Cross-Rhythms .d e vre se r sth g ir llA .clP g n ih silb u P yru b sm o o lB .1 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. 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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Keren Omry 2008 Keren Omry has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. .d evre ISBN: 978-0-8264-9743-7 (hardback) se r sth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data gir llA A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. .clP g n ih silb u P yru b sm o o lB .1 1 0 2 © th girypo TPyripnetseedt bany dN beowugnend Iinm Gagrienagt SByrsitteamins b Pyv Bt iLdtddl,e Cs hLetdn,n Kaii,n Ign’sd iLaynn, Norfolk C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1. B lues notes: a discourse of race in the poetry of Langston 27 Hughes, in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and in Corregidora by Gayl Jones 2. Bebop spoken here: performativity in Ralph Ellison, 62 James Baldwin and Toni Morrison 3. Modes of experience: modal jazz and the authority of experience 96 in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon 4. F ree jazz: postracialism and collectivity in Toni Morrison’s 126 ‘Recitatif’ and Paradise Conclusion 163 Notes 166 .d e vre Bibliography 178 se r sth Discography 185 g ir llA .clP Index 187 g n ih silb u P yru b sm o o lB .1 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Acknowledgements Writing this book has been quite a journey. The marvellous people who have accompanied and assisted me along this path are too numerous to list, but I wish to name and thank a few whose presence or contribution has been at times critical, at times a luxury, but always a gift: Helen Carr whose supervision during the fi rst incarnation of this project and unfailing support have been truly inspiring. Caroline Blinder, Trevor Brent, Josh Cohen and Sarah Martin patiently read bits and pieces at different stages and gave me invaluable pointers, good advice and encouraging tips. Thank you to Krin Gabbard, Steven C. Tracy and Robert O’Meally whose scholarship and kind intellectual generosity have helped give me confi dence with my own research. I am grateful to Harold Ober Associates Incorporated for grant- ing me permission to cite so many wonderful Hughes blues lines. Thanks to Lovalerie King and Lynn Orilla Scott who have generously allowed me to reprint portions from their fabulous collection, and for their kind support. My gratitude goes to the Dept. of English and American Studies, Tel Aviv University, which allowed me the opportunity to further develop these ideas in the classroom, and to the Haifa University English Language & Literature dept., and particularly Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan who has been both encourag- ing and supportive. Moreover, Werner Sollors and the UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies offered the rare combination of fi erce intellect, intense dialogue and great fun that proved incalculably fruitful for the completion .de stages of the book. vrese I wish to give warmest thanks to Selina Packard, Sonia Weiner, Sari Cohen- r sth Shabot, Jane Millican, Julie Soubielle, Tali Dattner and Elizabeth Crossley, who g ir llA each in her way at various phases, at all hours and across time zones, helped .clP me plow through the obstacle course that this book proved to be and came to g the rescue with good humour and patience, apostrophe advice or consoling n ih silb pints. Thanks to Shira Mintzer who has shown me there are other rhythms and u P paces to live by, and for countless cups of tea. Thank you to Brian Flanagan for yrub making me laugh and cry and dance so hard for so long. sm o Finally, to Ur and Gal and Nili: every word in these pages thanks you who’ve o lB .1 managed to stay always on the beat – your rhythms keep me going and this 1 02 book is testimony to how far they have taken me. © th And to new beginnings. g iryp o C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Introduction The rhythms of this book are manifold: the break-neck and dead-slow beat of race, the spurts, blasts and hum of jazz, and the inevitable drums of history; the tip tap tat of the keyboard, the buses screeching and heels clacking in outside noise, inside mind churning, pages turning, books thumping, kettle gurgling, these all meet and intersect to compose the soundtrack of Cross-Rhythms. This book aspires to contemplate and comment on how culture functions crucially in the reality that is our lives: personal investment in the music is inseparable from its historicity and its vitality. Exposing these links and junctures, locating ourselves at these crossroads, reveals their absolute criticality and offers ways of understanding history and presence and art and politics. This project investigates how African-American writers have used blues and jazz as conceptual reference points in their works in order to explore the aes- thetics of ethnic identity-making processes. I concentrate on seven writers who engage in a literary project that seeks to represent, realize and/or articulate the complex histories of African-American experience. The legacy of trauma inher- ited from these narratives is problematized in the texts as much as their imaginative and aesthetic contexts are informed by it. It is through their turn to blues and jazz that the confl icting impulses are reconciled.1 To theorize the political and aesthetic possibilities of a musical-literary sensibility, I incorporate .d evre the socio-musicological models laid out by Theodor W. Adorno regarding clas- se sical music into the foundation of my analysis. (Ironically, Adorno himself was r sth a harsh critic of jazz; I discuss his criticisms as well as my own decision to use his g ir llA work despite this, at further length below.) .clP Jazz in all its manifestations (musical but also cultural and political) emerged g n in the twentieth century and is clearly its product, spawned from the dramatic ih silb shifts in American culture and political ideology of the nineteenth century. u P yru A relatively new form and a highly fl uid one, jazz embodies the culmination of bsm historical trends, corresponding directly to the social and cultural shifts through- oo out the 1900s. Jazz, moreover, has always been linked to African-American lB .1 experience and the construction of racial and ethnic identities. However, it is 1 0 2 © important to emphasize that, this link notwithstanding, jazz has never been th divorced from white-American experience and is very much the result of the g iryp interaction of black and white individuals and communities. Throughout its o C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. 