Black Postmodernisms (Review of - Tricia Rose, Black Noise - Rap Music and Black Culture in Comtemporary America) - Postmodern Culture 5 - 1

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...
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https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.1r_potter.html
Russell A. Potter
1994
PMC 5.1
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture

in Contemporary America (Wesleyan UP/ UP of New
England)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness (Harvard UP)
1.
The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in

the development of the cluster of intellectual and political
movements that move variously under the banners of
Postmodernism, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Women's
Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and American Studies.
In one sense, they have been almost too successful in
gaining academic currency--some academics, it seems,
have embraced them before they even quite knew what
they were, happily tacking these new rubrics over the
departmental doorframe in hopes that they would work the
magic of keeping up with the theoretical Joneses. And yet,
at the same moment, these new fields have been attacked
with unusual virulence by such veterans of the academybashing circuit as Roger Kimball and Shelby Steele. Black
Studies, both in the U.K. and the U.S., has in particular
felt this crisis, continuing to serve as a favorite target for
the self-declared traditionalists even while it comes under
pressure from newer "Studies" competing for the same
academic niches. Earlier debates, such as those over the
questions of canon and curriculum, are now overshadowed
by far deeper and more ominous rumblings, as internal
divisions have erupted in an academic left that was
perhaps never as unified as its conservative critics liked to
believe. And, just to turn up the flame a little higher,
college and university budgets have begun to shrink,
forcing many of the new generation of academic
mavericks and activists into arguments over who will get
how big a slice of the dwindling pie--or who will get no
slice at all. The distant laughter of the conservative critics
of the academy adds a sense of lurking despair to this
morose game of musical chairs.
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2.
Meanwhile, back in the "cultures" that these fields

ostensibly study, the wheel of new subcultural formations
and their commodified doppelgangers has been spinning
with increasing speed. While this acceleration has been
marked in rapid changes in video, film, multimedia, and
hypertext, one of the most visible sites of change has been
music; yesterday's rhythms of revolution are today's pricey
national concert tours, and tomorrow's instant
retrocompilation CD's. Under such circumstances,
academics who cast their hats into the ring of "popular
culture" or "cultural studies" had best be prepared for a
fast-forward free-for-all; if they emerge with something
more than a handful of someone else's hair, they probably
ought to get some sort of medal. The battered academic
Volvo suddenly finds itself caught between sound-systemloaded Jeeps blaring Ice Cube on the one side and
air-conditioned Lexuses with the radio tuned to Rush
Limbaugh on the other. It's culture wars with a vengeance,
and yet it's also a time when there is an opportunity,
however fleeting, for voices from within the academy to
perform potent acts of cultural translation, acts which,
even if they can't resolve the cacophony, can at least
articulate what's at stake, and perhaps finally break
through the strained dichotomies between "intellectual"
and "popular" culture, and perhaps even take account of
the interpenetration of such categories. That, after all, was
supposed to be one of the benefits of the post-structuralist
critiques that pried open this door in the first place; it
seems strange that, a generation after Barthes, people
should still be discovering the mythologics of culture as
though this were something never heard of before.
3.
A large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very

discourses post-structuralism has deployed to describe
itself. As bell hooks put it back in the first issue of
Postmodern Culture:
The contemporary discourse which talks
the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring
breakthroughs that allow recognition
of otherness, still directs its
critical voice primarily to a
specialized audience, one that shares
a common language rooted in the very
master narratives it claims to
challenge. If radical postmodernist
thinking is to have a transformative
impact then a critical break with the
notion of "authority" as "mastery
over" must not simply be a rhetorical
device, it must be reflected in habits
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of being, including styles of writing

as well as chosen subject matter.1
Hooks's rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of

postmodern critiques to ignore or tokenize black
expressive artforms, but also the long-standing--and
oftentimes justified--suspicion on the part of black writers
and philosophers over what (if anything) postmodernism
could possibly offer for the kinds of critical histories they
were engaged with constructing. As recently as 1989, it
was possible for Cornel West to allow, in his essay "Black
Culture and Postmodernism," that "the current
'postmodernism' debate is first and foremost a product of
significant First World reflections upon the decentering of
Europe."2 West, as one of the leading black philosophers
of our time, saw both the parochial and ludic elements of
postmodernism as signs of its insufficient engagement
with black culture, even as he gestured toward "a
potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism."3 Yet in
the light of critiques and analyses by scholars such as
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric Lott, and Paul Gilroy, it has
become increasingly evident that what had earlier been
articulated primarily as the subcultural resistance of black
artforms has in fact had a long and intimate relation with
the founding dialectics of "Western" modernism, and
consequently of "postmodernism" as well. Now, at last, it
seems possible to begin to acknowledge the manifold
ways in which black studies, and the histories and arts that
it has engaged, have been and continue to be absolutely
central to the questions raised by contemporary theory,
and consequently to the numerous appropriations and
figurations of blackness that have (in)formed modernist
and postmodernist thought (as well as of the black artists
and writers who have claimed and reclaimed a place in the
genealogy of avant gardes).
4.
Still, both Gilroy and Rose, though for somewhat

