy (1991, 111- 112) has aptly described them, monocultural, national, and ethnocentric.

The classic conundrum of anthropology consists of the following three statements:

1) Human beings everywhere are the same;

2) Human beings everywhere are different; and

3) Both of the preceding statements are true.

The dialectic of sameness and difference is the foundation of comparison with comparison itself based on the fact of cultural variation. Ideally, comparison can be framed in a way that is decentering and, within the frame, does not privilege any of the subjects compared. Otherwise the comparison becomes subsumed and absorbed in the story

and position of one of the groups to the detriment of the full range of sameness and difference in all the groups. From the point of view of the rhetoric of variation, the lat- ter is an evil thing; for the rhetoric of descent, especially the contributionist variety, it is not. This is not to exalt one over the other. It is simply that one should not be confused. Even if we do not know where we are going, we should be able to say where we are coming from and what we are doing at each moment.

The rhetorics of variation and descent both deal with similarities, but they differ from each other in important ways. The rhetoric of variation is concerned with both similarity and difference equally, while the rhetoric of descent is concerned solely with commonalities. Descent rhetoric is at once narrative and genealogical; variation rhetoric need not be either. The variation frame does not have a center within it; descent rhetoric is usually centered on a founding ancestor, outstanding descendant, or point of departure. In descent rhetoric resemblances are familial, and adaptation to environment is ignored; in variation rhetoric both resemblances and differences come from something that needs to be accounted for and might come from a number of sources that therefore need to be investigat- ed and their proportions of influence understood.

Of the three rhetorics discussed here, the rhetoric of variation seems to be the least pervasive and the least developed. A study embodying one form of this approach, a seldom-cited classic in my opin- ion, is Alan Lomax's article "The Homo- geneity of African-Afro-American Musical Style" (1970). Lomax places Afro-American song style (Afro-American here starting initially with the U.S., then extending through the black music-making communities of the New World) in perspective, first in the context of world song styles, then within the




context of one of the great world musical families.

It must be realized that all the states or traits, represented by all the points on every one of the lines, probably occur with some frequency in every culture. In fact, however, most states are extremely infrequent, because song traditions confine the range of performance behavior within very narrow limits. (185)

However,

When Afro-American song style (so much in dispute among American folk- lorists and musicologists) is studied within a perspective of world song style, it can be seen as a typical member of one African style family, somewhat affected by European acculturation.... Such sweep- ing statements can only be supported or challenged in a context of comparison that includes data from Africa, Western Europe and the New World, both white and black.... Afro-American music, considered as a whole, is a sub-system of a continental Black African style tradition that seems to be one of the most ancient, consistent, and fertile of world musical families. (181)

While specifying common characteristics, Lomax at once makes the case for a unity across the diaspora and for a core tradition that can only be specified in reference to two poles, each of which eventually fades out of the immediate frame of reference into other zones.

This relaxed, repetitive, cohesive, multi- leveled, yet leader-oriented style is dis- tinctively African. It dominates African song from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Gibraltar and west into the American colonies. It is both a source and symbol of African cultural homogeneity.... The African stylistic center lies between the two historic poles of African cultural history-Egypt and the

Mediterranean Civilization to the North, and the culture of the ancient African hunters in the south. (189)

According to Lomax, African Negro areas lie between these two extremes and Afro- American areas tend to go right along with Black African areas in these [African] respects. Lomax then goes on to deal with acculturation. His summary of European influence on Afro-American song style, though apparently simple, is in fact a multi- layered and multidimensional account of cultural variation which accomplishes its goal by systematically shifting between the world, Europe, and Africa as frames of reference.

