Black Soundscapes White Stages

Black Soundscapes White Stages is a revelatory drumroll, summoning us to the fruitful intersections of musicology, Francophone and Creolophone literature, and cinema studies. Hill's work on neglected artists and cultural producers including poet Léon Gontran Damas and biguine singer Léona Gabriel, and his insightful readings of the vexed figure of the doudou make indispensible contributions to Francophone studies. The book's chapters are arranged around readings of texts that have resisted assimilation into a strident “negritude in the major.” He presents innovative analyses of soundtexts including the popular song “Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard”; the musical genre of the biguine; Josephine Baker's performances and undoings of the imperial family romance; the curiously promiscuous beat of the tam-tam; and the emergence of colonial radio broadcasting through a dazzlingly polished lens of transnational feminism and sound studies. Hill mines the details of musical texts, word play, and shot composition, teaching us to hear the tumulte noir of black soundscapes within a densely resonant chamber in which the tensile skin of the black body so central to Fanon's epidermal schemata of gender and race relations is struck to articulate new rhythms of transcolonial and diasporic interpretation. He is that rare scholar fully equipped to bring meticulous musicological analyses of melodic contours and instrumental timbre into conversation with incisive textual analysis informed by robust philological work in both French and Créole, and a consistently exact and exacting political analysis of the consequences of French imperial violence and its ensuing entanglements. Readers will find him in conversation with Mary Louise Pratt's work on travel writing; rich new scholarship on seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Antillean culture by Sara Johnson and others; feminist negritude scholarship by Jennifer Wilks and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting; the robust body of work on black Paris and transnationalism by scholars including Tyler Stovall, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, William Stack, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Françoise Lionnet; and the fine critical work of Kofi Agawu and John Mowitt on percussion. This range is one of the book's most impressive achievements. As the first book in the new Callaloo African Diaspora Series, edited, like the journal of the same name, by Charles Rowell, Hill's Black Soundscapes White Stages gives evidence of the vibrancy of the field of African diaspora studies and establishes the series as a prime locus for such work.The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction traces how both French negrophilia and negrophobia have accreted around the notion of black noise, or le tumulte noir, tracing tropes of sonic representation of the Antilles from early colonial descriptions of the cacophonous landscape through a shift to the doux parler of the Antillean Créole to which negritude in the major delivered a resounding blow. Hill suggests that where Mary Louise Pratt's analyses of travel writing taught us to read the visual logics of the “seeing man,” we might equally gain from attending to the “hearing man” in such imperial scenes. Hill goes on to argue for a need to hear the current of negritude in the major in counterpoint with the often-female voices articulating nuanced critiques of as well as performing the afterlives of doudouisme, the genre named dismissively after the Antillean lovers of colonial agents, writing seen as too sentimental and apolitical an exoticism. Departing from Murray Schaeffer's notion of nature as a locus of pure sound and his dismay at the “schizophonia” of modernity, Hill turns instead to Lindon Barrett's conception of “the other side of value” to argue that the black soundscapes of diasporic subjects hear and demand to be heard double. He introduces a leitmotif that runs throughout the book, seizing on a term Fanon uses for the disorderly sounds of the tumulte noir—ratés—which sound not only the explosive sound of an engine backfiring but, in Hill's usage, a range of other black soundtexts whose “failures” expose the incoherencies and insufficiencies of colonial logic. In chapter 1, Hill offers a counter-reading to Fanon's dismissal of relations between black women and white men in Black Skin, White Masks. He commandeers the rat-tat-tat-tat of Fanon's dismissal of black female subjectivity articulating a desire for the colonizing other (the doudou) to beat out a precise reading of the popular song “Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard” that recovers the intersubjective relation between Créole and French, colonized and colonizer, offering a useful complication to familiar readings of the imperial family romance. In chapter 2, Hill turns attention to the musical genre of the biguine, providing a useful summary of key moments in the genre's formation and recovering the influential role of radio broadcaster and vocalist Léona Gabriel. Hill teases out the contradictions that inhere in her on-air presentations of biguine, which meld touristic exoticism with the sonic work of anthologizing diasporic sound. Hill grounds his account of the biguine's many ambivalences in a recognition of how the form inscribes the profound losses sedimented in the Antillean re-memories of slavery, colonization, and the volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée, which in 1902 destroyed the cultural capital of Martinique, Saint-Pierre. For Hill, the biguine is a crucial soundscape where Créole music's place in an ongoing struggle over the problem of hybridity in popular and critical thought may be heard. Chapter 3 proffers a close reading of the polysemy in Josephine Baker's performance career by examining one iconic film text where a slew of colonial and racial fantasies run together in an oily mix, Princesse Tam Tam (1935). Baker provides a perfect figure through which to deconstruct the mythologies of the doudou; and while Hill gives thorough attention to critical diasporic responses to Baker, including early dismissals of her musicality and buffoonery, he also insists on challenging the masculinist bent of such criticisms. His writing on Baker contributes to recent scholarship by Jayna Brown, Anne Anlin Cheng, Terri Francis, and others on her curious role in violent colonial economies of representation. Chapter 4 traces the fascinating dual etymologies of the tam-tam as a Chinese cymbal and an African drum, revealing just how recently one of the most recurrent tropes of African authenticity became canonical. Following Agawu's argument that African rhythm is an invented notion, Hill challenges us to think harder about the percussion evoked in negritude poetry. Hill's close readings of the epic poem Black-Label in this chapter are a nuanced and welcome addition to the comparatively limited scholarship on Damas. In Chapter 5, Hill takes as his starting point the origin of short-wave colonial radio broadcasting at the Exposition Internationale Coloniale of 1931 to analyze how radio facilitated the projection of “the authentic voice of France,” critiquing its imperial functions while drawing on Fanon's work on radio listening in the tradition of Ian Baucom. Hill picks up the frequency of audio technology in Césaire's poem “Automatic Crystal” and demonstrates how colonial technologies instigated virtuosic counter-texts in writing and sound that recentered the black body in all its materiality, insisting that we attend to the violence with which even anticolonial rhythms beat on the figured skin of black women, femmes nues, femmes noires. Throughout the book, the subtending beat of le cri noir is always perceptible, and his nuanced readings, while sensitive to entanglement, ambivalence, and complicity, refuse to deny the power of the dream of authenticity. On the contrary, as Black Soundscapes White Stages concludes, dreaming authenticity “means constructing the conditions of possibility for claims of legitimation rooted not in exclusionary fantasies of purity, nor in romantic narratives of pure agency, but rather in the critically oriented, self-aware cultural practices that plant stakes every day in history” (153). In its wake, this book invites further critical attention for Léon Gontran Damas's poetry, a full historical account of female biguine singers and commentators—and, indeed, of the musical genre as a whole, particularly in interwar France—and continued work on the role of audio technologies and colonial exhibitions in comparative studies of French, British, and other imperial projects

Art · Art history · Colonialism · French · Humanities · Literature · Musical · Sound (geography · Soundscape · White (mutation · African history and culture studies · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History