Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Early American Music and the Construction of Race

2021; University of California Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.571

1547-3848

Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, Bonnie Gordon, Maria Ryan, Candace Bailey, David García González, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Caitlin Marshall, Sarah Eyerly and Rachel Wheeler,

Music History and Culture

An ideology of racial difference is baked into American music history. The staggering diversity of music heard in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as waves of colonization, forced migration, enslavement, expulsion, and immigration brought different peoples into prolonged and often violent contact with each other, created lasting ideas and praxes of musical alterity. This holds true across genres and contexts. Native peoples and European colonists heard each other's music foremost as indicators of indelible difference and secondarily as signs of friendliness or danger. Enslavers perceived threats and conspiracy in African and African American singing, drumming, and dancing, and regulated against them. Belief in Euro-Americans' racial superiority found support in the pious and genteel repertoire that was popular among white citizens in the early United States. Nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, which promoted white supremacy and has been held up as a paragon of US musical ingenuity and US racism, reflects racialized musical fantasies, ideologies, and practices that had been coalescing for centuries.This colloquy aims to advance the conversation about music and the construction of race by foregrounding case studies of marginalized music makers in America before the advent of recorded sound. The prominence of the color line ca. 1900 has made recognizing the diversity and fluidity of prior American racializations difficult.2 Take the much-studied phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy: before the racially reductive Lost Cause narratives that erroneously reframed the Civil War as a valiant fight for states' rights (rather than the expansion of a white supremacist empire), before the legal and psychic perversions of Jim Crow, before the racialized market segmentation of the recording industry and the incomplete triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a pan-racial and ethnic minstrel culture in the sheet music, newspaper advertisements, sporting print culture, broadsheets, and commercial photography that constituted the era's mass media.3 In their live performances, minstrel troupes burlesqued in blackface, redface, and yellowface to exert social control not only by playing off against each other caricatures of Black Americans, Chinese Americans, and Indigenous peoples, but also by deploying gender-bending stereotypes while mocking Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish Americans.4 Recognizing minstrelsy's broader stakes helps to reframe the horrors of the Jim Crow era as part of America's "Greater Reconstruction," a term that captures the coincident traumas of the US imperial project of westward expansion and racial exclusion, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawai'i (1898), and the mass murder and imprisonment of Native Americans in the reservation system following the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890). A limiting framework that retrospectively views much of American culture through a Black-white binary has prohibited scholars from grappling with the truly astounding range of racialized musics produced before the twentieth century.Dismantling the Black-white binary requires us to locate our discussion of music and race in the period prior to 1900. It also requires a geographic reorientation away from the coastal and urban United States, regions whose concert life and music publishing industries have received the lion's share of scholarly attention. This colloquy's geographic scope builds on important recent work on music and cultural history in the American West, along what is now the United States–Mexico border, the American South, and the Caribbean.5 Working from these regions, the essays that follow unpack myriad racial constructions by considering American music through Spanish, French, African, and Indigenous sources, languages, and lived experiences.Racial fantasy is a productive trope that brings together the disparate conversations about race that are engaged by this colloquy. The world-building power of the racial fantasy animates much of the history and historiography of race, racial representation, music, gender, class, and sexuality in American culture. "Racial fantasy" is related to Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman's definition of the adjacent term "racial imaginary."6 But whereas Radano and Bohlman emphasize ideological constructions, "fantasy" draws attention to the intersection of affect, desire, and power as expressed in both musical and embodied registers.7 As a tool of white supremacy and violent racism, racial fantasy pervaded the institutions and practices of American musical performance: laws, sonic conventions, set designs and costuming, and performance practices all helped to conjure an independent, white American national identity.8 Racialized forms of musicking admittedly provided sites for creative expression, community building, resistance, relief from the oppressive conditions of labor, joy, and pleasure. By the nineteenth century, for instance, racialized and ethnicized "cheap amusements" offered essential social sustenance to the laboring working class. But as numerous cultural historians have argued, these entertainments perpetuated racist caricatures and stereotypes while fleetingly suspending the moral stigma associated with the physical delights of music.9 Departing from this scholarship, the aspect of racial fantasy we wish to focus on is not the escapism of popular urban amusements, performances, and nightlife that gave a brief but