A line-by-line Cantometric analysis points to one strong influence upon Negro singing in the West-that of Euro- pean folk song. The most distinctive fea- ture of West European song is the straightforward presentation of text- heavy, simple strophes. The Afro-Ameri- can profile varies markedly from that of Africa only in relation to [these] West Eu- ropean features. Afro-America is: (1) the only African area in the first quartile for four-phrase strophes, where Europe leads the world; (2) the only African area below the median for complex litany (all African Bantu areas are in the first quartile here); (3) the only African area above the median on medium-length phrases (here West Europe leads the world); (4) the only area of African heartland in the first quartile for normal accent and above the median on wordi- ness, where Europe is in both respects outstanding; (5) the only African area below the median on fast tempo besides the Guinea coast, which it strongly resem- bles; (6) the highest of all African areas in employing simple meter, an important trait of both West Europe and Africa.

In all other respects, Afir-American style is Cantometrically identical with the core African gardener style. Its two closest congeners are Equatorial Bantu at 85% similarity, and



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Guinea Coast, at 84% similarity. (197; emphasis is Lomax's)

Finally, he links the whole thing together through the results of other analyses.

The song styles of black communities in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, the United States, and many West Indian Islands have been similarly studied Cantometri- cally. All adhere closely to the core Black African model, some even more closely than Haiti. The telltale stylistic pattern ... is everywhere dynamically in evi-

dence, not only in the musical folk communities, . . . but also in the rich and var- ied black urban musical traditions. This is not merely a matter of survival of confor- mity to a blindly accepted heritage from the past. This is an ongoing, highly crys- tallized approach to communication and to interaction which has brought new music and new cultural developments to live in all American black communities. (201)

It is noteworthy that Lomax is able to ac- complish this grand unifying gesture without one reference to notions of descent or inheritance. Here resemblance does not serve as trope for descent but is simply similarity. In variation rhetoric resemblances are not familial but serial and are formed chain- like between and among separate distinct entities that are both similar to and different from others.

The question of how we deal with the cultural analysis and political implications of variation between and within the black musics is closely related to the question of how we should deal with the analysis and political implications of variation within and between black communities and within larg- er units they may comprise whether they be nations, regions, or diasporas. The question of the analytical status of variation is about whether comparison is valid, appropriate, or even possible. It is also about whether one

wishes to confront the system and processes that generate, maintain, and undermine this diversity or deny them. Confrontation inevitably takes one through the music into the realms of race, class, gender, and ethnicity and their influences on musical concepts, content, and expression. Not every- one wants to go there, and for all its virtues, which I believe are considerable, studies such as Lomax's do not go there or deal with these questions.

A capitalist economic system dominated and controlled by Europeans brought African, European, and Asian peoples together in the Americas. Beyond this sheer volume of migration and culture contact, colonial systems entrapping both the mi- grating groups and the original inhabitants of the lands made it impossible for any of them to preserve their former cultures intact. Continuity and disruption, disintegra- tion, death, and survival in the crosscurrents of five hundred years of social and cultural change are what we are actually dealing with here-a history scouring the face of both the oppressed and the oppressor. Whether in the form of political divisions, economic inequality and poverty, ethnic group stereotypes, or racial and religious hostility, difference and division became fundamental and culture an ideological battleground (Wallerstein 1990; Nettleford 1986).

Incorporating diverse groups into fluid- ly class-structured, racially and ethnically stratified societies produced a great deal of cultural variation within each of the colonies, much of which has persisted into the present. Most of the postcolonial world-and all multiethnic or multiracial societies-are in a situation in which the ideological, ethnic, racial, and economic conflicts existing within their highly differ- entiated cultural systems are all expressed by a common set of symbols and concepts. As a result, the fundamental cultural cate-




gories people use are very rich and diverse in meaning but are also internally inconsis- tent. In the Americas, where the cultural traditions of Africans could neither be con- tinued entirely intact nor smoothly integrat- ed into a harmonious national culture, this kind of cultural variation has taken a char- acteristic form recognized only recently by some researchers as an intersystem or cultural continuum (Brandon 1990; Brandon 1993; Drummond 1980, 353).

