"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world!
That has such people in't!"
--Shakespeare; Miranda: The Tempest
Even through her naïveté, Miranda, daughter of Duke Prospero, understood that the world was much vaster then she could conceptualize from her sheltered existence in exile. Once exposed to the larger world and overwhelmed by the emotions that accompanied her awareness of the levels of freedom for mankind, she exclaims her recognition of the world “that has such people in’t.” Much like Miranda, epochs of humanity have attempted to understand the world and its “many goodly creatures”, its free, its bonded, and its in-between. From these brainstorms of existence myth was created as a meta-narrative for the paradoxes of life and freedom. Much like Miranda, many other characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest are enslaved throughout the play, such as Caliban and Ariel, and this theme of reconciling a world of freeman and slave is indeed what is confronted in the course of a myth, albeit on a grander scale of fatal mortal and supernatural God.
Indeed, many definitions of myth exist; however, for the purpose of illustrating a more utopian rather than dystopian vision for a Brave New World, an America where civil dialogue, cooperative economics, and effective domestic public policy in the wake of globalization is maintained, there has to be a shrinking of the gap between lower and working class blacks and the black middle class and elite to ensure fair participation in a growing multicultural world. We will consider a two-part definition that is constructed from the point of view of the community and then the individual. I posit the duty of the cultural worker. These people may or may not be creating for money, but claim the duty to better society. They insist that the practices and outcomes of the creative businesses they build be harmonious with public good, even when it is perfectly legal and more profitable to do otherwise.For our purposes the cultural worker will be the musician/artist/poet as the creators of the matrix of determinism which can bridge this gap, not only for the economic, social, and cultural liberation of more blacks of the underclass, but also for many other marginalized societies such as immigrant Americans, ethnic Americans, the LGBT community, and those of varying faiths. This matrix of cultural liberation is what I believe has the potential to help prevent what Jerome Schiele calls domination by seduction, wherein the dominant culture promotes clandestine modes of domination. This will be discussed later in “The Rub” section.
Myth
As mentioned above, the community and individual that will be addressed is the African American community and the President of the United States, Barack Obama. So many questions have been raised regarding the possibilities of his administration and what it could mean for all Americans, but for the sake of analyzing present myth creation, we will focus on the relationship between Obama and the black community. Historically, African Americans in the United States—during slavery, Jim Crow, and Reagonomics—have created myths around themselves and individuals in an effort to cultivate and elevate those who they believed embodied the ideals and gave voice to the topical and historical concerns of their community. Historically and socially African Americans have continually made alliance with the oppressed in religious text such as the Bible due to the parallels in their life situations. The people they read and sung songs of were poor, marginalized, and condemned, yet from their very community arose a liberator, a destroyer, a messiah. With that being said, we must consider how and why myths are created not only for the community, but for the significant individuals who serve as mediators between the oppressed and the institutions of oppression.
In essence, myth will be defined as a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society. Given this definition it would make sense for African Americans to constantly cite world myths and religious text in an effort to make sense of their divided communities throughout the Diaspora. In his book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argues that there are mythologically instructed communities. This means that these individuals lives are heavily influences by certain moral and ethical principles spelled out in a mythic text, much like the Bible or Koran. For the ancients, myths or sacred teachings were their guiding texts for understanding life and functioning in communion with each other. He further explains that from these myths arise a corpus of images and identities and models that provide the pattern to which growth may aspire—a range of metaphoric identities that myth provides in a set of possible programmatic identities for the individual personality. This notion can be further extended to include the community as an individual personality which would further problematize the idea of how myth is created. From the legacy of slavery, African Americans share a collective consciousness of what oppression means. Though it differs for every person, what cannot be denied is that the experience is part of a shared memory of the past, much like slavery in general is part of the American imagination (those set of subconscious histories that shape our national mind as a country). So a dialectical synthesis can be made between shared oppression and shared liberation, hence the “one for all and all for one” mentality that is often present in the black community that stands as part of the legacy of race and color in America.
It is in this culture of the oppressed from which internal strife in made manifest in the active creation of a liberatory myth. However, African American culture is an ethnic as well as a class culture because the history of black people in the United States has produced a residue of shared collective memories and frames of reference. It is because black Americans have undergone unique experiences in America, experiences that no other national or racial minority or lower class group have shared, that a distinctive ethnic culture has evolved. Though this culture is overwhelmingly the product of American experience, the first contributing source is still African (Schiele 443).
And it is indeed the synthesis of African American that urges the production of myth. It’s purpose being the mediating between the internal worlds of a people and the externalizing of their fears, desires, and ideals. Externalizing is the basis for communion between men by the subjectifying of our worlds through externalization we are able to paradoxically share communally in the nature of internal experience and by externalizing cause and effect we may construct a common matrix of determinism.