pleasurable reprieve from the repressive social order imposed by urban reformers and employers, as well as by both mainstream Protestant family values that centered on protecting purity, and Jewish and immigrant communities' concerns about maintaining cultural traditions. Instead, we present racial fantasy as a framework that productively probes the pleasure, terror, joy, anxiety, humor, mourning, plotting, desire, longing, and ideas of purity or authenticity located in the musical minds and affective registers that shaped race culturally in the four centuries of intercultural encounter that preceded the twentieth century. Foregrounding the affective and ideological formations of racial fantasy invites us to peer beyond the material lives of historical actors, past where the paper trail ends, and gives scholars a tool for thinking beyond archival limitations.Our proposal, that scholars hear American music history through the filter of racial fantasy, grows from an innovative scholarly understanding of the role of fantasy in broader racial constructions and imaginings that emerged in the 1990s. Scholars of US culture such as Philip J. Deloria, Saidiya Hartman, Walter Johnson, Eric Lott, William J. Mahar, David Roediger, Michael Rogin, Jacqueline Rose, and Shane White and Graham White, and cultural critics like Greil Marcus, tackled histories of transgressive and paradoxical racial desires using fragmentary evidence that promoted racial caricature visually, musically, and in embodied performances.10 Focusing particularly on the nineteenth century, these scholars called attention to the ways in which white masculine fantasies fostered racial constructions that superseded class and ethnicity by enacting Black, Latinx, Asian, white, and Indigenous identities. These enactments took place in daily life, on the stage, and, crucially, in the explosion of printed mass multimedia, including sheet music, the circulation of which codified visual and musical stereotypes in the period before sound and film recording.11 In every part of the globe that was touched by minstrelsy, fantasies served to advance white male status. In the Americas broadly, and the United States in particular, racial fantasies helped to fashion a white identity that contained anxieties about domination and difference by projecting desires for racial and sexual conquest and transmutation.12Violence is key to racial fantasy. In the early nineteenth century, as the United States found its footing as a white nation-state on stolen land built with kidnapped labor, racial fantasy consolidated in popular culture, music, and theater as a nativist tool of mass media that aimed to subjugate, eliminate, or assimilate those who were not identified as white, all in the name of "Americanization." Amid the overlapping forces of Indian Removal, manifest destiny, the slave market, and racial representation on the stage, music galvanized "more rarified fantasies of what it meant to be a white man."13 White men could purchase fantasies not only in the form of sheet music and concert tickets, but by purchasing enslaved human beings who could be forced to perform for the rest of their lives, their musical efforts propelling forward a racist culture and political economy. Violent performances are everywhere in the historical record. Katrina Dyonne Thompson argues that long before the mass commercialization of the minstrel show, a product of the North, global tourists flocked to scenes of enslaved performance.14 (Some of those tourists included blackface superstars E. P. Christy and T. D. Rice, who stole elements of performances given by enslaved musicians.) The musical talent of kidnapped and enslaved violinist Solomon Northup, for instance, was harnessed and packaged in the human showroom to drive market value up while perpetuating the perverted fantasies that white enslavers held of themselves and of their own social mobility, benevolence, and mastery through seemingly genteel practices related to music, culture, and ownership.15 In such cases, we can recognize how the performance of racial fantasy co-constitutes structures of racial fantasy, with devastating real-world consequences.16Nineteenth-century historiography has, understandably, focused on the ramifications of white domination over Black people. But the Black-white binary would have been nonsensical to denizens of prior eras. When people from different regions were hurled together by colonialism, forced migration, and the slave trade, they also confronted differences in religion, living customs, grooming and dress, gender relations and child-rearing, musical practices and preferences, and literacy and record-keeping. Seeking to justify exploitative practices worldwide, Europeans and Euro-Americans conscripted these differences to build a racial ideology of which a "natural" human hierarchy was a central tenet, with those of western European descent at the top.17 On metropolitan stages, operas and plays elaborated this fantasy.18 In drawing rooms, affluent and propertied white American women and men asserted their cultural superiority by emulating European tastes.19 Yet ideas about white civilizational supremacy came into being alongside concrete evidence that Europeans' actual power hinged on relationships with non-European allies.20 These relationships were multilateral and vulnerable to reversal. When faced with the limits of what was possible by force, the fantasy of European supremacy made for an appealing ideological compensation for American settler colonists. Before there could be the nineteenth-century racial fantasy of white men's consuming desires, the fantasy of the eighteenth century had to construct the shield that reassured them that they were the most knowledgeable and influential people on earth, whatever the evidence to the contrary. This confidence became invaluable in the nineteenth century, bolstering the belief among white performers that mastering and authentically replicating the music of "lesser races" was possible.Paranoia and terror were