In a cultural continuum the differences in thought and expression among groups derive in part from a shared pool of ideology, tradition, and experience. But people re- late to this pool differently because of their place in society and their place on the continuum. The reality of the intersystem then is in the bridges or transformations neces- sary to get from one end of the intersystem to the other. It is from this perspective that we can look at what happened when Afri- can, Amerindian, and European musics and musicians encountered each other in the Americas and produced the range of black musics seen in each place. In such a situation the systematic nature of culture must be located in the relationships that, through a series of gradations or transformations and situational adjustments, link one intersystem with another (Drummond 1980, 370).

Mervyn Alleyne has developed the notion of the cultural continuum in his treat- ment ofJamaican language, religion, and music and takes an integrative approach by considering these three aspects of a single complex or focus.

Parallels exist between language, religion, and music inJamaica, both structurally and functionally. The distinction between deep and surface structure is useful in all three fields. In each case, the deep structure is African, while surface structure is influenced by other cultures with which

Africans have been in contact. This distinction enables us to go beyond the view thatJamaican culture is a mere mixing (or synthesis or syncretism) of African and European forms and to deal with it instead as a process; it enables us to ex- plain this process rather than just list or describe objects. In religion, deep struc- tural meaning is rendered by surface form; in language, deep structure syntax is distinguished from surface vocabulary; and in music, rhythm is distinguished from melody. (Alleyne 1988, 149)

Generalizing his approach leads to the idea that this contact with Europe was experi- enced in different ways by individual slaves and groups of slaves and resulted in a continuum of variation in music that could be described in terms of the density of Euro- pean elements found in the African-based rhythmic structure. He notes the direction of change: "the population has 'moved' in the course of history along the line of the continuum, 'losing' forms close to the base culture derived from Africa; this process is continuing even now" (91).

Named genres are merely zones ab- stracted from this musical continuum and are themselves subject to variation. Similar points were made by Charles Keil in reference to black music in the United States. For example, Keil (1966, 32) distinguishes three broad subdivisions or genres with black music in the United States: "sacred music-spirituals, jubilees, and gospels; sec- ular music-blues (country and urban) and most jazz before World War II; and 'art' music or jazz since 1945." An individual group or performer is located not at a point but at a zone of greater or lesser range on the musical continuum. Hence, Keil writes:

An adequate analysis of any one of the three basic Afro-American genres, whether synchronic or diachronic, cannot be readily divorced from considera- tion of the other two.... The Afro-Amer-



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ican tradition represents not only a variety of mixtures between European and African elements but a series of blend- ings within itself. (32, 33)

And in the same way that a speaker can switch between different speech levels, so an individual can switch between different modes of musical behavior.

Many blues singers begin their careers in gospel groups, and a few become preach- ers or gospel singers when the fast life be- gins to lose its charm. Many blues musicians work their way into the jazz community. Church choir directors are eager to outdraw each other, and try to bring their arrangements up to date by intro- ducing elements from current blues styles. (32)

This outline is just as true and just as common in Jamaica and other black communities in the New World. Although genres appear to be separate, they are in fact actually different stages on the continuum of variation.

The Rhetoric of Interaction

Both the rhetoric of variation and the rhetoric of descent assume that there are separate entities (however they may be defined) that may be related to each other or not be related to each other. The rhetoric of interaction questions the separateness and distinctiveness (boundedness) of the entities themselves.

In the rhetoric of interaction, people and commodities flow between different regions of the world and pull partial worlds of meaning with them in their wake. The flow of meanings, people, and commodities within a worldwide web of social, economic, and cultural relationships constitutes a culture of its own-a global cultural system that has been gestating for, at the least, five hundred

years, a system that we had better learn to understand.