different reasons, tend to eschew the term "postmodern":
Gilroy prefers "anti-modern" or "counterculture of
modernity"; Rose uses the more materialist-inflected
"post-industrial." Gilroy has a healthy suspicion of the
simplistic relativism of some avatars of postmodernism,
and prefers to see these black cultural formations as
oppositional modernities, rather than postmodernities.
Interested primarily in reclaiming the territory of the
modern as a movement instigated by the historical
experiences and philosophical implications of black
slavery and diaspora, he looks dimly on the kind of glib
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postmodernism of writers such as Jameson, whose

academic "we" never feels the need to account for its own
racial, sexual, and gender presuppositions. Rose, for her
part, never directly addresses the implications of
postmodern theory, though she makes ready use of many
of its strands. Her commitment to a thoroughly materialist
account of the roots of black expressivities makes her
suspicious of some of these strands, but she confines her
critique to one or two writers who exemplify its worst
qualities. Both Gilroy and Rose are right, I think, to be
wary, but at the same time their work raises questions
which are absolutely fundamental to postmodernist theory
and practice, and indeed draw forcefully on some of the
same decentering discourses as some of the more political
postmoderist texts.
5.
I will discuss Rose's book first since, despite the fact

that it does not explicitly engage with the questions of
(post)modernity, it works within a certain characteristic
bind of one genre of academic postmodernism. For, both
with "high" cultural formations (such as the writings of
Derrida or the post-Haraway theorists of cyberspace) and
with so-called "popular" formations (hip-hop, grunge,
rock videos), the most common tone taken up by public
intellectuals is that of the "bluffer's guide." What should
we know about hypertext? What's the latest word on street
culture? To audiences for whom such questions elicit a
potent mixture of curiosity and anxiety, there is an endless
hunger for articles or books that will give them a ready
grip on the latest cultural movement. Academic writers,
especially those who like to work as activist public
intellectuals, implicitly address this broader audience, and
yet in their desire to fulfill its wishes for a synoptic
overview of a critical issue, they often serve reductive
ends. This is partly the doing of reviewers and readers,
who are looking for ready-made rhetorical handles, but it
is also part of academic writers' desire to enjoy a spotlight
broader than the private accolades of students or
colleagues.
6.
The crucial question is that posed by Michel de Certeau

in Heterologies: "From what position do the historians of
popular culture speak? And what object do they constitute
as a result of that position?"4 For it is rarely in the
interests of "insurrectionary knowledges" (such as
hip-hop) that the historians or chroniclers of "culture," as
constituted by the knowledges of semiotics, anthropology,
or literary theory, have spoken. Those on the right,
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informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of "the

decline and fall" from a Norman Rockwell past into a Piss
Christ present, explicitly oppose all insurrectionary arts;
intellectuals on the left, unfortunately, have seemed more
interested in making academic capital of the popular than
in articulating to a broader audience just what the value of
such insurrections might be. When it comes to books
whose explicit subject matter, rap music, is among the
chief targets of the moral panicists of the right, as well as
a phenomenon frequently held up by those on the left as a
sign that artistic political resistance is alive and well, the
exemplary questions of the public intellectuals of the left
and right go toe-to-toe, each trying to claim hip-hop as a
centerpiece of their social agenda. It's a fight to the finish,
as one critic's nihilistic gat-toting hoodlum is another's
organic intellectual. As rappers say, "It's on."
7.
And Tricia Rose, for one, is ready for the battle. Black
Noise is the kind of book you would like to send in a plain
brown wrapper to everyone who dismisses rap music as a
long-lived fad, mindless posturing, or minstrelsy for the
'90s. She provides ample evidence for skeptics of the
development of rap music, its place within hip-hop culture
and black American culture in general, and its
efflourescence in the face of all kinds of direct and
indirect attacks. Her opening chapter, "Voices from the
Margins," effectively summarizes rap music's cultural
imbrication at the level both of its production (she uses rap
video as an example here) and of its consumption, with
the associated questions of performance, audience, and
technology. This segues nicely into the second chapter,
"All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture
in Postindustrial New York," where she provides a
detailed social history of the South Bronx as the primary
site of the emergence of hip-hop culture. The history is
crucial, and ought to be required reading for critics such as
David Samuels or C. Delores Tucker, clarion-callers of the
"rap is a white plot" conspiracy theory. And, while writers
such as David Toop or Stephen Hagar have given more
detailed accounts of the musical developments in the years
leading up to hip-hop's ascendancy, Rose offers an
account that clearly demonstrates the links of all the
musical and artistic dimensions of hip-hop culture to the
material situation of young black and Latino Americans in
New York City in the late 1970's and early '80's.
8.
The latter part of this chapter extends Rose's

arguments, attempting to link certain productive hip-hop
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tropes, such as "flow" and "breaking," to the cultural

histories she details. Here, however, she seems to founder
a bit, as she comes up against the age-old musicologist's
conundrum of how to link form and content in a structure
that is, to a large extent, not representational (or, on the
verbal level, never simply representational). And, as
attractive as it is to categorize rap music's formal features,
unless such accounts explicitly address the material
histories at stake, they quickly dissipate into hazy
generalities (just what is "flow," anyway?). Rose seems to
sense this, as she quickly moves into a discussion of
hip-hop culture's holy trinity of writing, breaking, and
rapping, for each of which she offers succinct and
suggestive accounting. As in other parts of the book, one
has the sense that Rose is more at home supplying cultural
contexts than she is in producing close analyses of
particular rap lyrics or hip-hop creations.
9.
Rose's next chapter, "Soul Sonic Forces," takes a

