Toward a Theory of Diaspora Aesthetics

Toward a Theory of Diaspora AestheticsAuthor(s): Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.Source: Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 4 (1998), pp. 25-67Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177068Accessed: 25/06/2009 14:58

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Toward a Theory of Diaspora Aesthetics

Samuel A. Floyd Jr.

In this article the term "diaspora" is used as a symbol of unification or, as the case may be, reunification. It applies to African-derived peoples everywhere, whatever artistic and cultural practices they embrace, or do not embrace. It represents a complex of artistic practices that may or may not be unique to African-derived peoples or societies, wherever they may live. It embraces both African-derived and European-derived artistic and cultural practices. These practices have emanated from the combined influences of African and European societies, with some influence from Native American societies.' In this diaspora reside, with equal belonging, the painters Henry Osawa Tan- ner and Romare Bearden; the writers Mar- garet Walker and Albert Murray (who de- nies any artistic connection with Africa); and the composers and musicians Tad Dameron, George Walker, Charlie Parker, Sanford Allen, Billie Holiday, Leontyne Price, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Miguel Faflde Perez, as well as the baroque trumpeter and jazz classicist Wynton Marsalis.

In delineating diaspora aesthetics, I will focus here on aspects of the black expressive arts, treating visual, verbal, and aural thinking and their unification in an integrated mode of perception and inquiry, and giving attention to how certain elements are

1. My notion of diaspora, therefore, seeks to ac- commodate and, in some cases, resolve the "them" and "us" thinking that allows "some" of us to exclude "other" blacks from diasporic membership because their aesthetic and other preferences do not conform to what we think they should be.

made manifest in five artistic forms: poetry, prose, painting, music, and dance. For example, in painting we see lines as tables, chairs, and lamps, noses, arms, and lips; in music, we hear them as successions of tones (pitches); in dance, lines are described in diagonal, circular, and straight movements; in poetry, lines of text are relatively long or short, placed in large or small groups, are staggered or uneven; in prose, lines are manifested metaphorically, for example, in plot lines and lines of characterization that have been "drawn" or "made" in some way. As lines in painting delineate space, lines in music (melodies and repeated notes) do the same, for as they move, we hear them as high, low, or at or near the center of the musical ecology.2Just as each of the arts can possess narrative quality, they also can, and do, have musical quality, for "the impression directly made by an harmonious ensemble in any art is often described as the musical quality of that art" (Dewey 1980, 145).

An example of the narrative quality of music is discussed by Bruce Tucker in his article "Narrative, Extra-musical Form, and the Meta-Modernism of the Art Ensemble of Chicago" (1997). Tucker treats a 1990 videotaped performance of the Art Ensem- ble of Chicago as a narrative telling of history, the form of which is determined by extra-musical properties. For Tucker, the Ensemble's performance is a "mythic and historical, ritualistic, open-ended" form that tells a story "replete with polemics, subtle

2. The term "musical ecology" refers here to the relationship between musical elements and their for- mulations.

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26 Lenox Avenue

In delineating diaspora aesthetics, I willfocus here upon aspects of the black expressive arts, treating visual thinking, verbal thinking, and aural thinking and their unification in an integrated mode of perception and inquiry, giving attention to how certain elements are made manifest in poetry, literature, painting, music, and dance.

historical and geographic connections, and metacommen- tary undreamed of by historians of style." In describing one passage, Tucker explains that

As Bowie's solo stretches out, it moves farther and farther away from the orbit of bebop. The bass and drums main- tain a bebop feel behind him, but additional percussion features bells, chimes, and a gong. While Bowie moves be- yond bebop through modal playing and hard bop, Moye's work on drums takes on some Elvin Jones-like polyrhythms and dynamics. Meanwhile, much of the percussion acquires an increasingly African feel. Thus the music moves simultaneously forward in the history of jazz and back to Africa, eventually converging in shimmering sound-fields of free jazz, erasing that 1945 dividing line by expanding the music in both directions on either side of it and then converging in music that defies description. The Ensemble erases genre lines, geographic lines, and, often, melodic lines and bar lines, in order to inscribe their own set of connections, to traverse the musical terrain and create a narrative line. (27)

Thus, says Tucker, it is first-person narrative (the "We" in the title of the tune "We Bop"), that seeks "to understand and make connections among the musics of disparate times, places, and peoples, including African-American, African, European, and European-American musics. The work cuts across boundaries of language, nationality, and history and simultaneously registers those differences" (30).

Not all scholars agree that such border-crossing inquiry is viable. In writing about parallel structures among the arts, Hans Lund states that the notion that pictorial art and literature share "converging elements" has had both its support- ers and detractors, with the latter "speaking of diverging elements and fundamental and ontological differences." He goes on to point out, however, that "the earlier so impres- sionistic hunt for parallels between the two arts has now become stringent and methodic," producing fruitful insights (Lund 1992, 17). He cites as examples of scholars pursuing this researchJean Hagstrum (1968),Jean Seznec (1972), Mario Praz (1974), and others whose work supports my own search for artistic parallels and a mode of inquiry that can be used for all of the black expressive arts, that is, an integrative inquiry.

I will begin with a brief discussion of Robert Hayden's

Toward a Theory of Diaspora Aesthetics 27

poem "Middle Passage" (reprinted in Randall 1971, 123-128), in which the poet gives artistic form to the historic insurrection mounted in 1831 by captive Africans aboard the ship Amistad. The poem is an imaginative rendering of contemporary accounts of events that took place aboard that ship and of the liberation of its slave cargo. The importance of this poem lies in its powerful commentary and imaginative rendering of a significant diasporic event. Tragedy, symbolism, imagery, and other dramatic elements are represented in the poet's own voice and in all the historical voices of the poem, each contributing to the dramatic quality of the events that chronicle the theft of humans and the plague and calamity that attended the voyage of the Amistad. The poem is incomplete, a remnant of a longer version on which the poet stopped work in the 1940s. Nev- ertheless, it is a significant fragment, complete within itself, a powerful dialogue between and among voices drawn from ships' logs, diary entries, a court transcript of the trial of the captives, and other poems-all placed against occasional comments made ostensibly by a member, or members, of the ships' crew-as well as the poet's own voice.

Hayden's dramatic literary collage of narrative and verse chronicles the tensions, starvation, inhuman imprisonment, death, rebellion, and eventual liberation of the African captives; it reveals the fears, self-justifications, and hypocrisies of privilege and wealth; and it documents the contempt in which the captors held Cinquez, the leader of the captives and the hero of the incident. The African diaspora is implied through references to numerous lands and locations in Africa and the Americas, and the horrors of the making of the diaspora are repeatedly referred to:

Jestus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:

voyage through death to life upon these shores.

"10 April 1800- Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.

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Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes.3

The ships' names (Jesus, Mercy, Adventure, et al.) and inter- ludes of hymn-text ("Thou who walked on Galilee . .. Pilot Oh Pilot Me") symbolize the irony and hypocrisy of the slavers' invocation of Christian symbols and values in such an obscene and malevolent enterprise. The trip was a

Voyage through death, voyage whose chartings

are unlove.

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death spreads outward from the hold, where the living and the dead, the horribly dying, lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, the corpse of mercy rots with him, rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes.

The two rhymed verses that begin "Deep in the festering hold thy father lies" bring the reader into a work of lyric expression, mythic import, and epic scope. Much later, toward the end of this long poem, the cruelty and hypocisy of the slavers are evidenced by the poet's inclusion of a portion of the Captain's log, or his diary, which reads in part:

And it distresses us to know there are so many here who seem inclined

3. Two colleagues who were kind enough to read a draft of this manu- script independently pointed out to me that this passage is a reworking of lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest. They also pointed out other rework- ings and borrowings in the poem, for example, from Eliot and Coleridge (the latter's murdered albatross signals death for captive and captor alike). I am sure readers will notice other items important to a full analysis of the poem.


to justify the mutiny of these blacks. We find it paradoxical indeed that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty are rooted in the labor of your slaves should suffer the augustJohn Quincy Adams to speak with so much passion of the right of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's garland for Cinquez. I tell you that we are determined to return to Cuba with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez-or let us say "the Prince"-Cinquez shall die.

In this passage the slaver himself lays bare the hypocrisy of the Christian slave owners; sincere benevolence, on the other hand, is evident in the implied appeal and critique of John Quincy Adams (not quoted here). And the poet imme- diately comments, bringing the lengthy, yet seemingly brief, poem to its close:

The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will:

Cinquez its deathless primaveral image, life that transfigures many lives.

Voyage through death to life upon these shores.