2 Cross-Rhythms development, jazz has been critically affected by reviews of white critics, demands of white audiences and decision-making policies of white-run businesses, and has, moreover, for our purposes, been deeply infl uential on countless white- American authors.2 And yet, much as jazz is and always has been intimately linked to the evolving defi nitions of race and ethnic identity in America, in general, it is its function within shifting notions of blackness in particular that concerns us here. It is for this reason (rather than any troubling presumed organic or biological affi liations) that I have selected only texts written by African-American writers for critical investigation in Cross-Rhythms. Race The genealogy of the terms race and ethnicity and the relationship between them is well established but warrants a brief run through. European ideas defi ning race through biology and/or language, and linking it with a hierarchically ordered cultural nationalism, shaped racial ideas in North America from the nineteenth century, specifi cally as they culminate in the American myth of a manifest destiny.3 In the United States, this ideology of essentialist cultural nationhood was manipulated as a means of violent social division whose defi n- ing logic of exclusivity changed with the shifting explications of race. Indeed, a confused connection between race and language persisted, often serving as a clear racial marker. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the connection was already accepted as established fact and was transformed from a tool of inclusion, to one of exclusion. As will be seen in what follows, language becomes a central trope in African-American culture which, in the twentieth century, effectively inverts the racist denigrations based on perceived linguistic incom- petence. Instead, linguistic differences tend to be privileged as a subversive vernacular that verifi es ethnic authenticity. .d e vre Audrey Smedley, in her history of the development of racial thought in the ser sthg Utionnitse, dcu Ssttaotmess, ,R aacctiev aitnieds N, boertlhie Afsm, aernicda p (r1a9c9ti3c)e,s d tehfia nt pese retthainnic tioty aa ps a‘arltli ctuhloasre g trroaudpi- ir llA of people who see themselves and are seen by others as having distinct cultural .clP features, a separate history, and a specifi c sociocultural identity’ (30–1). ‘Race,’ g nih in contrast, ‘signifi es rigidity and permanences of position / status within a silbu ranking order that is based on what is believed to be the unalterable reality P yru of innate biological differences’ (32). In other words, ethnicity signifi es learned b sm behaviour and race denotes inherited genealogy. o olB Werner Sollors’s study of ethnicity in contemporary American society, Beyond .11 Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986), offered new terms with 0 2 © which to formulate these concepts. Recognizing the tensions associated with a thg discussion of ethnicity, Sollors prefers to strip the expression of its emotional irypo dressing, reconfi guring it to represent an interactive process between what he C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Introduction 3 calls descent and consent. Descent suggests an unassailable and essential self and social identifi cation; consent, in contrast, signifi es a conscious act of affi liation. Sollors suggests that modern ethnic identifi cation can be traced back to the etymological roots of ethnicity. Etymologically, ethnicity derives from the Greek ethnos, or ethnikos, which means ‘otherness’. Sollors describes this ‘otherness’ in religious terms where the so-called other represented the heathen, as set apart from the chosen people. There are countless examples of how this for- mulation of an elect which is posited against an antagonistic other (frequently clothed in religious rhetoric) has been applied in modern societies. As Sollors shows, this religious metaphor has been adopted in various ways by both white- American and African-American communities. Thus, this ethnic identifi cation becomes a highly subjective and fl exible process of categorization. Sollors rec- ognizes that the apparently natural social fragmentation into identifi able groups – recognizable as ethnic in twentieth-century America – is transformed into a political and ideological tool through its ability to take into account the diversity it contains and still preserve a coherent category. Contemporary efforts to recreate an ethnic self-defi nition (a phenomenon Sollors attributes to what he calls the third-generation ethnic Americans) is not a reversion to ethnic gestures – confl ating ethnicity to a two-dimensional mask of traditions which can be symbolically recognized at will. Rather, it is a modern, dynamic and creative process which integrates contemporary black experience with American culture and the distinct ethnic heritage. In ever- shifting relation to the American social landscape, these neo-traditions (such as afro hairstyle) may be interpreted as reactions to what was seen as an American melting pot. In a marriage of the notions of descent and consent, the process of ethnic identifi cation during the second half of the twentieth century has been redefi ned through the creation of new traditions and by appropriating distinctly American motifs. Thus the acceptance of America as a homeland, literally and imaginatively, in all its manifestations, has been central in recon- .d e vre ceptualizing the process of ethnic identifi cation. ser sthg AmAecrkincaonwsl eadngdin Agf raic atnra Admitieornic aonf s,c aonmdm auccneapl tidnigff ethreen htiiasttoiornic abl eimtwpeeerna tiwveh ittoe ir llA recognize the violence which has defi ned this differentiation, in this project .clP I use both race and ethnicity as terms which strive to understand these processes. g nih My own defi nitions of these expressions grow out of the ideas of Smedley, silbu Sollors and others (including Reginald Horsman, Paul Gilroy, Kwame Appiah P yru and Henry Louis Gates), and are specifi cally related to the historical, political b sm and social contexts of the United States. With race, I refer to that socio-genetic o olB concept: the artifi cially constructed idea that accepts certain genetic physical or .11 behavioural attributes as a method of statically categorizing communities. This 0 2 © defi nition strains to bear the weight of miscegenation and interracial relation- thg ships that defy any notion of racial purity in America. Nevertheless, the idea of irypo some intrinsic racial identity has been central to American ideologies. In the C Omry, Keren. Cross-Rhythms : Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011.