second drive by the same territory, and is considerably
more successful. Rose performs a difficult balancing act
between those who would link hip-hop to pre-modern
African-American or African traditions, and others who
would rather see it as a wholly new innovation dependent
on technology. For the most part, she is able to delineate
the ways in which rap music partakes of both orality and
technology, without being limited by the paradigms of
either. Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, she tends to
see those who read rap as a "postmodern" artform as
necessarily moving away from the materialist grounding
of black studies, and does not allow for the possibility of a
materialist postmodernism. Nonetheless, she acutely cuts
down to size those who disembody hip-hop, taking it as a
postmodern machine without a driver, and thus forgetting
the actual black communities who have produced and
consume it.
10.
At the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop's

aesthetic with the questions of originality, production, and
commodification that have long been points of contention
among critics of African-American music. At least since
Adorno's attempt to trash jazz as mindless musical
repetition--up there with religion as an opiate of the
masses--critics have argued over the social implications of
music and other artforms "in the age of mechanical
reproduction." Rose neatly sidesteps Adorno, quite
accurately observing that he assumes that "mass
production sets the terms for repetition and that any other
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cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems

of mass production, are subsumed by the larger logic of
industrialization" (72). On the contrary, Rose asserts,
repetition, precisely because it antedates and post-dates
industrial capitalism, is an ideal mode of resistance, both
because it can re-appropriate and hijack technological
machinery, and because it in fact makes a very potent
agent for denaturalizing dominant cultural assumptions
about what constitutes art.
11.
This offers Rose another smooth segue into the

question of sampling, which she quite accurately identifies
as central to hip-hop's technological practices and
aesthetic values. I wish that she would have taken up the
critical ways in which, as she richly suggests, sampling
challenges notions about originality and intellectual
property, but she chooses instead to focus on the specific
techniques which some of rap's best-known
producers--such as Eric "Vietnam" Sadler--use to "bring
the noise." Her interview with and analysis of Sadler is
fascinating, but at the end the theoretical issues raised by
such practices are only touched on in passing. Rose does,
however, offer a salient critique of some of the past
scholarship on sampling, again moving to complicate the
all-too-easy dichotomies of technology versus
community, or fragmented versus whole, that tend to
underpin many analyses.
12.
The central chapter, "Prophets of Rage: Rap Music and

the Politics of Black Cultural Expression," finally enables
Rose to free herself from the work--necessary, but to some
extent deadening--of sketching in the sociological and
musical contexts of hip-hop; having made her points about
the material situation of the music, she is free to assess its
larger cultural engagements. And, at the beginning, she is
forceful in articulating the intense, inevitably
contradictory power of rap music in society. She offers a
model--of "public" and "private" transcripts--which
suggests the doubleness, the coded nature of rap lyrics.
And as far as this analysis goes, she's right on the money.
Yet it's odd, given the substantial work done on the black
tradition of Signifying, that Rose seems to eschew this
model, choosing instead a rather generalized model that
does not resonate as strongly as it might with other critical
work in the larger field of Black Studies. Nonetheless, the
point is substantially the same, which is that rap lyrics
play with what its listeners know (or don't), drawing them
in even as it shape-shifts through tropological sequences
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that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to

'hook' its listeners like an angler snagging a trout.
13.
Rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop

lyrics--Paris's "The Devil Made Me Do It," KRS-One's
"Who Protects Us from You?," L.L. Cool J.'s "Illegal
Search," and Public Enemy's "Night of the Living
Baseheads." Her readings, while uneven in places,
certainly demonstrate the potency of these lyrics, as well
as their rhetorical fluidity. Yet just at this point, where
there is the greatest opportunity to analyze how rap lyrics
work on the tropological level, Rose instead reads all four
lyrics in a basically narrative sense, comparing them with
anecdotes from her own life, hypothetical reflections on
the class dimensions of L.L. Cool J.'s status as a wealthy
entertainer, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the video for
PE's "Baseheads." There are salient social points in every
reading, but only scattered observations on exactly how
these raps managed to bum rush the mass-media stage, or
on the promised "politics" of black expression. There is
also, for the most part, no close reading of the tropological
moves that structure these raps: it's rather like reading an
account of a boxing match that talks only about strategy
without offering any blow-by-blow details.
14.
Again, de Certeau's question comes to mind: in

presenting analyses of larger cultural movements, what is
at stake? However much academic writers would like to
eschew the role of talking heads, their commentary spliced
in between footage of current or past events, is there
another, more fully engaged role open to them? Rose is
clearly struggling with these questions, as anyone who
writes such a book must, and expectations perhaps run too
high. Hip-hop is too vast to lend itself to ready analysis in
any one book, as Rose herself notes frankly in her preface,
and however detailed or full her readings, they can't stand
in for hip-hop culture as a whole. Still, the modality of
object and analysis, of the critic as commentator, suffuses
much of this book, and gives it at times a frustrating
distance from what it tries to bring most closely into view.
Rose is at times, it seems, uncertain just where to set the
dial between the rhetorical distance of conventional
criticism and the ready familiarity and engagement of a
fan of the artform. Having to explain every reference at
every point can be deadening, and yet dropping allusions
left and right risks leaving many readers scratching their
heads.
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15.
Rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is