In the poem's powerful detailing and symbolizing of the primary means by which the African diaspora was made- the forced journey of a people from Africa to the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-most impressive is Hayden's imagery, his ability to make pictures with words, as, for example, when he describes "palm-oil-glisten- ing wenches" and uses evocative terms such as "lucent," "lit- torals," and "wind and wave." References to King Anthracite (hard, glossy, black coal) and to bodies laid "spoon-fashion" lend stark imagery to the text. The work is rife with metaphor and implication. Colorful language evokes movement ("flashing," "scudding," "thrashing," "plough," " weave"), pain and suffering ("moans," "fever," "chastening," "terrify- ing sickness"), brutality ("torn flesh," "sacred blood," "cane- knife's wounding flash"), horror and debilitation ("charnel stench," "festering," "gelid," "leper's claw," "stinking," "butchered bodies"), and greed ("black gold, black ivory, black seed"). All of this is treated music-like in free verse within the form of a narrative poem, with forced rhymes,

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contrasting voices, repetition of word and line, and verse in incremental expansion. The fragments of the hymn text are both central and ornamental to the sense of the narrative and its poetic structure. Like all poets, Hayden makes music with words. The music of the poem's overall syntax is inter- rupted by abrupt and frequent changes in forms (tercets, quatrains, etc.) and is enhanced by variety of voice and potent change of pace. The author's varied rhythmic sense is illustrated in the following lines:

"Sails flashing in the winds like weapons" = ; n E

"sharks following the moans and fever of the dying" = . .

"horror the corposant and compass rose" =

Even without hearing it recited, which would make more apparent the vocal inflections, elisions, and other elements and devices of pitch, the reader can sense the poem assert- ing itself musically through its rhythms.

As Robert Hayden makes pictures and music with his poetry, Albert Murray makes music with prose. Referring to him and his writings, the poet Elizabeth Alexander has written, "In my mind and in his I think a painting is a poem / A tambourine's a hip shake and a train whistle a guitar" (quoted in Gates 1996, 78). Like Alexander's metaphoric characterization, Murray's writing style is musical, as evidenced in his use of the repeated motive metaphor in his novel The Seven League Boots (1996b, 175-176):

and when I said, You can go either way from Kansas City, south to the blues and New Orleans and Louis Armstrong and all of that, or east to stride time in Harlem and Duke Ellington and all of that, she said, Whatever you say, mae- stro. So I said, Why don't we just stick with what we already have going? And she said, Why don't we indeed?

Then she also said, May I take that to mean that you ap- prove of what you have found so far? And when I said, No question about it and said, I can't get over finding so much of this stuff up here in these elegant hills, that was when she told me that she had been shopping from a list prepared for her by a newfound friend in St. Moritz last winter.


The Seven League Boots is saturated with such musical constructions, in this case echoing not only the motivic play of music with Murray's "she said / I said" repetitions4 but also the "signifyin"' of African-American oral culture. In another place in the novel the protagonist, Scooter, is seen "snap- ping his fingers and tilting his head on the diagonal," mim- icking the angular rhythmic and melodic gestures ofjazz (177). Murray also uses a form of incremental repetition, as do writers working in many different styles; but he treats it as blues and jazz musicians do: "It was a gamble to be sure, but no chance taking no adventure and no adventure no hero and no hero no story and no story no storyteller and no storybooks, and no storytellers and story books, no need for compass, maps, and mileage charts since all purpose and action involves risk; and inertia has no destination. Even as entropy has no shape, form, or fashion" (211). He comes out of his riff with a nice cadence in the key of the "tonic" (my metaphor) on the word "destination," and adds a sen- tence fragment that serves as an extension, ending on the word "fashion." Murray's use of musically metaphoric expli- cations of human relationships is palpably evident in Scoot- er's statement that

the casualness of our routine interactions was such that all of our verbal exchanges had already taken on a second chorus intimacy. No vamping around the bush. No ever so careful segueing into an unmistakable first chorus. You could begin with the second chorus or with or without a vamp or segue and then move on to the out chorus, or skip to the out chorus. Or begin not with the second chorus but with the out chorus. (213)

Murray relates literary devices to African-American music when he has Scooter refer to "a homegrown equivalent to the European sonata, namely the instrumental, the structure of which is not based on exposition, development, and recapitulation, as is the so-called classical sonata, but rather on a series of choruses of various kinds . .. which function like stanzas or chapters in a narrative" (218).

But only a very small portion of Murray's "musical" texts use direct musical references or terminology. In response to my request for an explanation of how he "writes music with

As Hayden with his poetry makes pictures and music with words, the writer Albert Mur- ray makes music with prose. Referring to him and his writings, the poet Elizabeth Alexander has written, "In my mind and in his I think a painting is a poem / A tambourine's a hip shake and a train whistle a guitar. " These metaphoric characterizations possess descriptive validity, evoking literary sound pictures. But Murray's writing style itself is musical, as evidenced in his use of the repeated motive metaphor.

4. Such constructions are reminiscent of the writing style of Gertrude Stein (1935). See, for example, brief passages in her essays entitled "What Is English Literature" (11-55), "Pictures" (59-90), and "Portraits and Repe- tition" (165-206).

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words," Murray suggested that I read the "Sunday morning" section of his novel Train Whistle Guitar (1974, 90-94) while playing a recording of "Come Sunday" from Duke Elling- ton's extended work Black, Brown and Beige.5 After doing so, I concluded that the moods of Ellington's music and Mur- ray's narrative are both nostalgic, their tempos slow and their paces varied; the language of both is descriptive and pictorial and the phrases pleasantly uneven; the forms of both are sectional and their rhythms repetitive. Improvised passages of varying length appear as parenthetical state- ments or as asides that elaborate descriptive passages. Mur- ray even has one of his characters make music, through movement, and almost sing part of her commentary:

Lucinda Wiggins was somebody who was not only trying to go to heaven whole soul and body like the prophet Elijah, but was indeed over halfway there already, what with the way she always used to sit in the number one seat in the Amen corner diagonally rocking in double time while fan- ning herself in half time. Saying: preach the word Sir, tell them about it. And then saying: Lord have mercy Lord have mercy on my soul. In such a way as always certain to move somebody to respond by breaking into one of the moans that she herself had made famous: Lord poor sinner in a hmmmmm a hmmmmm, Lord the poor sin-ner innnn aaaaa hmmmmmmmm aaaaa hmmmmmmmm. And what with the way she would then say Yes Jesus yes Jesus yes Jesus yes Lord yes Jesus yes Lord yes Jesus yes Lord. (Murray 1974, 92)

Containing visual metaphor (e.g., the rocking chair), manifestations of vernacular preaching and singing ("Preach the word, Sir"; "Poor sinner in a hmmmmm"), and an eight- times repeated (call-and-) response figure ("yes Lord yes Jesus," etc.), this passage from Murray's novel is identical in mood and similar in technique to Ellington's reflective and respectful wordless ode to the Sabbath.6

5. Murray doesn't claim originality in the business of "writing music with words"; in fact, he cites other writers who have been in the "musical underpinnings business"-a diverse group that includes Herman Melville, Mark Twain, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein-pointing out that the tradi- tions "out of which they worked [also] had musical underpinnings." Joyce, he says, "was influenced by Irish poetry and music ... and Stein by the music inherent in language as such" (Murray 1996a, 5).

6. Murray's writing serves as a demonstration of certain aesthetic processes and structures, so that its use here is a good introduction to the process of interart inquiry. It need only be realized that the devices used by Murray cannot be expected to reside in this way, or at all, in the writings of other authors.


Musical metaphors also abound in African-American visual art. In The Blue Devils of Nada (1996a, 116-117 and passim), Murray discusses the collage-paintings of Romare Bear- den as "the visual equivalent of blues composition" and "far more a matter of on-the-spot improvisation or impromptu invention not unlike that of the jazz musician than of representation such as the stock in trade" of the visual artist.7 Bearden's work is described by Murray as improvisatory, fundamentally ornamental, "narrative and anecdotal," denota- tive, based on the "blues idiom," and reflective of 'Jazz aesthetic" musicianship. Musical structure and aesthetic process are implied in references to "leapfrog sequences," "overlapping planes, flat space, decoration, [and] ornamen- tation as primary objectives of painting," and "depth as illusion in art as description." According to Murray, his friend Bearden took his cue for color separation from the "expressive use of interval in the piano style of Earl Hines" and from the "visual possibilities of Ellington's . .. use of blues timbres, down-home onomatopoeia, urban dissonance, and cacophony." Bearden's conception of rhythm and accent was apparently influenced by Count Basie's "deceptively sim- ple abbreviations of ragtime and Harlem stride" and Thelo- nious Monk's "instantly captivating distortions and disjunc- tures" (120). Bearden uses all of this, says Murray, to process "into aesthetic statement" the raw material that comes "directly from or in some way allude [s] to or otherwise reflect[s] historic, geographic, or idiomatic particulars of African-American experience" (117).

In The Painter's Mind (1981), Bearden and his co-author Carl Holty discuss structure and space in painting, showing how the "four great structured [sic] elements"-volume, placement, tension, and repetition-relate to each other in works of visual art. The authors explain how the painter's manipulation of these elements creates unity, proportion, illusion, perspective, suspension, and other perceptual effects. Although they have little to say about music, what they do say about it is provocative. They state, for example, that ";volume in painting evokes the same sensation as in music;

7. It may be fairly suggested that I load the dice here by invoking the works and commentary of two artists who best make my point. But that is just the point: I use their work and words because they address that portion of diaspora aesthetics that in the broad frame of things has been marginal- ized and neglected, employing them as a means of balancing the Europe- derived treatments that black expressive art has undergone. Besides, as we shall see directly, Bearden's own theoretical orientation resides squarely in the European aesthetic tradition, so that an appropriate balance will be struck as my narrative proceeds.