building blocks of colonial racial fantasy for white settlers, who were frequently reminded just how noncompliant those they dominated and sought to dominate were.21 Time and again, the shared social space of settler colonialism and the plantocracy gave rise to conflict.22 Although colonists committed the most violence by far, reports of Native American attacks and Black rebellions fueled contagious conspiracies. These conspiracies demanded the clear articulation of racial difference in which music and noise were critical for drawing the spatial and cultural distinction between "us" and "them."23 From drumming in the Stono Rebellion to ubiquitous reports of war whoops in frontier attacks, accounts of violence circulated by word of mouth and in print. The line between fantasy and realism was often blurred: what colonists heard, what they believed they heard, and what they believed one could hear all converged to create the "savage slot" by which white Americans defined themselves.24Colonialist depictions of non-European music across time periods employ language that expresses sonic alterity. In face-to-face colonial encounters, the insufficiency of notation to capture non-European music reflected the fragility and limitations of Western power and knowledge, descriptive primary sources often depicting music as indecipherable noise.25 Seventeenth-century New England colonists habitually referred to the sounds of Algonquian-speaking Indians as "hideous" and their singing as hard to describe.26 Encounters with a wider array of cultures did little to mitigate white listeners' biases in the nineteenth century: Martha Noyse Williams, wife of the US commissioner at Shantou, declared that "[t]he noise of the [Chinese] performers, together with the clangor of their musical instruments" almost drove her "mad," rendering them so culturally abnormal, so foreign, that she could not make sense of them.27 Even unusually sympathetic and informed white listeners slipped into moments of incomprehension: abolitionist Lucy McKim compared the enslaved music she encountered on the Sea Islands to "the singing of birds, or the tones of the Aeolian Harp," whose otherworldliness made it impossible to transcribe, an indictment often lobbed at nonwhite music heard in the Americas.28While the utility of racial fantasy as a hermeneutic is not new, the essays that follow provide anchoring points for this notoriously slippery idea, the tendrils of which are often figured as specters and shadows, described by scholars as haunting and looming over American cultural history and its archives.29 Not only might they provide a historiography for future scholarship to interrogate, but they collectively serve as a nexus for conversations about this topic that are too often isolated within disciplinary silos. Taking up the themes of yearning, projection, and vanquishment, these essays demonstrate how strategies of racial fantasy changed over time.Bonnie Gordon's essay addresses the intertwined racial and colonial imaginaries that came together in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dealing with two geocultural identities and two time periods, Gordon considers how racial difference figures in early modern European acoustemologies, and also how those acoustemologies are perpetuated today. She explores a fantastic spatiality between the Old World and the imaginative otherworldly "Somewhere" of the Americas that has always noisily threatened the established order. Writing from the urgency of the summer 2020 uprisings and in the shadow of partisan public debates about the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times 1619 Project, she makes the explanatory power of racial fantasy patent. How else could a divisive figure such as Christopher Columbus, or a location such as Jamestown, Virginia (now a symbolic "first'' for English colonization and enslavement but before that a Spanish outpost lodged in a larger matrix of colonization and enslavement), command such fierce loyalty and equally fierce calls for justice in the 2020s?30 Gordon reminds us that we still live with the scars of early modern fantasies of justifiable hemispheric colonization.As Maria Ryan discusses in her essay, the legacy of racial subjugation and fantasy also confronts researchers in the archive. An unexpected encounter with a British song in a Jamaican plantation letterbook leads Ryan to delve into the violent world of early nineteenth-century slavery. Acknowledging gendered violence in particular, she compares the experiences of two enslaved women of two hundred years ago with her own racialized and gendered objectification as a researcher. Invoking critical fabulation as a methodology, Ryan calls attention to the way knowledge about enslaved musical practices has been hampered or even suppressed as a result of the way archives themselves are often configured.Gender and race also intersect in Candace Bailey's essay, which tackles the imbrication of genteel femininity, social position, and skin color. Her archival research into elite free Black families in the major urban slave trade hubs of the antebellum South overturns scholarly assumptions about the intersection of gender and race. Young Black women, she shows, pursued the ornamental accomplishments presumed to have been the domain of white women, demonstrating that Black women occupied the same spaces and collected and played the same music as white women. The fantasy of achieving tasteful musical accomplishments, resonant with ongoing respectability politics, was a powerful force in shaping Black gentility.Both Bailey and David Garcia draw attention to the historical musical cultures of the American South and West, Garcia by calling attention to the contested aural and musical history of the United States–Mexico borderland. After evoking the horrifying stakes of current border politics, Garcia turns to sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illuminate competing Indigenous, Latinx, and Anglo claims to territory and musicality. In doing so, he