at her best when she can use specific material histories or
social trends. Her analysis of the politics of the decline in
large-arena rap venues, which makes up the balance of her
"Prophets of Rage" chapter, is compelling, and brings
together numerous sources to make evident the repressive
but often behind-the-scenes politics of large concert
venues. Yet this analysis, as acute as it is, does not quite
fulfill the chapter's promise of an accounting of the
politics of black musical expression, since it does not
address studio recordings, magazine and newspaper
attacks on rap, show-trials such as those of Biz Markie or
2 Live Crew, or the problem with rap's lack of radio
exposure, all of which are at least as significant as the
politics of live concerts--perhaps more, given that rap
music today is primarily produced and consumed via
recordings, despite its reliance on dialogic structures
which remain fundamentally linked to acts of reception,
call-and-response, and interlocution.
16.
Rose's final chapter, "Bad Sistas," is in fact her

strongest, bringing together as it does her ability to read
social structures--such as sexism and homophobia--not
simply alongside but within the discourses of rap lyrics
and media hype. She rightly rejects the sort of identity
politics that thinks it solely the job of women rappers to
answer male rappers' misogyny, or for that matter
assumes that a woman rapper is necessarily a feminist
rapper. She denounces the implicit heterosexism of many
champions of hip-hop (in particular Houston A. Baker, Jr.
and Nelson George). Yet she does more than simply call
such bias out on the carpet, but goes further, situating
critical discourses over rap in relationship to the uneasy
alliances between bourgeois, predominantly white
feminism and black women whose struggles, while allied
in a general sense with those of this feminism, have had to
be contested within very different social and economic
structures. She moves astutely from this analysis to a
series of examples drawn from the raps and videos of
artists such as Salt-n-Pepa, Roxanne Shante, and MC Lyte,
demonstrating the ongoing and complex verbal play via
which women rappers dramatize their own multiple and at
times contradictory positions in relation to their lovers,
their rivals, and their homegirls. Finally, she offers a
refreshingly candid account of the ways in which black
women's sexuality manages to be both openly expressive
and resistant to objectification, a kind of feminism that,
though reluctant to name itself as such, clearly has a
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potent and complex contribution to make to feminist

theory and practice. Ultimately, Rose implies, the
vernacular ethos of black women struggling against
sexism and racism is the root and ground which
feminism--particularly academic feminist theory--tends to
overlook, even as it continually invokes its name. There
are valuable grounds here for analysis of the larger
relations between academic discourses and vernacular
artforms and social structures: though there is no space in
the book to develop them, I hope that Rose (and others)
will continue to do so.
17.
Black Noise, despite its shortcomings--and some are

inevitable in any book that tries to tackle a vibrantly living
and changing artform--is without question the best book
on rap music and hip-hop culture yet to appear. Even
though much of its time is spent detailing the backgrounds
of the music, such backgrounding is an inescapable
necessity when writing about a cultural formation so often
attacked, distorted, and hyped within both the academic
and the popular press, and about which there is so much
misinformation and sheer ignorance. Rose, admirably,
does not try to over-simplify her topic, and at its best her
book offers a snapshot of hip-hop with all its urgent and
yet at times contradictory messages and tactics intact.
With the appearance of Rose's book, it is to be hoped that
hip-hop critics inside and outside the academy will be able
to move on toward a more detailed engagement with the
numerous political, social, and aesthetic issues it raises,
without having at every turn to stop and explain the basic
issues and histories at stake.
18.
One aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate

hip-hop within the larger histories of black expressive arts,
and still more broadly, within the critical debates over
culture, identity, and (post)modernity that have helped
define the terms for the social and intellectual struggles of
the '90's. Rose, concerned primarily with defending
hip-hop as a cultural movement, only gestures toward
these broader issues, and while identifying hip-hop as a
"postindustrial art," she does not address exactly what that
might mean from the point of the historical development
of black arts. Here the work of Paul Gilroy offers an
apposite yet wholly supportive counterpoint; working with
what seems at the outset an impossibly broad brush,
Gilroy sets out to demarcate the histories of what he calls
"the black Atlantic," in the process sketching out the
fundamentals of a new, trans-national, yet non-reductive
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model of the interrelations between black diasporic

cultures. And, while it is hard to compete with the
dust-jacket accolades showered upon Gilroy's book by
critics such as Anthony Appiah or Hazel Carby, it is
impossible to overstate the importance of his work to
black studies, or to cultural studies as a whole. A radical
scholar who nonetheless has a passion for carefully
balanced observations, Gilroy's book is forty theses on the
door of cultural studies, and if the folks inside neglect to
read them, they do so at their peril. Few writers--maybe
none--can combine as Gilroy does a series of potent,
historically articulated textual epiphanies with the broad
yet meticulous brush of synthesis. Precisely because the
book is so thoroughly grounded in the particularities of
black histories and artforms, there is no way to review it
without attending to each of Gilroy's specific
investigations in turn--and yet to do this is to be reminded
(as I suspect Gilroy would want us to be) of the
complexity as well as the continuity of black diasporic
artforms.
19.
Central to Gilroy's thesis is the claim that