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it swells and recedes, but it is always there" (104). In dis- cussingJack Sonenberg's painting Wing, they say, "If the canvas was a melody, this operation would be comparable to a suspension in music" (190). Other comments reflect musical construction, rhythms, and contrasts: "Pictorial structure, in part, rests on the arrangement of related shapes" (74), "Whatever the image, the only visual reality present is the structure. There is no real face, no real ship, no real land- scape, no real depth.... These are illusions; the structure that supports them is not" (2). The authors speak, in passim, of "linear rhythms" and of movements up, down, and side- ways; of "planing movements that pass in opposing directions"; of "oblique thrust[s]" and "frontal planes," of "spacial structures [as] the architecture for describing the visible world"; and of "strong diagonal movement ... balanced only by an action at right angles to it, . . . curves by counter- curves, . . . horizontal movements against ... vertical."

Naturally, Bearden's thoughts about art are reflected in his own work. His collage Conjur Woman (1971) is made of a nature photograph over which have been pasted other and smaller images from various sources, some of which combine to form the figure of a woman (see Plate 1). The background photograph is of a wooded area, with seven cutout birds sitting in its trees. Cutout birds also sit in each corner of the picture, another halfway down the frame, and the last on the right, atop the conjure woman's left hand. This oversized left hand supports an encircling snake that is emerging from the branches of a shrub or tree. To the woman's left is a prop tree in the form of a pasted-on picture of a wooden cutout. A wooden fence separates the woman's backyard, in which she is standing, from the wooded area behind it.

Movement is in all directions. The two birds at the top, each perched on a twig, and the one on the ground at right look toward and out of the left side of the picture. The three birds on the extreme left are all looking to the right. The woman's left hand points straight up, accentuating both the encircling movement of the snake and the movements generated by the four birds looking left and the three looking right. The woman looks to the right side of the picture, directly at the hand-encircling snake that is moving across, down, and around her hand. The tree and another wooden object beside it are both curvilinear, their rhythms moving upward.

Tension centers in the conjure woman-the center of


Plate 1 Romare Bearden Conjur Woman (1971) 4- -4 4 ~- j;jZ~~~6

Plate 1. Romare Bearden, Conjur Woman ( 1971)

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the contrasting rhythms-and is relieved only by one set of those rhythms: the combined movement of the sightlines of the two left-looking birds at the top of the picture. But even this apparently consonant movement encounters the disso- nant movement of the right-looking bird in the top-left corner, this conflict softened and partially obscured because the bird's outline is blended into the structure and tones of this portion of the picture and half of its body is ostensibly outside the picture frame. Most of the conflict is below these elements, beginning on the left-hand side of the picture with the right-curving crooks in the prop tree, and con- tinuing with the left-looking bird sitting on one of the tree's branches and with the bird on the ground beneath it. These right-bearing rhythms conflict with the left-looking birds on the right side of the picture and the right-bearing curves in the circling snake.

Depth is achieved through the perspective created by the relative positions, sizes, and contrasts of the large figure of the woman and the other foreground objects-the hand- encircling snake and the bird sitting at bottom-left-in contrast to the sizes of the trees in the background and the size, height, and position of the fence. The fence is accentuated and emphasized by the black void behind it and by the small portion of white walkway that can be seen between the fence and the figure of the woman. The walkway runs behind the prop tree, which is itself separated and distanced from the woman by the patch of higher ground on which the front-left bird sits. The apparent downward thrust from that bird through the white walkway to the black void gives depth to the entire composition. It is all done with volume-a decrescendo of shapes that begins with the mighty volume of the figure of the conjure woman, through the lesser volume of the prop tree, to the even smaller volume of the visible portion of the fence, to the void represented by the color black, the nothingness of which is enhanced by the small, light-colored branches above and around it.

The whole is framed by the seven bird figures-a repetition of the bird motif six times around the picture and three left-right pairings of birds at the sides of the picture. The movement and shape of the snake are repeated in the curvilinear prop tree. A bottom-left/top-right implied diagonal is created by the two birds in those relative positions, and a shallower one is created by the bottom-left/mid-left couple. Thus, the whole is composed of rhythm that has been created by direction, tension, position, and size of figures, by the comparative volumes of figures and images, and


by light and shade from white to black-a magnificent real- ization of the "four great structured elements," volume, placement, tension, and repetition.

Among the Yoruba, the bird motif is, on the one hand, a symbol of female witchcraft and, on the other, a metaphor for ase, the "enabling power" that promotes human welfare. The image of the bird atop the conjure woman's hand recalls images of the ritual staffs for Osanyin, the orisha (spirit) of herbal medicine (see, for example, Lawal 1996, 23; Drewal and Pemberton 1991, 34-37), some of which Bear- den may have seen in Nigeria, or elsewhere in a reproduc- tion (see Plate 2). It is particularly significant in Bearden's picture, since, according to Margaret Thompson Drewal, "When priestesses are possessed by their deities and go into trance . . . their spirits are transformed into birds and use this opportunity to gather and hold secret meetings in the treetops." This notion of woman as bird suggests "the power of transformation" and causes women to be known also as "owners of birds" (Drewal 1992, 178). The dominance of the bird motif in Bearden's collage reflects its importance in Yoruba cosmogony. The snake, too, is important in Yoruba cosmogony. It symbolizes communication with an orisha (Lawal 1996, 24), and its circling of the woman's hand is a metaphor for the power of such communication.8 Together, the bird and snake motifs add spiritual power to the image, symbolizing and enhancing that of the conjur woman.

Further scrutiny reveals an ersatz African mask in the snake's penultimate curve, a mask repeated on the bottom right of the picture and diagonally in the top left-hand corner. The three masks are symbols of Africa and the ancestors. The changing of the season is symbolized by falling leaves. The leaves are repeated among the bare branches and twigs of the trees and in the dry grass at the bottom-left and -right of the composition. Obeah (a form of sorcery, or witchcraft) is evoked by the woman's arms and hands. Its surreal nature is indicated by her undersized and collage- constructed right arm and hand and the oversized, cutout left hand (the only specifically surreal figures in the composition). This left hand could double as the prongs of a pitch- fork to represent the evils of poison and terror that Obeah

8. The snake and the tree frequently represent "symbolic Entangle- ment-the snake curled round the tree . .. -and a symbolic image of moral dualism" recalling the "Biblical symbol of the Tree of Life encircled by the snake and signifying the principle of evil" (Cirlot 1995, 288).

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te 2.Rta tffrOayW


is said to share with its good side. The movement of the crossed gazes of the birds in their vertical and horizontal positions intersect the diagonal positioning of the African masks and the bottom-right/top-left birds. The circling figures on the left and the right of the picture create cross- rhythms and polyrhythms-expressive staples of African- derived, black-vernacular cultures of the West Indies and the southeastern United States, many of which at one time embraced and, in a few cases, still host Obeah.

I want now to relate Bearden's work to that of an Afro- Chinese-Cuban artist from the Caribbean, Wifredo Lam. His painting TheJungle (1943) consists of four human-like figures set against or within a cane field (or bamboo grove) that contains leafy foliage growing among its stalks (see Plate 3). The human-like images are composites of human, animal, and vegetal elements. Their structures and countenances appear to be formed from or ornamented by fruit, gourds, bones, and animal horns formed into geometric and other shapes-crescent heads, one set of triangular ears, one spherical chin, rounded gourd-buttocks, plant stalks for legs, circles for knees, and papaya-shaped breasts. The heads of some of these beings are animal-like, others mask-like, derived from the masks of African ancestral rites. Three of the figures seem to be standing immobile, the other sitting. Their feet are grotesquely large. Adding pow- erfully to the surreal character of the composition is the configuration of the being standing second from the right- frame, whose head and torso face front and whose lower legs and feet face rear, toward the cane field. Four hands are shown with their palms open and up, at surreal positions, placements, angles, and heights, apparently symbolizing an offering to Eleggua, the African-derived deity who, with his characteristic bladed head, lurks in the lower left- hand corner of the painting, looking out of the picture frame and referencing the Afro-Cuban religion of Santerfa. A pair of scissors, apparently held in the hand of the figure on the far right, symbolizes the cutting of cane and plants for the offering; their detritus litters the ground below. The surreal positions and the cross-rhythmic placements, angles, heights, and patterning make the painting polyrhythmic-a visual metaphor for the drumming of African and Africa- derived musical ensembles.

The center of the picture is where the tension lies, created by the convergence of movement toward the middle of

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Like Bearden's Conjur Woman, Lam's The Jungle is cross-rhythmic and polyrhythmic, but in Lam's picture the rhythms are also angular, suggesting the varipitched drumming of the Afirican batd ensemble. The repetition of the beings' hands and of themselves, their various positions and heights, and the directions in which they variously point, all suggest rhythms moving up and down, back andforth, and diagonally.

the image from each side of the composition, which is ac- complished by the crowding together of the three human- like forms on the right side of the picture and by decreases in volume-decrescendi that also recede and crowd the figures, stalks, and foliage in a pincer movement. The crowding gradually recedes from right to left by way of the gradual degrading of light as openings between the stalks of the sugar cane field reveal portions of its dark void. Toward the left of the picture the void widens gradually, high to low, coaxing the eye down toward the bottom of the picture where it is drawn to the Eleggua figure in the far left corner of the picture frame.