reimagines the collective fantasy and erasure that scholars engage in when we use terms such as "United States" and "antebellum," both of which presume a national teleology that disguises conflict. When we take Indigenous and Latinx peoples' music histories seriously, the musical and political landscape of the nineteenth century changes. Stop erasing those histories, and start attending to their relation to dehumanization today, urges Garcia.31Presenting two recordings and an accompanying set of notes, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. reconsiders well-known Negro spirituals that evoke coffles and violent family separations alongside powerful hopes for escape and freedom. For Ramsey, the "stealing away" that figures prominently in spirituals was embedded in the larger "hiding tradition" that territorially remapped slavery's carceral landscape and preserved the intergenerational transference of Black survival tactics, creating a spiritual shield of protection. If, as Bonnie Gordon writes, European racial fantasy was a "Somewhere," racial fantasy arises in Black peoples' ability to transport themselves musically to what poet-scholar Kevin Young terms a fantastical "Elsewhere"—a form of psychological escape to which freedom seekers might have recourse when self-emancipation is impossible.32 For European settler colonists, the Somewhere could be a destination (one that resulted, usually, in Native land dispossession); for people of African descent, the Elsewhere was intangible and manifested in many forms, invoked by an individual imagining where freedom could be possible, and also as a collective envisioning and willing of an alternative racial fantasy, grounded in total emancipation—one that conjured a place where freedom, equality, and self-possession was obtainable.33 The racial fantasy of Elsewhere continues today in other fantastic forms and media.34As Caitlin Marshall reveals in her essay, the representation of Native Americans on nineteenth-century US stages projected a racial fantasy of Native erasure and replacement. Focusing on renowned actor Edwin Forrest, Marshall delves into his fantastic deployment of "sonic redface," particularly in his 1829 role-playing of the seventeenth-century Wampanoag sachem Metacom. There are clear parallels between the claims to authenticity of blackface minstrels T. D. Rice and E. P. Christy, which they alleged stemmed from studying enslaved African American performers, and their rival Forrest's claim to have learned Native oratory from a Choctaw chief. Forrest's alleged access to an "actual" Indian, coinciding troublingly with the Jacksonian mass Indigenous expulsion, has been taken up unquestioningly by theater scholars. Marshall brings to light both the tenuousness of this link and the larger significance of the way Forrest's supposed racial authority patently served as a vehicle for white imperialism by subsuming the Indigenous Other.35A strategy of colonialist racial fantasy has been to declare some musics as "unrepresentable"—a strategy that never imagines that a colonized subject might talk back. How Native American musicians respond to, reject, work within, and generally complicate colonial categories of music is the subject of Sarah Eyerly and Rachel Wheeler's essay. Drawing on their extensive and award-winning scholarship on eighteenth-century Mohican Moravian hymnody, the authors foreground how contemporary Mohican musicians confront the Indigenous erasure that has long been endemic to white racial fantasies. These musicians insist on the legitimacy of their genre-crossing music making as Mohican music, thereby avoiding the trap that is the search for "authentic" Mohican music.Taken together, the approaches presented in these essays reflect recent moves toward the anticolonial and antiracist research methods, community collaboration, and greater attention to performance and listening practices that are increasingly part of the scholarly conversation.36 Historical sources relating to the construction of race touch on the traumas of genocide, enslavement, physical violence both spectacular and routine, dispossession and removal, and sexual assault, as well as the more casual and recurring violence of the forced anonymity of individuals and the flattening of diverse and rich lives into crass caricatures and stereotypes.37 The essays in this colloquy address the dilemmas occasioned by dealing with biased and disturbing archival sources, asking how we, as scholars, engage with a compromised historical record. Concerns about archival absences and silences, and how to attend to the absent and silenced voices, are not simply abstract or metaphorical.38 What has been lost or rendered fragmentary, through shipwreck, fire, pandemic, war, pillage, the illegality of literacy for some groups and the lack of formal education for others, pales when compared to that which was never documented. Moreover, the establishment of archives, the provenance of their holdings, decisions about sustainability and accessibility, collecting priorities, cataloging protocols, the material preservation of ephemera, searchability, and bibliographical metadata all render some histories more tellable than others, a tendency that the essays in this colloquy seek to mitigate.39 Seeking out evidence in hitherto ignored written sources and ephemera, and reading for clues about the musical past along and against the archival grain, the authors in this colloquy excavate and reconstruct diverse musical priorities, conditions, and subjectivities.Future scholarship that carries forward the impetus for this colloquy might help us to hear what transpired in transgressive, creolized, and syncretized spaces—the music of the unknown and unnamed in Congo Squares; the gathering voices in the night behind the California missions; the entertainments in street parades and markets; the labor songs that kept pace in the fields, on docks, on ship decks, on railroads, in mines; and the riots, wars, and protests that were spaces for more fluid moments of expression. These are music histories that are concealed inside or alongside the rigid hierarchies of class and race that are the stuff of global capitalism and commercialized sound. They are histories that remain to be told.The long summer of 2020 saw a global pandemic, protests, and a racial reckoning across the United States. In library basements, books cataloged in the M2s (musical monuments) got dustier than usual. Concert halls remained tacet because the physical intimacy of performance might be deadly. And statues tumbled, especially of Christopher Columbus. In Chicago, city workers used a crane to dismantle him as a small crowd cheered. In St. Paul, Minnesota, protesters tied ropes around his neck and pulled him off his pedestal. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters toppled an eight-foot Columbus, set him on fire, and threw him in the river. In Boston, they cut off his head.Columbus did not get much American press until the three hundredth anniversary of his voyage. On October 12, 1792, in the first official celebration of Columbus Day, the Italian who had worked for the Spanish sailed into the American imaginary as a nationalist symbol. Former British subjects celebrated Columbus as an embodiment of the "New World," and as decidedly not British. In the quest for a national identity and culture, citizens of the new nation found in the figure of Columbus a symbol of empire. Over the course of the next century, writers, artists, and leaders increasingly painted a picture of an idealized explorer and romantic hero who stood for manifest destiny. And by 1892, he was an Enlightenment hero with the Chicago World's Fair named after him.In the century of Columbus's American ascendance, the links between music and empire were forged. European and British elites heard their written cultivated music as radically different from the music of people from faraway lands. In Gary Tomlinson's words, Across the century from 1750 to 1850 music lodged itself at the heart of a discourse that pried Europe and its histories apart from non-European lives and cultures. Perched at the apex of the new aesthetics, it came to function as a kind of limit-case of European uniqueness in world history and an affirmation of the gap, within the cultural formation of modernity, between history and anthropology.40 In the process of creating an aesthetic rooted in western European supremacy, and with Jean-Jacques Rousseau leading the way, thinkers located voice and song as particularly human and noise as not.This essay moves from the historical Columbus to Jamestown and back in order to highlight multiple zones of contact and to emphasize sound as a part of the contested performance of early American identity. I argue that early American acoustemologies of race reverberated with premodern climatic taxonomies and texts passed down from the classical Greek and Roman tradition. It might seem jarring to begin an essay about cosmologies of race in Columbus's voyages and Jamestown with an allusion to the current moment. But it is a deliberate call to hear contemporary echoes of the deep past and to pivot from tendencies to read Jamestown through the lens of the Enlightenment and emergent democracy toward reading for the premodern roots. My reading highlights the systems of thought and practice that produced capitalism, slavery, and settler colonialisms and amplifies sound as instrumental in reproducing hierarchies of humanity.Columbus is seen in this essay as a passenger on a sea change and as an upbeat to the early American republic. The sixteenth century saw the dethroning of the Mediterranean as a center of Western culture and the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade and the Protestant Reformation. Aníbal Quijano explains that, over the course of the sixteenth century, two historical processes associated in the production of that space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of "race," a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive.41Understanding the entanglement of music and race in early America requires querying racialized thinking prior to the seventeenth century, which was conditioned by European myths. Enrique Dussel locates the birth of modernity in 1492, the year of Columbus's voyage, and "with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European."42 In the premodern and Enlightenment imagination, the north was the frigid zone of people possessed of character strength; southern Europeans were characterized by moderation, and capable of thought and self-governance; and the torrid zone, which included the Americas, was full of lusty savages. By the sixteenth century the almost-people and othered creatures of the torrid zone occupied a non-normative place and shored up the hegemonic normativity of the European explorer. And Western aesthetic practices had tended to deny the region history and philosophy, and often humanity itself.43To highlight the Mediterranean inflection of early America is to answer Lisa Lowe's call to remember the intimate connections between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and especially between settler colonialism and the transatlantic African slave trade.44 And it is to take seriously Sylvia Wynter's reading of 1492.45 For her, Columbus was instrumental in a system of knowledge that put man rather than God at the helm, and that marked women, Black people, Brown people, children, disabled people, and queer people as inferior. Man, as in white, able-bodied, Christian men, was "us" and everyone else was "them."Listening to Jamestown necessarily amplifies the role of sound in the hemispheric history of early America and indeed in the invention of America as a cultural and geographical construct.46 So, while this essay is not an attempt to rewrite Virginian history, there is an important corrective embedded within it. American origin stories have tended to highlight Jamestown as the first English settlement and as the birthplace of American democracy. This narrative evades the imposit