While one can argue that local cultures are precisely those that can be understood better by putting them into the context of their surrounding environment rather than isolating them, increasingly the surrounding environment includes the local effects of regional, national, and international communications systems and the migration of peoples. Local cultures become more connect- ed with each other and with cultures that seem to have no obvious or persisting connection with a specific locality, region, or nation. In the modern world, much of the involvement of men and women with the wider world and other cultures consists of digesting items from some distant place and inserting them into their local culture via consumption, i.e., buying them as commodities. This is true whether the commodity takes the form of an object or an experience, whether the consumption is incon- spicuous or a show of status, or whether for the individual person the consumption serves exoticism, cultural identity, or political and economic solidarity with the cre- ators of the commodity.

Even though cultural diversity and cultural variation have been givens for the New World communities whose black musics we study since their beginnings, even relatively isolated local communities have experi- enced increasing diversity and variation in the contemporary era. Political refugees or migrant workers from the Caribbean and Latin America who travel to England, France, the United States, or other coun- tries are incorporated into the labor market and try to override geography by connect- ing with their compatriots and constructing a semblance of their native music cultures in which to embrace themselves in the new setting. The majority of the people, though, do not migrate; they stay home. Even in




staying home, they find their local culture and musics less pervasive, the continuity of their musical traditions less able to be taken for granted, and the boundaries between them and the outside less clear and rapidly breaking down (Hannerz 1990, 249).

Song lyrics, dances, music, and perfor- mances emerge from a hundred different places and are subsumed into subsystems of local and regional communications. The local and regional systems themselves form simply one layer of a gigantic web-like global communications system. While the global communications web has many nodes, it is clearly centered in and oriented around the concerns and tastes of North America and Europe. The pathways of production, circulation, and consumption have become so labyrithine and the border-jumping flows of information, music, and images so complex that conventional concepts can barely con- tain or represent them. By the time a black music is apprehended as a world phenome- non it has already made a convoluted pil- grimage from its origins. On that world stage where the music is surrounded by an aura of glossy splintered media-mediated reflections, how do we fix the value of its now- distant origins? Furthermore, the media as- similation of black musics has led to the present irony: that the musical influence of formerly enslaved, then outcast, and still oppressed African peoples should dominate the popular culture of most of the Western world and virtually anywhere else where popular song features syncopation and a back beat.

The nearly narcissistic self-concern one often encounters in both the cosmopolite and in the local who has become obsessed and absorbed into the imported media images of a distant culture is like that of an adolescent. It derives from the fact that both the cosmopolitan and the local are trying to create their own identities in the space between a native and a foreign cul-

ture, just as an adolescent is trying construct a sense of self in the passage between the world of children and the world of adults (Hannerz 1990, 240). In each of these cultural mirrors, they see a distorted image of themselves. This fascinating caricature keeps them peering into the mirrors, trying to construct a clear portrait of the unknown face within themselves that they can sense but not yet see.

In a recent study of Cuban dance music, Lise Waxer (1994) made telling use of the rhetoric of interaction toward two related ends: (1) looking at Latin music in relation to a transnational Latin cultural identity and (2) revising the standard one-way linear narrative that has dominated accounts of the evolution of Latin, especially Cuban, dance music:

I do want to highlight an understanding of Latin music as a stylistic complex that, even with an emphasis on Cuban-based genres, cannot be identified as strictly Cuban-although to this day most Cubans refer to Cuban styles, regardless of how far beyond Cuban borders they have spread and changed, as miusica cubana. Since the 1930s, Latin music has evolved from a specific, geographically located style to one having multiple sites of articulation. Transcending geographic and cultural boundaries has been central to its affective power-its capacity as dance music to literally move thousands of people. (140)

She then goes on to describe the process through which part of this development took place, with New York and Havana as major "sites of articulation":

In New York, musicians performing Cuban styles were exposed to audiences, performance contexts, musical resources, and economic constraints that differed from those in Cuba, all of which served to transform the Cuban sound. Back in