Music
There is no doubt that music has—and has had, historically—a crucial role in defining and expressing the ethnic cultural component in black American culture. As Amiri Baraka put it in his novel Blues People: “The one peculiar referent to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to ‘citizenship’ is his music” (Jones 63). The transition from slavery to citizenship is the change for which I seek to argue for a bridge, a matrix of determinism, and a reclamation of cultural assets from institutions of cultural domination. Furthermore, I want to suggest that it is first and foremost the cultural domination that creates the foundation for further oppression through economics, media, society, and education (this, again, will be further addresses in “The Rub”).
Nonetheless, the role of music in the African American community has its roots in the life force of their African past. Traditional African music is symbolic, an expression and validation of psychic energy. In traditional Africa, music is an integral part of life and is linked with the worldview of the society in which it is produced. It has social, ritual, and ceremonial functions as well as some purely recreational purposes. Traditional art forms, including music, are rooted in mythology, legends, and folklore, and are associated with gods, ancestors and heroes. Musical activities are ritualized and intended to link the visible world with the invisible. Dancing is often an important part of the ritual and spiritual aspect of music. These aspects of African culture have been retained, despite slavery, in the diasporic communities all over the world, but most notably in the music of African Americans. What scholars call “Africanisms” are the retentions in modern African American culture which links blacks in America psychically to their ancestral past—this could be in the form of speech, dress, culture, etc. What we saw in the seventies in Black American music is an example of this retention and also a precursor to the swing of the pendulum back to this type of modern myth being in the music. Earlier, the term cultural worker was used to describe the musicians who through symbolic image and sound merged their music with the myths of a liberatory nature whether it be inspired by religious overtones, the paradox of love, the phenomena of astronomy, the shifting of paradigms, the creation of alternate realities, or the invoking of divine creative spirits.
Again, the connection between culture and music is a very thin line in African American culture. Music is heavily involved in both the creation and literal colonization of space—music creates an embodied but imaginary space that mediates our internal space (feelings, desires, dreams) with external space (the physical, the experienced). As cultural musicologist Jody Berland has recognized, listening to local, regional, or national radio broadcasts brings listeners together in time outside of space that both narrates an imagined community and defines a cultural space but also takes us outside of where we are and our everyday activities. Thus music, in general, connects listeners to fantasy, pleasure and an ever-elusive future. Like a time-traveling, omnipresent alien presence—music takes us outside of our bodies and place while simultaneously reminding us of our location and what it means to live there (185). This is exactly the type of musical—and even theatrical, filmic, and television—evolution that needs to occur to in media and entertainment to create an atmosphere for change on larger levels of society.
Messiahs
In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female; at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his life role he is necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman, servant, or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun, or harlot; he cannot be all. Hence the totality—the fullness of man—is not in the separate member, but in the body of society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ (Bruner 354). Hence, this is why many members of the African American community see Obama on many levels, as not just the President, but a symbol of progress, change, and the living myth of what the American Dream can create. But why is their always the messianic overtones when a man of color is in a position of power, and specifically how is Obama being created not only by the African American community, but by other marginalized people and the media, as a messiah figure. Furthermore, in the context of this document, all myths are, at some stage, actually believed to be true by the peoples of the societies that used or originated the myth and we have seen this myth before: Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, Caesar Chavez, Fredrick Douglass, Ghandi, Marcus Garvey, etc. And it is in the death of one myth that another arises. We see constant rememberance of the death of MLK and his legacy and the parallel rise of the myth of Obama and his vision for a Brave New World.
However, as Derik Smith points out in his article "I am Obama: The American Imagination and the New Black Hero":
"...that the viability of the new black hero is dependent upon his ability to carefully regulate his blackness. To satisfy the needs of the national imagination, he must cultivate the patina of blackness while radiating a transcendent racial identity that is not immediately linked to the black communiy, which remains profoundly stigmatized. Because he maintains a prescribed distance from the black community, the ascendancy of the new black hero is no way equal to a national desire to redress some of America's most pressing race problems. Ultimately, America's recent fascination with a darker national savior has to be considered in the context of a rich tradition in its narrative in which self-sacrificing men of color offer both salvation and absolution to the white protagonists."
And this is the reason I urge the Obama Administration and those cultural workers looking to actively participate in the call for cultural redress to embrace the emancipation of culture from institutions of domination such as record companys, producers, television networks, studios, universities etc. because those who control the methods of distribution usually aren't concern with cultural awareness. But despite this present reality, we have the power to proactively reconstruct our cultural infrastructure if we but take a page from our new President, our new myth. Because, it's as Gilber Murray puts it, "This power of entering vividly into the feelings of both parties in a conflict is...the characteristic gift." And in a growing age of multiculturalism, its time that we embrace not only our American national identity as being a melting pot, but to individually embrace a concept pinned by Ruth Hill Upseem called global nomads (or third culture kids, trans-culture kids) which refers to someone who, as a child, has spent a significant period of time in one or more cultures other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own, this integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture. Obama is a global nomad and we see its affect on the way he's creating himself as an outreach type of president who wants to hear all voices and who has the ability to easily negotiate many cultures in an effort to create this matrix of cultural determinism.