modernism(s) cannot be conceived of as European, that in
fact the genealogy of modernism is from the outset bound
up with black histories, cultural forms, and the historical
experience of slavery. Gilroy bases this claim not on a
sweeping monumental survey, but on an incisive
tropological tour through the tutor-texts of modernism,
among which he includes not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and
Benjamin, but Douglass, DuBois, and C.L.R. James. But
before making these specific cases, Gilroy wants first to
sketch in the problematics of contemporary cultural
studies, within which blackness and modernity orbit in
circles both of contest and exchange. Gilroy's chronotope
here is that of a ship, undertaking multiple transatlantic
crossings, carrying slaves through the immeasurable
horror of the Middle Passage, and in later times carrying
the speech, song, and spirit of what Gilroy sees as a
fundamentally transnational black Atlantic culture. As a
sort of shot over the bow, Gilroy fires the first of many
broadsides at those whom he calls black "particularists"
and "exceptionalists," and, rebel without a pause, directs
an equal volley at the ostensibly allied fleet of the
anti-essentialist position. Black culture, he argues, need
not answer the call to (mis)represent itself as wholly
unified and ethnically absolute, nor need it disperse to the
four winds of assimilation, appropriation,
commodification, and reification. It can, in fact, very well
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claim for itself both roots and routes (Gilroy's favorite

trope, and one that resonates throughout this book)
20.
Yet in order to make such claims, Gilroy must first do

what very few in his position have done, and that is to
critique the very field of cultural studies within which he
stands. For, while in the U.S. black studies came up
through the academy within a fairly consistent humanistic
paradigm, in the U.K., black studies has been shaped by a
long alliance with left intellectuals in the field of cultural
studies. Now that cultural studies itself has become such a
popular U.K. export, Gilroy has something to say about
the nature of its cargo. He notes the conspicuous absence
in the histories narrated by British Marxists of the
anti-colonial struggles of previous centuries, which plays
into the pernicious and yet rarely explicit assumption that
to be "British" was (and is) to be "white." As Gilroy tells
it, it's striking how the ostensibly revolutionary sentiments
of British cultural studies at times partake as intensely of a
kind of nostalgic nationalism as the far more reactionary
ideologies of the most stodgy conservatives. This same
nationalism underpins the logic of "American Studies" in
the U.S., and Black Studies as well; African-American
culture is held forth as the paradigm and fons sacrae of
blackness, against which what Gilroy calls "U.K. Blak" or
the polymorphous Black cultures of the Caribbean are all
too often marginalized. Like Marxists before them, critics
within cultural studies seem blind to their own reliance on
precisely the sort of nationalistic frames which erode their
claims to larger mass formations. In the case of black
diasporic cultures, this tunnel vision is particularly costly,
as Gilroy demonstrates forcefully in the chapters that
follow.
21.
Much of the balance of the first chapter--"The Black

Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity"--are devoted to
an analysis of the writings of Martin Delany which, while
valuable, seems peripheral to Gilroy's project. Gilroy's
analysis of Delany as a foundational force in the linkage
of black masculinity and patriarchy to black national
identity is forceful, but represents only one aspect of the
ethos Gilroy seeks to define. His threefold model of black
consciousness is only sketched here, but it is highly
pertinent: black modernisms have been edged on either
side by a kind of longing for the "anti-modern" past and
an anticipatory yearning for a postmodern yet-to-come"
(37). Delany works well as an exemplary thinker of the
"past" element in this triad, but to lay out the other end of
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the spectrum Gilroy turns to black music. For as he

pointedly observes, music both forces an accounting with
the extra-textual world and takes account of the
performative vernacular dimensions of black culture, for
which heavily literary accounts of black culture have so
often failed to account, and yet which are so central.
Music, furthermore, serves as a force of continuum,
reaching back to draw from African melodic and rhythmic
roots, even as it is shaped by its own transatlantic routes
of transmission, as when American R&B traveled to
Jamaica and was reborn as Ska, which in turn gave rise to
rock steady, Reggae, and dancehall (each of which in turn
has traveled both to and from the UK and US). Whatever
the textual and literary arguments Gilroy makes--and they
are compelling in and of themselves--music is his trump
card, as it offers the clearest framework within which his
thesis of the black Atlantic as the "counterculture of
modernity" can be materially demonstrated.
22.
Gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden

(and at first, rather obscure) movement back to a
discussion of Hegel, and the central role of the
master-slave dialectic in his philosophy and those of his
peers and followers. It's a different tack (to maintain the
nautical tropology), and yet a strategic one. All too often,
the deep-seated racialism of Hegel and those who wrote in
his wake is glossed over, or (perhaps worse) admitted as
though it were an incidental blot on an otherwise
unblemished cloth. On the contrary, as Gilroy insists, it is
fundamental to the philosophical turns which led directly
to modernism. Slavery, he notes, was for a great period of
time considered as a problem internal to the European
"West": it was only after the moral campaign against it
that it was jettisoned as if it were some sort of awful
accident. The relation of slave and master changes and
fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of slave and
master--on this, both slavery's defenders and the first
generation of its critics could agree: if it became at times
an abstraction, its material presence was never far away.
Gilroy embodies this potent material corollary in stunning
readings both of the narrative and life of Frederick
Douglass and the case of Margaret Garner (which Toni
Morrison used as the basis for Beloved); the experience of
escape--failed or successful--from the psychological
bonds of slavery emerges as a kind of limit-experience
which tests the very foundations of subjectivity. And
more: Douglass, for one, emerges as a signal modernist
figure, not simply a self-made man, but a self made via a
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
14 of 21
particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist

smithies of the soul.
23.
Gilroy's next chapter finally addresses the central

question of black music, and in many ways it's the most
free-ranging and compelling reading in the whole book.
It's refreshing to read a critic who knows the music
thoroughly, whether he's writing about the Fisk Jubilee
Singers, Miles Davis, or Eric B. and Rakim. There is none
of the usual critical hand-wringing over 2 Live Crew et.
al.--Gilroy knows enough to know that's not where it's
at--nor is there the kind of list-of-names vertigo of a critic
who's trying to link everything with everything. Gilroy
treats musicians as artists on their own terms, and finds
linkages in their thought and performance that are the
mortar of his larger claims. The Fisk Jubilee Singers form
one trope, with their extensive European tours making a
signal moment for the European dimensions of black arts,
even as they return later in the book to represent blackness
to a young and still very northeasterly W.E.B. DuBois.
Their modern counterparts have far more compact means
of transportation, as the chronotope of the turntable
replaces that of the ship, and the triangulation between UK
Blak, US soul and R&B, and Caribbean musics is traced
with attention to the ways in which it refutes any
simplistic notion of Africa (or the U.S., or anyplace) as
the point of origin, even as it structures and propagates
truly synthetic and recognizable black styles. By
examining instances of transatlantic fusion such as those
of Soul II Soul, Ronnie Laws, and Apache Indian, Gilroy
articulates what he sees as a cultural formation that is both
"constructed" and yet has (a) "soul," an essence if you
will, a musical spectrum both whole and heteroglot,
connected and fragmented.
24.
It's a shame that Gilroy doesn't develop this particular

thesis further, and it is a potent corrective to the kind of
reductive musical nationalism practiced by many black
critics, even as it squarely claims for black music a
"counterculture of modernity" which must be met on its
own terms. Still, while music is vital to his argument-forming, as he notes, a crucial mode beyond textuality and
simple representation--Gilroy has far broader ambitions,
specifically the (re)clamation of black Atlantic formations
in literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. To
this project, his re-examinations of DuBois and Wright are
of the utmost importance, and not simply because of their
travels and exiles (DuBois to Germany as a young man,
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
15 of 21
and to Africa as "The Old Man," and Wright's move to

France), but because they enable Gilroy to rewrite the
genealogy of blackness itself.
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
16 of 21
25.
Gilroy's analysis of DuBois takes a twofold focus: a

detailed re-examination of The Souls of Black Folk, and a
reading of some of DuBois's long-neglected polemical
novels (which, though fascinating, there is not room to
discuss here). In the background of both, Gilroy posits a
surprising--even scandalous--connection: the thought that
DuBois's nationalism owed something to the German
nationalism he encountered while studying in Germany.
Yet at the same time as the power of national identity
impressed itself on DuBois, he could not fully follow the
kind of black particularism espoused by precursors such as
Martin Delany or Alexander Crummel, for the simple
reason that he was particularly aware of the ways in which
national and racial identities were formed and informed by
a complex and often conflicting set of historical urges.
Gilroy sorts these out into three stages, which he
associates with the three sections of The Souls of Black
Folk: the struggle against the institution of slavery, the
struggle to win bourgeois rights and liberties, and the
pursuit of spaces of black community and autonomy. He
notes that the battle against racism is necessarily different
in each of these phases, and also that the ways in which
these stages overlapped each other led to the coexistence
and conflict of what were, on a tactical level, very
different struggles. The falling out between DuBois and
Washington, for instance, is newly intelligible in this light,
as education had a radically different role to play in the
first two of these phases. The third stage--with all its
attendant anxieties of assimilation and particularism--is,
Gilroy argues, the moment for the emergence of
oppositional black modernisms:
The third stage characteristically
involves a deliberate and
self-conscious move beyond language in
ways that are informed by the social
memory of the earlier experiences of
enforced separation from the world of
written communication. A
countercultural sense of the inability
of mere words to convey certain truths
inaugurates a special indictment of
modernity's enforced separation of art
and life as well as a distinct
aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic)
standpoint. Music is the best way of
examining this final aspect.
(123-124).
The special significance of black spiritual songs for