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Cuba, however, musicians were continual- ly absorbing ideas and stylistic practices from North America (most importantly, jazz styles emanating from New York), a process that reframed the local Cuban music formation. These new sounds, in turn, would go back to New York and other North American cities, influencing further developments there. The result- ing "chaining" of musical styles is at the very core of the transnational development that I broach here. Thus, in refin- ing the standard narrative of Latin music history, Havana and New York are seen as two points of creativity in a circular process, each one responding, either directly or indirectly, to changes in the other. (141)

Music is by definition a collective phe- nomenon linked to personal interactions and social relationships. Just as people re- late to the diversity of the global cultural system differently, the relationship between a music and the ecology of a particular piece of Earth can be extremely variable and indirect. The less social relationships are confined within territorial, class, or racial ethnic boundaries, the less musical practices are too. We can distinguish then between black musics that are best defined in relation to nations, regions, or localities and those that are carried collectively as structures of meaning in networks that are more extended in space, networks that are transnational or even global. Rather than suggesting that black musics are as easily separable as the crisp category markers by which they are separated in retail stores, this distinction suggests instead that, especially in our time, they tend to interact and interpenetrate. What the rhetoric of interaction tries to address, then, is what the transnational context for black music is and how it gets, got, and stays that way.

Conclusion

The rhetoric of descent is so well estab-

lished that it is almost a popular and political reflex by now. While the rhetoric of variation is the least developed, some studies on black music have been done that are close to it, and researchers of other musics have developed some methods and tools that could be helpful (e.g., Lomax 1970; Boiles 1982; Carvalho 1993; and Hoetink 1985). The rhetoric of interaction points to the fact that networks of circulation and cultural exchange have existed between separated black communities and between black and other communities for a long time. These networks of contact and exchange cry out for detailed historical reconstruction and for close analysis within the context of the contemporary world of black and world music and their recent histories (see Baron 1977 and Waxer 1994 in relation to salsa and Latin jazz respectively).

While these three rhetorics differ from each other and can be volatile when com- bined, they bear within themselves potental- ities that can be either progressive or stag- nating. Descent rhetoric has been plagued by a nationalist essentialism even when the potential for a global and truly Pan-African- ist dimension exists within it. Variation rhetoric in the absence of keen analysis of race, gender, class, and ethnicity leads to tepid pluralism that marches away from rather than toward the world of politics. The rhetoric of interaction can easily re- duce to a kind of global market analysis that separates analysis of the flow of images and musics from analysis of the economic and cultural consequences involved or the capitalist world system that dominates and structures both. Where one person sees a contra- diction, another sees a state of being. Where there are conditions of tension, there is also a zone of freedom out of which one can and sometimes must work (see Moore 1994). The poles of apparently irrec- oncilable oppositions may yet lead to an area that is, in the words of Duke Ellington, beyond category.




History and literature show us over and over again how the self-identity, culture, and aesthetics that distinguish black communities have so often been constructed through music. The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of the Ameri- cas constitutes an important element of in- terconnectedness in its own right. Even when mediated by the mechanics of sound reproduction technology and commodifica- tion, black music evokes a recognition that allows people to sense an internal racial core around which they can construct an identity and coherent experience of themselves. This leads beyond the musical context, however, into other areas of life; for black identity is not solely an experience but, like any identity, is based in practices and activities, speech, gestures and bodily attitudes, aspirations, and longings. The musical context and the interaction between performer and audience condenses these activities but heightens them; it does not monopolize them (Gilroy 1991, 127). One does not want to supplement a continental Pan-Africanism with a Pan-African- Americanism if both are to remain idle dreams. But a possible political agenda could be to unite musical practices, aesthetic codes, and values to a cultural practice that would link the blacks of the New World to each other, politically and in identity, even though they are scattered across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean and are divided by language and national boundaries. That this is worth doing, I do not doubt; how it can be done, that I do not know.

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Reflections on Joining the Americas: Project Kalinda and the Three Rhetorics

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