From what may appear to be a blended palette of a sub- dued color spectrum ranging from pale to darker greens, blues, and reddish-orange hues there emerges, with closer attention, an image field full of the accented color contrasts of the Caribbean. Color is used to simulate the light and shadow of a jungle or cane-field environment that only re- luctantly and partially admits rays of an unseen sun. Togeth- er with line and form, color is used as decorative accent and as a means of emphasizing surreal and otherwise unique aspects of the composition (such as the Eleggua head at the bottom of the composition, the reversed legs and feet and three eyes of the figure standing second from the right, and the displaced leg and foot of the one at the far left, the top of the leg transmuting into a cane stalk or walking stick as it lies between the legs of the seated being). Taken in by the eye both successively and simultaneously, the rhythms of the multidimensional offering hands and the rhythms of the ac- centing reddish-orange vertical stripes of paint and horizon- tally oriented leaf spots create a crossrhythmic and polyrhythmic stew of timbres and planes that suggest the music of Lam's home island. Improvised through the selection, placement, and coloring of human, animal, and vegetal figures, through the selection of elements and icons of San- teria, and by the placement of them all in strategic positions to inform and make the structure, the whole has the effect of a grand polyrhythmic stretto of figures, elements, and events.

In TheJungle, Lam may have used surrealism to signify on African-American ritual, and African-American-oriented art to signify on European artistic orientation and technique. Undoubtedly, he configures Eleggua to signify (typically) on everything, silently looking out of his party and at us spectators, faux-bemused. Thus, I am reminded here of

Plate 3. Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943


HenryJohn Drewal's article "Signifyin' Saints," in which he explores aspects of Afro-Brazilian art history. He finds that in accepting the Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilians "adopted a pragmatic and effective strategy in a seemingly impossible situation, not unlike the African-American strategy of signi-

fyin', double-voiced rhetoric devised to comment upon, sati- rize, mislead, and critique supposed masters" (Drewal 1996, 268). He discusses the Yoruba concepts of sire (Portuguese xire) and a?se (Portuguese axe), the former representing "em- powering improvisation" and embracing and encouraging "artistic innovations that open spaces for discourse and action," the latter referring to "the life force that exists in everything," which constitutes "performative power" and "is available for humans to use and manipulate as they deal with forces in the world." These two forces combine in wor- ship contexts in which participants use "outer display to focus on inner being.... Thus the use of Catholic imagery in a Candomble context does not connote capitulation or conversion, rather it represents a tactic of masking inner character with outer appearance-visual signifyin"' within a context in which "they had to conceal in order to protect their true nature, and their icons" (269-270).

Bearden's and Lam's works suggest the West Indies in their treatment of conjure, their suggestion of masquerade, and their compelling music; they also suggest the southeastern coast of the United States where Obeah and West Indi- an musical performance practices were influential. The rhythms of the music in these locations are based to a large degree on cinquillo and tresillo motives. Cinquillo, the five- note figure, and tresillo, the three-note figure, both deriva- tions from the African time line, serve as rhythmic ostinati for, and appear frequently in, the melodic lines of numerous Latin-American and West-Indian genres (see Ex. 1).

Example 1. Cinquillo and tresillo rhythms

Cinquillo = Jn

Tresillo = J L)J

To connect these rhythms more closely to the thread of my narrative, I want to turn to one of Lam's countrymen from the nineteenth century, the Afro-Cuban composer and cornetist Miguel Failde P6rez (1852-1921), whose 1879 "Las Alturas de Simpson" (Simpson Heights, a neighborhood in

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Matanzas, Cuba) was the first danz6n to be published (see Ex. 2).9 The fundamental structure of the piece is three primary linear musical spaces defined by key, melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone color. Each of these 16-bar sections features three distinct timbres in turn: Introduction, Clarinet Trio, and Metal Trio. The A section (Introduction), repeated as indicated in Example 3, presents the combined sounds of the full ensemble; the B section is based on the characteristic sound of three clarinets; and the C strain pro- jects the equally characteristic sounds of brass-in this case trumpet, trombone, and tuba. A performance recorded in 1954 by the Orquesta Tfpica de Enrique Penia, released on the album The Cuban Danz6n: Its Ancestors and Descendants (Folkways FE4066, 1982),10 features a lineup of cornet, trombone, tuba, two clarinets (the third clarinet part must have been played by one of the violins), two violins, timpani, and guiiro (see Plate 4). The instruments present an aural picture of what is suggested in the printed music, in which no instruments other than those of the two trios are as- signed.

As the performers move through the A, B, and C spaces the composer has outlined for them, they define the character of each not only through the timbres cited but also by varying the overall range, rhythmic activity, and density of each section, both as instructed by the composer and through their own embellishments and improvisations. This can be seen visually by comparing the A section (which features sixteenth notes and eighth notes) with the B section (which features dotted quarter and dotted eighth notes and cadential rests) and by comparing the rhythms of these two sections with the dotted-quarter eighth-note-oriented C section. Variations in tone color are noted in the opening of the piece: a single trumpet sounds three staccato notes as the pickup to the full ensemble's statement of the A theme, the mingled timbre of which contrasts boldly with the single

9. Helio Orovio, in the Diccionario de la musica cubana (1992) credits Failde Perez as having "created" the danz6n, butJohn Santos (1982, 3) says that a dance by that name was being performed in Matanzas at least twenty years earlier than Failde Perez's version. Santos traces its path from the con- tredanza through the danza habafiera and the habanfera proper and indicates also that it was influenced significantly by the s6n afrocubano (1, 2). Accord- ing to Orovio (139), the danz6n is "slower, more rhythmic and varied than the danza or the contradanza."

10. In commemoration of the 75th anniverary of Faflde Perez's danz6n.

Toward a Theory of Diaspora Aesthetl'cs 43

Example 2. Miguel Failde P&ez, "Las A lturas de Simpson. Reprinted from Failde (I 964, 1 91-1 92)

do

VD 4

AP-

:W

r- T-1 r- Ti

dll

JW-

2

74t

AP-

44

dp

7

-AN m lw rl

77 F-, T-L

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Example 2, continued. Miguel Failde Perez, "Las Alturas de Simpson"

i 7~~~~~6

otra ~ _

i$#2 ; i \ f if 5 5 ?tt-a1[?#!or - dfr tFF ;

At, E,? F '

i St: ddtf 6rs ; esms ms,ls e ts ;t is j~~~~~~~~~~I

-1

0 Q)

ci, a-

(D

cr) 0

0

CD

0 c

Cl) (ci

CD)

01

..sE. .:. -.:T- ; -..... .... .... ~~~|l&. ..--- l?- >.;... .. __

E E ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. -. .4.;. ^ _. . . - . . . . . . .

. .. . . . . i- -.....A

_ N's '= a ... ... .. s S : .,,-, ......... ,.,,. .. s. ' .:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. .. .. .. .. _ e - ., -:. > - .: .......... ::M>N' -'. '' w ' | An'S .N- "'''-''''~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . ... ... .. ...

w _,S,_ i-- Z

t.;.,~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . ........... @-S 5;tt s ! !-t:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. -. -:-.. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .- _ il - - _ _ . ... ... ... ....... s'.X . s a~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. .. .. . ..

_ X S _ M _ _'--'- S; N - -.-'? . f . tZ. ls~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .....

I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ... s. \. =.. . _ - - _ _ ,': - -.... X .,,,: 5 ,- - ,X,s'..'.... ..

,.,.,,., ,> -

..................~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. ....... .......... . . ......... - .-....'. _ ' -'.l _~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.....

...., ,, . , _I........ W.'.i... * .,,,,,., _l 7..=~~. ... ......'

~~~~~~~~~~~~~........ .. ... ;, ., . ... . .... ... . . ........ ........ ..... .... ,,Fj...........

* ~~~ ~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . . . . . . *.. . .-

Plate~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ... ..uet ...... .......e en

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Example 3. Miguel Failde Perez, "Las Alturas de Simpson, "formal structure

A full ensemble [8 bars] A (repeated) B clarinet trio [16 bars] A full ensemble A (repeated) B clarinet trio A A C metal (brass) trio A A C

color of the trumpet's opening notes. The cinquillo rhythm appears first in the third full measure, then again in mea- sures 5, 6, and 7. The spaces of the sections that follow contrast the ensemble's conglomerate sound with the more specific, softly penetrating color of the clarinet trio in B and the equally specific, brassy and martial sound of the three trumpets in the tresillo-based C section. Also contrasted is the relatively rapid rhythmic activity of A with the longer notes of B; and C strikes a balance between A and B in its degree of rhythmic activity. The changes in tone color between the sections are not abrupt but gradual: the clarinet trio, already playing in the full ensemble when its turn comes, simply emerges from the mix as the featured instru- ment, and the brass trio's entries are foreshadowed, at the end of each A section, by the emergence of the trumpet in a pickup to bar 8. The solo trumpet performs the same gesture at the end of each B section, introducing thereby the reformation of the full ensemble, soaring over the mix and being joined by its two compatriots as the C section begins. This single statement of the C section features an improvised statement by the trumpet and a complementary clarinet obbligato that appears to expand the space or occupy a part of it. Space is also defined by the pitch levels of the three sections, A occupying a high position, B a medium- high position, and C a position slightly higher than B. In the accompaniment, throughout, the cinquillo rhythm is frequently sounded, sometimes quite persistently, for example, in the brass trio sections.