DuBois, as well as the ongoing refiguration of black
musics as the representative cultural productions of the
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
17 of 21
black Atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and

suggests a still more potent claim. Perhaps it is not, in fact,
at the level of intellectual vanguards that the final phase of
black struggle needs to take place, but precisely at the
vernacular level. Gilroy, however, leaves this possibility
hanging as he offers a strong reading of The Souls of
Black Folk: while there is no space to reiterate his
argument in the detail it deserves in the scope of this brief
review, suffice it to say that it reveals strong and
all-too-often neglected undercurrents, which militate
toward a skeptical rejection of the broadconcept of
"progress" or "progressivism" with which DuBois is
conventionally associated. The DuBois who emerges in
these readings has a richer and more complicated
engagement with all three phases of black struggle, and
his model of "double consciousness" marks not a flaw but
a prophetic pointer toward a different kind of vision, a
"second sight" which looks far beyond the fuzzy
humanism of most modernist thinkers and toward the
postmodern possibility of seeing split subjectivity as a
critical asset.
26.
Gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling

look at Wright's career, focusing on his years in France.
Wright was faulted by many for his move to European
turf, and to this day the books he wrote in France have
been disparaged and neglected for failing to represent the
kind of realist, experiential models of race that were
central to the positive reception accorded his earlier
novels. Again, Gilroy discovers an unexpected Wright, a
person engaged with European modernity not via the
margin, but from the very questions that formed its center.
Wright's interest in Nietzschean affirmation via negation
(as one example of which Wright offered the "Dozens,"
the verbal ancestor of today's hip-hop disses), his
engagement with existentialism, and his deliberate refusal
of the simplistic representational terms which critics and
publishers held forth as the condition for their renewed
interest in his work, all become newly meaningful in
Gilroy's reading. For Wright, to claim modernism as his
own was a serious task, and grew as strongly and deeply
from the same experiences as earlier had led him to write
Native Son. In a compelling passage, Gilroy quotes
Wright's comments on the subject, which might well be
addressed to all of the detractors of his later work. Wright
claimed, in fact, that double consciousness--which he
called "split subjectivity"--gave him a particular and
potent slant on the crisis of modernity:
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
18 of 21
I've tried to lead you back to the

angle of my vision slowly . . . My
point of view is a Western one, but a
Western one that conflicts at several
vital points with the present,
dominant outlook of the West. Am I
ahead of or behind the West? My
personal judgment is that I'm ahead.
And I do not say this boastfully; such
a judgment is implied by the very
nature of those Western values I hold
dear. (qtd. 172)
It's a shame that Wright's angle of vision has not received

the kind of critical attention it deserves, and Gilroy offers
a number of compelling readings of Wright's later work
which will, hopefully, renew interest in his later writings.
27.
The final chapter, "Not a Story to Pass On: Living

Memory and the Slave Sublime," offers a fitting
culmination of the book's syntheses, though Gilroy is quite
clear that his book only sketches the barest outline of
black Atlantic roots 'n' routes. The title epigraph, drawn
from Morrison's Beloved, underlines the double valence of
tradition in black cultures; it is the bearer both of "jewels
brought from bondage" and of the unspeakable imprint of
slavery. The bitter intertwining of pain and pleasure, so
graphically evoked by Morrison in the scene where Paul D
traces out the "chokecherry tree" of scar tissue of Sethe's
back, is brought into critical focus as Gilroy traces the
debates between fragmented and whole racial selves,
between constructivist and essentialist polarities, and
again brings forth a new possibility. Gilroy shuns the
"spurious security" of melaninism, and is critical of some
of the more historically oversimplified versions of
Afrocentricity. And yet, nonetheless, he historically
situates the appeal of these discourses, and in fact
demonstrates compellingly the role of the yearning for
such stability in the production of the heteroglot yet
synaptically linked expressions of black diasporic
experiences. The "catastrophic rupture" of the middle
passage finds its compensation in acts of creation from
materials at hand, from vernacular syntheses of speech
and music, and in the deliberate engagement of these
discourses with the European modernities whose ideology
and aesthetics make for unexpected points of resonance.
Music, in particular, has the capacity both to "tell the
history" (as Jamaican DJ Prince Buster puts it) and to
bear the unbearable, extra-linguistic dimensions of what
Gilroy comes to call the "slave sublime." Music,
furthermore, is a profoundly temporal art, and in its
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
19 of 21
rhythmic unfolding builds a time for community. The

trope of time, as instanced in the Nation of Islam's
question "What Time Is It?," and its multiple diasporic
answers (Sun Ra: "It's after the end of the world"; The
Last Poets: "Time is running out"; Flavor-Flav's
gargantuan timepieces), both embody and transcend
historical time by, as Gilroy puts it, "asserting the
irreducible priority of the present" (202). Because of this
ability, music is capable of bearing the historical pain that
is the legacy of black diasporic cultures, and Gilroy offers
a suggestive reading of Percy Mayfield ("Hit the Road,
Jack"; "Please Send Me Someone to Love") as a
synecdoche of this transvaluative engagement with
melancholia and pain.
28.
This gives Gilroy the segue for his final and bold
movement, an accounting of the historical borrowings and
transformations that have linked black cultures in all
corners of the Atlantic to Jewish beliefs, traditions, and
intellectual syntheses. The most obvious vernacular link is
of course the landscape of black Spirituals, whose talk of
bondage in "Pharaoh's Land" and dreams of "Crossin' the
River of Jordan" draw from the Old Testament histories
which slaves encountered in the Caribbean and the
Americas. Their previous systems of belief fragmented
and eroded by the violence of the middle passage and the
experience of slavery, black slaves' appropriation and use
of the Jewish experiences of slavery constitutes, without a
doubt, one of the most profound "transvaluations of all
value" ever accomplished. This early legacy formed the
ground for later returns to Jewish religious and political
thought, in the process of which aspects of Jewish
nationalism, and the idea of black culture as "diasporic,"
grew readily. Black Atlantic religious practices such as
those loosely coalescing about Rastifarian religion are a
testament to the vernacular potency of these connections;
all the mythology of a return to Ethiopia, the figure of
Sellasie as Messiah, the myth of the Black Star Liners
which would carry Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" back to
the Promised Land, can be traced to this potent
conjunction. Gilroy gives a succinct and suggestive
account of one person, Edward Wilmot Blyden, an
influential black Caribbean writer and historian, and one
of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. Yet despite
some of the patriarchal and parochial qualities of his work,
Blyden's engagement with Jewish thought was, as Gilroy
shows, full and complex: Blyden learned Hebrew and
studied Jewish history with David Cardoze, a rabbi on the
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
20 of 21
island of St. Thomas. It was Blyden who made the