The Rub
At this juncture, where myth meets reality, I think it’s important to take a page from history in regards to how a matrix of determinism can be created in this new administration. Much like the Muslim Intellectuals of the Russian Empire who sought to address the backwardness of their people and the empire as a whole through educational reform, or Jadid, I believe it is the responsibility of the administration to address the cultural concerns for Americans—black or otherwise. Much like the Muslim intellectuals of the empire, America has to confront the growing disparity between the black underclass, middle class and elite. The jadidist called for spiritual, material and educational renewal in the empire, but, for the sake of this paper, I think it important to have a renewal in the cultural music of the African American community. This movement has been dubbed Afro-Futurism and it has the possibility to take off if we but confront the atmosphere of domination by seduction that draws on tactics of cultural absorption (i.e. incorporation of alternatives), inordinate consumerism, political and economic co-optation, symbolic racism, and symbolic violence rather than on violence, terror, intimidation, and overt legal discrimination. Telecommunications technologies allow media and entertainment arms of domination to assume a more prominent role in deluding the oppressed into willing participation in, and defense of, the social system that continues to exploit them. Trends in oppression by seduction include—1) decline in overt public pronouncements and attitudes affirming White intellection superiority; 2) the proliferation of African American political conservatives; 3) the elevated socioeconomic status of many African Americans; 4) the rise in the culture of consumerism; 5) the transformation of media images and messages. These trends increasingly render African American susceptible to alluring messages of meritocracy, political equality, and race neutrality, which can confine and thwart African American resistance against oppression.
The term Afro-Futurism refers to African American signification that appropriates images of advanced technology and alien and/or prosthetically enhanced (cyborg) futures. Such Afro-futuristic art is typically concerned with Black Nationalism and empowerment and creation of mythologies based on the confrontation between historical prophetic imagination, such as Egyptian theories of the afterlife, and modern alienated black existence. As Mark Dery observes, “African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendents of alien abductees” (Dery 1993, p736). Sociologist Paul Gilroy discusses Black Diaspora in terms of a history of dispersed people, but also of the space that results from this dispersal—“a utopian eruption of space into the linear temporal order of modern black politics’(Gilroy 1993, p 198) Therefore, Black diasporic consciousness seeks to return to an inaccessible homeland—in some sense, an imaginary utopian homeland that outer space metaphorically represents. This sense of African-alienation is also, of course, transferable to other marginalized social groups. The space alien as a transcendent form of Other capable of challenging simplistic binaries of male/female, black/white or rich/poor. Particularly evident in rave culture, for example, alien labeling allows for symbolic incorporation of idealized raceless, classless and genderless plurality of the dance floor. As Susan McClary has remarked: “The musical power of the disenfranchised—whether youth, the underclass, ethnic minorities, women or gay people—more often resides in their ability to articulate different ways of constructing the body, ways that bring along in their wake the potential for different experiential worlds.”
Ultimately, Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the Brave New World that will gradually become visible…it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of everyday, the herald of the future.
Afro-Futurism on the Rise
Santogold "Creator"
Janelle Monae "Many Moons"
Saul Williams "Sunday Bloody Sunday"
Tv on the Radio "Wolf like Me"
Solange "I Decided"
Kanye West "Love Lockdown"
Gnarls Barley "Run"
Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press. 1980.
Berland, Judy. “Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music, Formats, Local Narratives and Technological Meditation.” Popular Music. Vol. 9, No. 2. (April 1990): 179-192. JSTOR. 21 Feb. 2009.
Bruner, Jerome S. “Myth and Identity.” Daedalus Vol. 88, No. 2 (Spring 1959): 349-358. JSTOR. 21 Feb. 2009. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026501>
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 2004.Chase, Gilbert. “Afro-American Anthropology and Black Music.” Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical. Vol. 7. (1971): 117-124. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/779865>
Jerome, Fred. “Einstein, Race, and the Myth of the Cultural Icon.” Isis Vol. 95, No. 4 (Dec. 2004): 627-639. JSTOR. 21 Feb. 2009. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653093>
McLeod, Ken. “Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music.” Popular Music. Vol. 22, No. 3 (October 2003): 337-355. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877579>
Ogunleye, Tolagbe. “African American Folklore: Its Role in Reconstructing African American History.” Journal of Black Studies. Vol. 27, No. 4 (March 1997): 435-455. JSTOR. 21 Feb 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2784725
Schiele, Jerome H. “Mutattions of Eurcentric Domination and Their Implications for African American Resistance.” Journal of Black Studies. Vol. 32, No. 4 (March 2002): 439-463. JSTOR. 21 Feb. 2009. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180885>
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