The small amount of improvisation in the performed version of this piece makes a significant difference in its re- ception (as does the improvisation in Bearden's and Lam's visual artworks), decorating aspects of the work with new


but intimately related material. Even in this work of music, Bearden's four structural elements are represented: volume, created through the contrasting and varying amplitudes of loud and soft sounds and by the varying of timbre to create greater and lesser volumes of sound; the placement of pitches and volumes to vary the vertical (high and low) spaces and horizontal (earlier and later) spaces; the repetition of sections, rhythms, and melodic gestures to create continuity; and the teleological use of pitch, harmony, rhythm, and texture to create tension. As the first danz6n to be published, "Las Alturas de Simpson" commented on Cuban dance, symbolized the coming together in Cuba of Spanish and African cultures, forecast aspects of an emerging Cuban society, and recounted the danz6n's origins before the 1870s-its derivation from African and European sources, its cultivation in the African communities of Matanzas, its musical evolution from a two-part to a three-part structure, and finally its dissemination in the form of a printed score. Thus, it is also both narrative and narrator of aspects of Cuban history.

Aside from cinquillo- and tresillo-oriented rhythms- also common in other works of Faflde Prez, as well as Bear- den, Lam, and Murray-other artistic elements are shared with works of sculpture and dance: movement, including pattern, style, function, and source; gesture and posture (bodily attitude), including position and character; line, including angularity, curvature, and direction; space, including its function and mode of creation; light and shadow; color, including tone and timbre; placement of gesture, pitch, and line relative to rhythm and space; narrative, including subject and context; texture, including kind, type, and high and low relief; and unity and diversity, including theme and varia- tion in the relationships of all of these to each other. Such relationships would be explored in a more thorough inquiry into these works, as would the aesthetic intentions of the artists, the latter examination seeking, for example, Bear- den's purpose in including masks and an oversized left hand in Conjur Woman, Lam's expressed purpose of featur- ing Eleggua in the lower left-hand corner of The Jungle, and Failde Perez's specific reason for adding a third (C) section to the danza.

Space considerations preclude such explorations here, but further comparison of the work of these artists, in terms of Bearden's four structural agents, is desirable and possible. Thus, we observe that Albert Murray's novel Train Whis- tle Guitar is quite rhythmic, and in a most vernacular way, as

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in the following passage (the italics are mine, to indicate the location of some of Murray's repetitions and contrived rhythmic constructions):

I used to say My name is also Jack the Rabbit because my home is in the briarpatch, and Little Buddy (than whom there was never a better riddle buddy) used to say Me my name is Jack the Rabbit also because my home is also in the also and also of the briarpatch because that is also where I was bred and also born. And when I also used to say My name is also Jack the Bear he always used to say My home is also nowhere and also anywhere and also everywhere.

Because the also and also of all that was also the also plus the also of so many of the twelve-bar twelve-string guitar riddles you got whether in idiomatic iambics or otherwise mostly from Luzana Cholly who was the one who used to walk his trochaic-sporty stomping-ground limp walk pick- ing and plucking and knuckle knocking and strumming (like an anapestic locomotive) while singsongsaying Anywhere I hang my hat anywhere I prop my feet. Who could drink muddy water who could sleep in a hollow log. (Murray 1974, 4-5)

The rhythms and variations in the tempo of the words and clauses can be determined from the pacing and the repetitions, as in, for example, Murray's use of "also" and "also and also" and in the effective cadencing of the phrases.

As Murray's novel embraces narrative and anecdote- for example, in the passage just quoted-so does Robert Hayden's poem, and so does Bearden's collage. Conjur Woman refers to the power and paraphernalia of the reli- gions of transplanted Africans, and it also symbolizes the African diaspora in its references to a custom practiced in Africa, the West Indies, and in North America; and so also does Hayden's poem in its naming of places from where and to which Africans were dispersed by slaving ships; and so does Lam's painting The Jungle in its Eleggua symbolism, ritual elements, and African-derived music in a Latin-Ameri- can setting. Bearden's reference to a "pictorial structure" that "rests on the arrangement of related shapes" evokes images of musical structure, poetic structure, and narrative structure, each of which embodies, embraces, and reflects "volume, placement, tension, and repetition."

Hayden, Murray, Bearden, and Lam also have in common the use of narrative, which is equally important to poetry, dance, sculpture, and theater, and even to music. But


since most music scholars do not write about music in that way and since many would disagree that music has a narrative function, I will explore, briefly, this issue. Objection to the notion of music as narrative is relatively recent, according to the semiotician Eero Tarasti (1994, 68), who says that although "the narrative model is one of the strongest in Western thinking and art, . . . our music, as well as our talk about music, often follows narrative principles.... The whole of twentieth-century modernism has sought to sweep the narrative model from our consciousness." Suggesting that narrativity might have been "born together with tonali- ty," Tarasti posits that "the move from tonic to dominant ... is in fact the basic movement of all tonal music, i.e., 'toward' something. Further, all movements taking place con- trary to this scheme would represent movements against something" (74). He adds that "narrativity, in music as in other sign systems, is based on spatial, temporal, and actorial categories" and on "the modal character of music," which enlivens the bare bones of musical structure. Flowing "into all the musical gaps," it creates "a bridge between two sepa- rate tones, two phrases, two sections, two movements, and it provides music with energy" (285). These modalities, he says, "can be affirmative, interrogative, volitive, or exclama- tory" (39), each in its own way enlivening and energizing the structure of a musical work. Modalization "humanizes and anthropomorphizes music (unites it with the sphere of human values)" (72). He goes on to say that "the essence of melody does not consist in the succession of tones, but in transitions between them" (99). Tarasti connects temporality to other categories, saying that "in musical discourse . . . a balance obtains between three basic categories, the temporal, the spatial, and actorial" (286). In the actorial mode, musical themes become actors in a narrative exposition; and as space, time, and actors are articulated, the modalities of being, doing, and becoming emerge: "doing" effects movement from one state of "being" (consonance) to another, and "becoming" is a function of "doing." This logical construction has been previously stated, in a different way, by the musi- cologistJonathan Kramer (1988, 16), who employs the terms "linear" and "nonlinear," which "correspond roughly to the philosophical distinction between becoming and being."

In Tarasti's formulation, the spatial category includes the tonal space (e.g., the duration of a key center) and register space (e.g., the vertical space that a pitch or series of pitches occupies). In these two kinds of space, it seems to me, space and time intersect; as key centers and pitches occupy

Failde PerezIs "Las Alturas de Simpson," Lam's The Jungle, Bearden's Conjur Woman, Murray's The Seven League Boots, and Hayden's "Middle Passage, " with their similar meanings, metaphors, and narrative structure, all address the presence and importance of myth and function in black culture and in aspects of the black diaspora.

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certain lengths of time, vertical space (e.g., two or more pitches sounded simultaneously) is created and also creates time, since it has duration. Since successive durations create rhythm and particular pitches are created by time (per-second vibra- tions), time, rhythm, pitch, and space are functions of each other.

For Tarasti, space is metaphorical, geographical, and gen- erative of time. In distinguishing "real" space from "fictive" space, he defines the former in terms of "the pitch structure of music," where, for example, "some place in a musical uni- verse of space can be chosen as center, in relation to which other places are peripheral." Space is also delineated by "different registers in music," where "all the acoustic musical material can be measured in relation to the register it occupies"; it can be defined by the seating arrangements of performers as, for example, when musicians perform from different positions in a hall. "Finally, singers often imagine their voice as moving in space. For example, scales are not sung from up and down and back, but from near to far and far to near." Thus, he concludes, "musical space . . . can be articulated according to the following dimensions: horizontal (before/ after), vertical (up/down), and depth (in front of/behind). And, he says, "We should add a fourth dimension ... the distinction of center/periphery, in the sense that something in music can be surrounded by something else.... Some musical element, say, a theme (musical actor), pushes itself into the fore, while the rest of the texture 'surrounds' or envelops it." These spatial dimensions may create an impression analogous to perspective in painting: one object is in the foreground and the rest remains as background (78-80).

Further, certain sections of musical works occupy what Tarasti calls paratopic space. The exposition section of a sonata-form work, for example, typically occupies

a utopic space, where themes are innovated and introduced ... ; the development section is the space where thematic performances occur. Most often this paratopic space is at the same time a heterotopic space: the performances take place "elsewhere," that is, in keys other than that of the utopic space....

Likewise, the narrative "arch" of such multimovement works as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition ... exploits the distinction between topical and heterotopic space. After the introduction of the center of the narration (the modo russico of the first Promenade), the music moves through various heterotopic spaces, such as "The Tuileries," and "The Old


Castle." The music returns "home" to the center with "Baba- Yaga" and "The Gate of Kiev." (97)

So time created by sound in turn creates space-"shapes," as Jonathan Kramer echoes (1988, 2), moving through, yet simultaneously creating, time. It is all a circle, and it is also narrative, with its "actors" performing in space and time on different levels and in different places.