historical connections between Jewish and black
experiences of slavery and dispersal, which were revived
with the start of the Negritude movement in France in the
1930's.
29.
All this, of course, brings Gilroy face to face with the

claims of both black and Jewish particularists, each of
whom asserts that their collective experience is
untranslatable, and that (for some) even to compare the
two does violence to the sanctity and integrity of memory.
Gilroy does not offer a detailed critique of these claims,
but makes a passionate and very compelling argument for
renewed and continuing dialogue, a dialogue which might
begin to theorize more fully the "redemptive power
produced through suffering" as it works in a variety of
very different historical circumstances. Finally, Gilroy,
reflecting once more on Morrison's Beloved, looks
outward and onward to the ethical and artistic power of
history recovered and told via a process of "imaginative
appropriation." It is at this level, indeed, that the questions
Gilroy raises become especially pertinent, since he clearly
values some appropriations more than others. Having
voluntarily deprived himself of both the cudgel of
anti-essentialism and the mystic unifying power of black
particularism, Gilroy cannot offer any ultimate criterion
by which we might know which appropriations we ought
to value. In any case, as he readily acknowledges, the
complex hybridities and recurrent transits of the black
Atlantic render any such judgments temporary at best;
what counts is an engagement with the questions they
raise, and a refusal to trade the richness of uncertainty and
heterogeneity for what Gilroy sees as the poverty of
dogmatic certainties. It's a difficult struggle, but one to
which Gilroy's own work makes an immeasurable
contribution. Cultural studies, it is to be hoped, will never
be the same in the wake of the passage of Gilroy's
revolutionary work.
English Department
Colby College
rapotter@colby.edu
Copyright 1994 Russell A. Potter
NOTE: Readers may use portions of this work in
accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright
law. In addition, subscribers and members of subscribed
institutions may use the entire work for any internal
noncommercial purpose but, other than one copy sent by
email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that
individual's personal use, distribution of this article outside
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM
21 of 21
of a subscribed institution without express written

permission from either the author or the Johns Hopkins University Press is expressly
forbidden.
1.bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness," Postmodern

Culture 1.1
2.Cornel West, "Black Culture and Postmodernism,"
in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking
History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989): 87-98.
3.West, 96.
4.Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on
the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986): 129
Talk Back
06-Apr-16 2:59 PM

Black Postmodernisms (Review of - Tricia Rose, Black Noise - Rap Music and Black Culture in Comtemporary America) - Postmodern Culture 5 - 1

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Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture

The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

Meanwhile, back in the "cultures" that these fields

A large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

of being, including styles of writing

Hooks's rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of

Still, both Gilroy and Rose, though for somewhat

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

postmodernism of writers such as Jameson, whose

I will discuss Rose's book first since, despite the fact

The crucial question is that posed by Michel de Certeau

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of "the

The latter part of this chapter extends Rose's

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

tropes, such as "flow" and "breaking," to the cultural

Rose's next chapter, "Soul Sonic Forces," takes a

At the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop's

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems

This offers Rose another smooth segue into the

The central chapter, "Prophets of Rage: Rap Music and

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to

Rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop

Again, de Certeau's question comes to mind: in

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

Rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is

Rose's final chapter, "Bad Sistas," is in fact her

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

potent and complex contribution to make to feminist

Black Noise, despite its shortcomings--and some are

One aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

model of the interrelations between black diasporic

Central to Gilroy's thesis is the claim that

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

claim for itself both roots and routes (Gilroy's favorite

Yet in order to make such claims, Gilroy must first do

Much of the balance of the first chapter--"The Black

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

the spectrum Gilroy turns to black music. For as he

Gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist

Gilroy's next chapter finally addresses the central

It's a shame that Gilroy doesn't develop this particular

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

and to Africa as "The Old Man," and Wright's move to

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

Gilroy's analysis of DuBois takes a twofold focus: a

The special significance of black spiritual songs for

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

black Atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and

Gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...

I've tried to lead you back to the

It's a shame that Wright's angle of vision has not received

The final chapter, "Not a Story to Pass On: Living

Russell A. Potter - Review Essay: Black Modernisms / Black Postmod...