Lawrence Kramer, in his Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900, asks the question, "What kind of narrative effects ... are possible in a piece of textless instrumental music?" (1990, 184) and goes on to reveal the complexities and proW lems involved in the search for answers to it. Saying that "lyric successions are organized with primary reference to gestures of reflection, expression, and interpolation, whereas narrative successions crystallize primarily around patterns of action and consequence," he argues that "instrumental music leans more towards lyric than towards narrative in its organization of successions" (185), that "as a monological form, nondra- matic music affiliates itself fundamentally with lyric poetry" (188). In contrast to Tarasti, Kramer reports that "various elements of an instrumental piece may confront the presiding subject with agencies but not with agents, with personifica- tions but not persons." But he also says that "characteristic motives, rhythms, or styles may all be highly individualized; so, of course, may instrumental solos" (187). Further, "Many of the self-consciously cardinal moments of nineteenth-century music rely on quasi-narrative technique or interpolation: the interplay of themes, recitative, and Schrakensfanfare that begins the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; the fleet- ing recollection of the Tristan Prelude in Die Meistersinger; the materialization of a brass chorale in the introduction and coda of Brahms's finale for his First Symphony" (188-189).

In his discussions of lyric succession and narrative succession and of agency and personification, Lawrence Kramer in some ways and to some degree echoes elements of Tarasti's "'modalities." But Kramer provides a particularly effective means of relating music to poetry through the lyric mode, rather than or in addition to the narrative, by focusing on the elements of "reflection, expression, and interpolation" in our perception of the succession and development of

11. In other ways Kramer departs significantly from Tarasti's formulation as, for example, in his clarification of the distinctions between agency and agent, personification and person, by his privileging of the first set of these terms over the latter, and by exchewing in his formulation anything approximating Tarasti's anthropomorphic "being," "doing," and "becoming."

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events in works of music. But an examination of the implica- tions of this provocative idea must await later treatment.

For now, let us come full circle by revisiting Hayden's poem "Middle Passage," which like other examples of blank verse, implies pauses visually by using blank spaces, dashes (e.g., "'10 April 1800-"), and other typographical devices, and creates aesthetic space through constructions such as the following:

The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will:

Cinquez its deathless primaveral image, life that transfigures many lives.

Hayden varies the density of the work by, among other things, juxtaposing text (e.g., interrupting the hymn text with diary entries); he creates variety of volume by alternat- ing, short lyrical stanzas with longer narrative quotations; and he varies the texture linearly by contrasting blocks of text with irregular constructions such as

Voyage through death to life upon these shores.

He varies the tempo of the work by varying the contrasts between passages, lines, and words whose rhythms are slow with those that move and suggest faster readings, such as, for example,

You cannot stare that hatred down or chain the fear that stalks the watches and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath; cannot kill the deep immortal human wish, the timeless will.

"But for the storm that flung up of wind and wave, The Amistad, Sefiores, would have reached the port of Principe in two, three days at most; but for the storm we should have been prepared for what befell. Swift as the puma's leap it came. There was that interval of moonless calm filled only with the water's and the rigging's usual sounds, then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries and they had fallen on us with machete and marlinspike. . ."


Of course, these elements are not unique to African- American expressive art; they are pervasive in all art, carrying meanings and values in various guises in many idiomatic artworks. As John Dewey pointed out, artworks are expressive of values and meanings that cannot be expressed dis- cursively, by propositions. But each artistic medium, he and Murray agree, speaks its own idiom as it communicates these meanings and values (cf. Dewey 1980, 74, 85, 106; Murray 1973, 87). It appears that the inherent differences between and among the arts are directly related to the expressive capacities of each. Music, for example, is better suited to express "throbs and crises," vague and transient sentiments, agitation, and movement, than are sculpture and architecture, which excel at being expressive of time- lessness ("time suspended"), endurance, and stability (Dewey 1980, 233, 234, 236). Prose expressively describes the rhythms, values, and expressions of life, while poetry condenses them. What is common among the arts is organized energy-energy configured for aesthetic expression. It is this energy, as a "community of substance" (191), that unifies the arts.

Echoing Dewey, but going further and commenting from the African worldview, Janheinz Jahn (1961, 164) writes:

Rhythm is . .. expressed through . . . lines, surfaces, colours, and volumes in architecture, sculpture, or painting; through accents in poetry and music, through movements in the dance. But, doing this, rhythm turns all these concrete things towards the light of the spirit.... [R] hythm activates the word; it is its procreative compo- nent.....

In the poem the metre is rhythmical. When stressed syl- lables recur at regular intervals, we have a line of verse and then a poem. Yet even more essential than verbal rhythm is the rhythm of the drums; for. . . the language of the drums is also speech, it is Nommo, and indeed, privileged Nommo: it is the word of the ancestors. They speak through the drums and establish the basic rhythms. Be- tween word rhythm and the rhythm of the drums there is a kind of rhythmic counterpoint.

Rhythm is expressed in, and also governs, movement, interval, compression, and cumulation, all of which, in turn, gen- erate form. Through rhythm, we experience proportion, co- alescence, opposition, representation, clarity, form-"inte- gral fulfillment" (Dewey 1980, 137). Rhythm pervades "all the arts, literary, musical, plastic, and architectural, as well

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as the dance," from "lines in painting, meter in poetry; to ... curves in sculpture" (170). Thus there is "an energy of position as well as of motion"; the manifestation of rhythm in art is only a matter of emphasis (150, 170; see also 23, 138, 147).

The Martinican writer Aime Cesaire, who named the negritude movement and was one of its leaders, says that

rhythm is the architecture of being, the inner-dynamic that gives form.... Rhythm is ... the force which, through our senses, grips us at the root of our being. It is expressed through . . . lines, surfaces, colours, and volumes in architecture, sculpture, or painting, through accents in poetry and music, through movements in dance. But, doing this, rhythm turns all these concrete things towards the light of the spirit. In the degree to which rhythm is sensuously em- bodied, it illuminates the spirit. (Quoted in Harrison 1989, xxv)

The notions of space and time are closely related to the concept of narrative, as we have seen, and it is important that we observe how they interact. The analogy between instrumental music and literary narrative is not perfect, but this should not preclude its use, provided that its imperfec- tions are recognized and taken into account. I am reminded here of the theoretical notions I explored and developed in The Power of Black Music (Floyd 1995, 141), where I alluded briefly to the phrase definers and cadences that contribute to the making of sem4ntic value-the points of rest and summing up effected by "punctuation" and "chunks of musical thought." In this regard, I citedJoe Henderson's provocative description of his method of improvisation as he told it toJohn Murphy (1990, 15):

I think I was probably influenced by writers, poets-I mean just a full scope in relation to the written word. You know how to use quotation marks. You know how you quote people as a player. You use semicolons, hyphens, paragraphs, parentheses, stuff like this. I'm thinking like this when I'm playing. I'm having a conversation with somebody.

I also suggested in The Power of Black Music that music in- vokes semantic value through an auditory, symbolic semantic, through the "telling effect" of wordless rhetoric that Al- bert Murray says "asserts, alleges, quests, requests, and implies ... mocks, groans, concurs, and signifies misgiving and suspicions" (Murray 1973, 10).


My final example for discussion is a videorecording of Alvin Ailey's Revelations, a suite of dances based on Negro spirituals and a hymn tune. Its three sections are Pilgrim of Sorrow, based on the spirituals "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned" and "Didn't the Lord Deliver Daniel"; Take Me to the Water, based on the spirituals "Honor, Honor," "Wade in the Water," and "I Want to Be Ready"; and Move Mem- bers Move, in which is danced and sung "O Sinner Man," "The Day Is Past and Gone,"12 and "Rock-a My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham." In the performance examined here, the dancers are the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and the singers are the Howard Roberts Chorale. To the best of my knowledge, the performance is from the year 1973.

The suite begins with the slow and somber "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned," with ten dancers standing completely still, countenances expressionless, in a tight "V" formation in which they perform a variety of slow gestures with hands, arms, and full bodies, including "wing" postures, arm and hand spreads, plies, etc. (see Plate 5). As the "V" expands, contracts, then disperses, the dancers move in various line, circle, and diagonal configurations and a complex of spin and twirl movements. In this slow-moving first section, the dancers mirror the ABA, slow-fast-slow, musical form of the spiritual, matching its moods, textures, and phrasings, physically eliding the phrase endings of the spiritual's melody and reflecting in their tight physical formations the close harmony of the choral singing. Arm and hand gestures (of which the wing gesture is particularly striking) anticipate the beginnings of phrases and punctu- ate, complement, and oppose their ebb, flow, and cadencing. After executing a variety of dance patterns and movements in solo, duo, and various other configurations, the dancers come together in the initial tight "V" that opened

12. My request to CBMR Librarian Suzanne Flandreau for the identi- fication of this piece brought the following reply: "The Day Is Past (or Passed) and Gone" is an American hymn by the New England evangelical John Leland. The song used in Revelations is a metrical tune known in the Sacred Harp tradition as IDUMEA. There are field recordings of this hymn and tune sung by black singers in Alabama. The Staple Singers and the Spirit of Memphis Quartet have also recorded it.... The words by Leland and the tune IDUMEA [are included] in The Sacred Harp, where they are not found together.... The field recording of the hymn is on volume 8 of Frederick Ramsey's Folkways series Music from the South. The title of the album is Young Songsters (Folkways FA 2657). The Staple Singers rendition, under the title "The Day Is Passed and Gone," is recorded on Vee Jay LP5014. The Spirit of Memphis's rendition is on the 78 rpm recording King 4340 and the unidentified 78 rpm King 6371.

0)

Cb

0D

- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~4

Plt m n g m e n d n o z

Plate S. Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre of Harlem) Revelations, Image from "I've Been 'Buked "section, opening gesture


the work. They extend their hands upward in an open- palms gesture with fingers spread, raise their arms straight up, individually and successively move them into "V"s, then down to the horizontal, and finally to their sides as "I Been 'Buked" diminishes in tempo and volume and comes to a close.

In the up-tempo "Didn't the Lord Deliver Daniel," a fast ABA structure, there are pervasive cinquillo and tresillo rhythms in the drums and voices and between the choir, which sings the melody of the song, and the sopranos, who sing cross-rhythms against the melody. These musical structures accompany and are accompanied by the gestures and movements of three dancers who mirror and "comment" on a syncopated pattern that is mirrored in the gestures and movements of one male and three female dancers:

J nJm:;7 I X 7~ D;7- I J 7~ DJ I J 7L nJ I J n a c.

Some of the dancers' movements are performed in unison and in two-against-one configurations, with two dancers making identical movements and gestures while the other moves in contrasting fashion.

"Fix Me" features solo-chorus call-and-response phrasings. A pair of dancers smoothly and elegantly perform to a two-part melody characterized by a slow and languorous first part and a second part with more activity and a somewhat faster harmonic rhythm. The slow phrasings of the dancers are in keeping with the character of the music, as are the comparatively rapid movements that emphasize the slow tempo and intensify the musical phrasings that take place within it. The wing gesture from "I Been 'Buked" returns, and frequently the dancing couple pat the air with their hands, perhaps suggesting "fixing." The male dancer's lift- ing of the woman, together with her reclining gestures and postures, suggest at times that it is she who needs to be "fixed." The piece ends with a poignant gesture of entreaty by the female dancer.

Then comes a brief processional of seven dancers-four male, three female-in a West Indian motif, with original music by Howard Roberts that features the following rhythm.

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etc.

One dancer carries a parasol and others twirl decorative flags and make full-body twirling movements that lead directly into Part II. Five of the seven dancers in "Honor, Honor"-three male and two female-continue the West Indian motif,

.7l: 2) 2 1.7: v I.5 ] ;= 7 t) | I etc.

which is configured musically through the use of a tresillo rhythm and visually with flags (perhaps faux drapo-em- blems either of the vodun society or of the community at- large'3) and flag bearers (perhaps podrapo) and limbo-like movements and gestures. The dancers perform, variously, as a trio, a duo, and as a complement of seven. The wing gesture of "I Been 'Buked" and "Fix Me" reappears here in the couple's dance, and the phrase "Didn't the Lord deliver Daniel" is repeated, embedded within the music of "Wade in the Water," the second song in this section of the work. Limbo-like movements and gestures continue the West Indian motif, as does the rhythm, a reverse cinquillo.

Diaphanous blue lengths of fabric positioned before and behind the dancers signify water, which is "made," or "moved," by arm movements and undulating bodies. The tresillo rhythm in this fast-slow-fast rendition of "Wade in the Water" is stated as an introductory musical gesture and becomes foundational to the entire piece as it elaborates, presages, or sets up the reverse of the tresillo on which the music is based.

J.nr$ $ I J n $ $ I J n $ _ I J n $ $ I J n $ ? | etc.

The dancers' slow, marching movement, off-beat and in half-time, plays against the faster, rhythmic cadence of the music. The passage leading to the ending of the final section of "Wade in the Water" is highly polyrhythmic, sound- ing at one point three and four different rhythms at once.

13. For a brief elaboration of vodun practices vis-a-vis such paraphernalia, see Fleurant (1996, 19, 111).


"I Want to Be Ready" features a solo dancer and a solo singer accompanied by a chorale. Especially effective is the figure used in the cadencing of the concluding line of the spiritual.

n ~ if ) .70 q r etc. I want to put on my Long White Robe

The movements of the dancers variously mirror, complement, and contrast with the phrasings and gestures of the music, and the wing gesture of "I Been 'Buked," "Fix Me," and "Wade in the Water" is repeated once.

In Part III, the final movement of Revelations, against the contrasting colors of a blue earth and a reddish but somewhat multicolored sky backed by an unseen rising sun, a single dancer, shirtless, long-trousered, and socked in black, runs to and fro, as soprano Hilda Harris sings the words "O sinner man, where you gonna run to?" A dark line separates earth from sky, evoking the image of the dancer running back and forth and side to side across a spacious plain. Soon two other dancers, dressed identically, join the first and dance vigorously to the music, which is now sung faster and more vigorously by tenor BrotherJohn Sellers and underlaid with a consistent eighth-note rhythm (F-TT J7-7; V. ) that accompanies the following rhythm.

J $ J$ I J n~ J J I etc.

To the singing of "The Day Is Past and Gone," nine female dancers dressed in church-going finery, each carrying a stool and a rattan fan, enter singly and in two and threes, eventually forming a congregation sitting together on stools. "The Day Is Past and Gone" is quickly followed by 'You May Run On for a Long Time,"'14 which opens with the dancers striking still postures as they hold high their fans. Eventually nine men enter, strutting, encounter the women, and join them in stylized "churching," the women with their stools and the men strutting in a varied presentation in which call-and-response sermonizing and gestural commentary are vocalized and danced over, against, and with gospel-quartet style choral singing to create a churchlike atmosphere in which eighteen male and female dancers strut, hop, leap, twirl, and swirl to the underlying rhythm,

14. The song 'You May Run On for a Long Time" is recorded by the Golden Gate Quartet under the title "God Almighty Gonna Cut You Down" or "God's Gonna Cut 'em Down" (Hayes and Laughton 1992, 273, 275).

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m7 JZ177 J 7, 175 JZ7 J J J J71

which sometimes is also foregrounded. The women use the fans not only to cool themselves but also to point at the men and to make sweeping, swiping, and even hugging movements. This section of the suite, and thus the work as a whole, is brought to a lengthy but powerful and rousing close with "Rock-a My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham," which begins with the dancers in the same still poses that ended 'You May Run On for a Long Time." The tune of "Rock-a My Soul" and its compelling rhythm and variations of it comprise composites similar to the following rhythm.

This supports line dancing in which men and women oppose, complement, and move in unison with each other. The music grows in intensity by way of subtie incremental rhythms, building to a New Orleans-style out-chorus of "Rock-a-My Soul." The entire suite-with its African-like incremental repetition and development, call-and-response figures, West Indian-like rhythms and gestures in the processional and "Honor"-confirms and stresses the ground- ing of Revelations in African-Diaspora aesthetics.

Throughout Revelations, the varying volumes are delineated by the variously textured groupings and formations of the eighteen dancers-dressed in pastel colors of pink, white, orange, blue, and purple-and by their movements, which vary from long to short, large to small, thick to thin. The placements of the dancers in different parts of the dance space and in relation to one another create a variety of other complementary and overlapping spacial formations. Continuity is effected through the repetition of steps, postures, poses, movements, and gestures, including the striking wing pose, and by the linear and non-linear individ- ual and group gestures in the music and the dance. The ever-evolving formations, the color blends and contrasts, and the repetitions of gesture, posture, and movement create tensions and releases that mirror the struggles and ful- fillments of daily life. These expressive configurations are akin to those found in Fafilde P6rez's "Las Alturas de Simp- son," Lam's TheJungle, Bearden's Conjur Woman, Murray's The Seven League Boots, and Hayden's "Middle Passage." Reve- lations also shares similar meanings, metaphors, and narra-


tive structure with those works, since they all address the presence and importance of myth and function in black culture and in aspects of the African diaspora.

Ailey designed Revelations as a narrative "about the beauty of black people, about their intelligence, the spiritual, about the beauty of black people, their elegance, their ability to entertain, their love of self, their wanting to transmit through discipline their feelings to the audience" (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater 1986). Appearing on the tape following Revelations, Ailey says that the first section, Pilgrim of Sorrow, tells of "people wanting to get out of the South"; the second, Take Me to the Water, is based on Ailey's own baptism in Texas; and the third, Move Members Move, recalls Sunday morning memories. "The fact that there's a company of black dancers is a social statement. ... [The suite] is a political statement, too."

In this necessarily brief overview of black diasporic practices, there is much about all of the works discussed that could not be mentioned for lack of space; thus the analysis is obviously incomplete. While even a long and thorough discussion cannot do justice to any work of art, this is particularly true of dance, I think, where words cannot adequately capture the innumerable potent, powerful, and subtle moves, gestures, and postures, and their relationships to the accompanying music. But this is simply a challenge to be met in our search for and development of modes of inquiry adequate to the task. More extended examinations of the artworks discussed here would take into account elaboration of meaning vis-a-vis figures and images; more precise differ- entiation between rhythm, movement, and repetition; closer analysis of the relationships between the timbres, pitches, and chords in music and the color combinations of painting; additional connections among the gestures, postures, and figures that appear in the poetic, literary, pictorial, and dance works; relationships among the performative aspects of these artworks; the cultural nuances contained in them; and their place within the context of the artist's oeuvre and his or her genre as a whole (e.g., Bearden's Conjur Woman as part of his series on this theme, his musical interests and influences, and his general artistic influences). In addition, Bearden's and Lam's use of outsized body parts (the Conjur Woman's large hand and the large foot of one of the human- like figures in Lam's TheJungle) could be compared, and artistic processes in general would be more fully examined. In an article entitled "Confluences: Ile-Ife, Washington, D.C., and the TransAfrican Artist," the art historian Michael

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D. Harris refers to Alfred Smith's attempt, in his painting The Rehearsal, to "reconcile pattern space with chiaroscuro space" (space and depth realized through contrasts of very dark and very light), which led him to investigate Bearden's notion of 'jump space" and to conclude that "Bearden takes out the mid-ground. He doesn't give you a graduated relationship between the foreground, mid-ground, and background in the paintings" (Smith quoted in Harris 1997, 38-39). This is very similar to what Murray characterizes as Bearden's "leap frog sequences," his use of color as evoking "the expressive use of interval in the piano style of Earl Hines," and his use of "voids, or negative areas," and to what Bearden and Holty refer to as "linear rhythms."

Any artwork and any description of it must necessarily be in- direct, metaphorical, and paradoxical. For example, many of our musical terms are merely borrowings from vernacular and specialized categories in ancient Greek, Renaissance Italian, and other European cultures, coined through metaphoric transfer. The term melody, derived from the Greek word melos, which meant "limb," came to be known as a "limb" (part or piece) of a musical composition. Rhythm, from the Greek rhuthmos, originally "recurring motion" of any kind, was later used to describe recurring accents in verse, becoming the Latin word rhythmus (which is also the root of "rhyme" in English), which was borrowed by music as "rhythm." The term harmony comes, by way of the Latin harmonia and the French harmonie, from the Greek harmonfa, which meant "a means ofjoining," and was ap- plied to music to denote "scale," or simply "music"; in Eng- lish it originally meant what we would now call melody, coming to refer to chords only in the sixteenth century. Thus, if it is acceptable to speak metaphorically in describing elements within an artistic medium, it is equally appropriate, or even more so, to speak metaphorically of processes across artistic boundaries.

In addition to the cross-disciplinary metaphors already discussed, the rhythms of movement and the symbolism of icon and narrative in Bearden's collage, Lam's painting, Faflde P6rez' danz6n, and Ailey's dance also suggest dra- maturgy. If there were space in which to do so here, this field, too, could be subjected to the kind of analysis outlined in this essay-an analysis in which real actors would take the place of Tarasti's metaphorically musical ones (themes); in which the real lines of art and the metaphoric


ones of music (melodies) might become lines of action; in which the spacial and amplitudinal volumes of painting and music would be reflected in density of dialogue; and in which the orchestration of figures and timbres in art and music would become an orchestration of characters, events, and space.

Much of what I have already said about the African- American expressive arts is equally applicable to-indeed derived from-European and Europe-derived aesthetic practice and thought. But since Europe itself has long been host to African-diasporic communities, it is important that it have its own particular, although necessarily brief, mention. For centuries there have lived throughout the black Atlantic world individuals who either have been largely ignorant of, or have chosen to live apart from, the long song of North- American bluesmen and the cinquillo-tresillo beats of Caribbean and Caribbean-proximate cultures. Some African-derived individuals and groups, whether living in European or European-derived societies or in exclusively black communities, have functioned independently and according to whichever muse they chose to follow.

Edward Scobie, in his Black Britannia (1972), writing of England's "darling blacks," discusses Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), "a man of culture and learning" who by 1767 had composed and published two collections of country dances that Scobie describes as "far superior to much of the musical trivia which minor composers foisted on the long- suffering eighteenth-century public" (97-98). Sancho also wrote "several pieces of poetry, two plays . . . and a book entitled The Theory of Music." Another of these English blacks was George Polgreen Bridgtower (1779-1860), a child prodigy who went on to have a long and impressive career in which he performed extensively and wrote "many violin concertos and other instrumental pieces" (113-114). In France there lived the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739-1799), a violinist and the composer of ten concertos, twelve string quartets, six symphonic works, twelve arias and duos with orchestra, four sonatas, and 115 songs (Banat 1990; Lerma 1976; Southern 1982, 330). Following Saint- Georges in the 1780s, another French chevalier, JJ.O. Meude-Monpas, wrote and saw published a dictionary of music, a book about love and music, and, in 1786, six violin concertos. In England, between the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s, the internationally known and respect- ed Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor wrote numerous works that addressed both Europe-derived and

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For centuries there have lived throughout the black Atlantic world individuals who either have been largely ignorant of, or have chosen to live apart f;rom, the long song of North- American bluesmen and the cinquillo-tresillo beats of Caribbean and Caribbean- proximate cultures. Some

African-derived individuals and groups, whether living in European or European-derived societies or in exclusively black communities, have functioned independently and according to whichever muse they chose to follow.

African-derived aesthetics; his cantata Hiawatha reportedly rivaled Handel's Messiah in popularity for several years (Thompson 1994). In general, these black European composers, following the muse of their European culture, wrote in an idiom different from that of most of their racial coun- terparts in the Americas and in Africa. Nonetheless, the im- peratives of that idiom, like those of other artistic idioms throughout the world, conformed to the more overarching imperative of the four structural elements of which Bearden and Holty have written-volume, placement, tension, and repetition. A theory of diaspora aesthetics must take into account all the various idiomatic manifestations of diaspora art making.

Interart inquiry has its basis in thinking in words, propositions, lines, colors, spaces, tones, gestures, movements, and images as they are manifest in any artistic medium or amalgam. In amalgams in which there is relatively equal participation of several artistic mediums, the challenge for the perceiver is to observe and mediate the unity or disunity of their disparate elements. In the final analysis, art is ritual, which has the aim of transforming consciousness to achieve what Dewey has called "an experience"- aesthetic for some, divinely spiritual for others.

Awareness of such cross-media relationships will remind us that, among the arts, "each possesses what the other ac- tively exploits" (Dewey 1980, 208). In painting and sculpture, line and mass are formed into images; in music, lines and pitches are compressed into mass; in dance, bodies are grouped into masses. Notes in a melody do not actually move, but in teleological music they insinuate movement- forward, upward, downward, even "back and forth." Novels and plays are constituted, says Dewey, of "persons, situations, actions, ideas, movements, events," and, Tarasti would add, of the music of sonic actors (themes). Dewey goes on: "Prose and drama often attain the picturesque, and poetry the genuinely pictorial, that is the communication of the visible scene of things. But in these arts, the pictorial is sub- dued and secondary" (235). Where prose draws out and describes experience through narration, poetry "condenses and abbreviates" experience, "thus giving words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive" (241).

The present article only suggests possibilities; for the ex- ploration of diaspora aesthetics, a more fully delineated and completely textured explication would place what I have discussed above within the context of related historical, philo-


sophical, social, and geographical developments and events. Such an exposition would place Wifredo Lam, for example, within the context of broad artistic developments that began with turn-of-the-century radical art movements in Europe- movements that embraced and made use of post-impres- sionist, expressionist, surrealist, and other techniques-and influenced modernist art in the Caribbean. He would be placed more particularly against the background of the na- tionalist painters in Cuba who preceded him, known as La Vanguardia, and who borrowed from and interpreted the African roots of the Cuban tradition; and his work and social position would be compared to that of his artistic peers from the 1930s and 1940s, most of whom had made use of or were influenced by Afro-Cuban expressive art and religion. Lam would also be placed against the backdrop of the negritude and Harlem Renaissance movements, both of which promoted the use of African-derived folklore and folk arts as the basis for so-called high art. It is all of this and more that integrative studies seek to explicate in order to erect bridges over the conceptual gaps that exist between the arts and the humanities and to see them as a genuine and more richly configured whole.

I would like to thank the following individuals for taking the time to read and critique portions or the entirety of drafts of this article: Sterling Stuckey and Bruce Tucker, who read the entire penultimate draft and made important suggestions; the participants in the CBMR's spring 1997 Integrative Studies Retreat, particularly Richard Long, George Lewis, and Danille Taylor-Guthrie, who offered comments that led to additional changes for the better. Howard Roberts, music director of Alvin Ailey's Revelations, generously and significantly provided me with inside information that greatly aided and helped shape my discussion of this work. The Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, whoseJosephus Daniels Fellowship I held at the National Humanities Center during periods in 1995 and 1996, greatly facilitated the writing and completion of this article.

Awareness of such cross-media relationships will remind us that, among the arts, "each possesses what the other ac- tively exploits. " In painting and sculpture, line and mass are formed into images; in music, lines and pitches are compressed into mass; in dance, bodies are grouped into masses. Notes in a melody do not actually move, but in teleological music they insinuate movement-forward, upward, downward, even "back and forth. " Novels and plays are constituted of "persons, situations, actions, ideas, movements, events, " and the music of sonic actors (themes).

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Toward a Theory of Diaspora Aesthetics

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