Decolonizing Revelation by Rufus Burnett Jr

Author:Rufus Burnett Jr. [Burnett, Rufus Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Academic (R&L)
Published: 2018-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Sonic and the Sensual in the Blues Cosmovision

If the space of production is the space shaped by the “forced context,” then the place of production, which is the discursive interpretation of space, finds a repository in the sonic expressions of the blues epistemology. It is through the sonic that blues people signify the space of the Delta as a place. The sonic—music, beat, melody, and lyrics—bears within it questions, critiques, and an epistemic basis for engagement with the Delta Region. For those living in the Delta at the turn of the century, the blues was a refuge and a well of imagination and wonder. The blues, as a cultural production, affirmed a vision of life in spite of the Plantation Regime. With guitars, rhythm, lyrics, moans, shouts, and stomping, blues people signified the Delta otherwise. The blues vision of the Delta did not take delight in the iconic “land of cotton” sung about nostalgically in the song “Dixie.” Instead, the blues articulated, similar to the spirituals and gospel music, a peoples’ longings from inside the womb of colonialism. Gerhard Kubik argues that Blues music is American and African, Arab and English, Religious and agnostic, traditional and inventive.48 Lyrically, the blues communicates a people’s experience of the “forced context” that is the Delta while simultaneously communicating the human desires for meaningful modes of life. It is not only a repository of the resistant spirit of political and economic autonomy concerned with the means of production, as Woods primarily contends, but also an affirmation of the sensual enfleshed49 and embodied ways of knowing the reality. The blues is also both communal and individual and as such continues a memory of the African tradition of call and response. The blues enriches the tradition with lessons learned from the individuted experiences of the levee camps, sharecropping, sexual relationships, and bad fortune. The wisdom in the blues was created from individuated experiences that defied the confines of the secular and profane notions of the reality suggested by the Afro-Christian cosmovision.

As they wrestled with the Afro-Christian cosmovision, blues people acknowledged that thinking with the Hebrew Bible and the world of first-century Palestine in the Gospels was not enough to confront the complexities of life. The Bible-based piety of black Protestantism provided little solace to people longing to fulfill their desire for uninhibited sensual love and romantic relationships. The precarious conditions of life that left black Americans trapped under the domination of the Plantation Regime exacerbated the desire for sensual and romantic love. Unlike the rituals of Afro-Christianity, which promised earthly and heavenly rewards in exchange for sexual restraint and moral fortitude, the blues provided an outlet for Delta peoples to confront the visceral effects of what the “environment” demanded of their bodies.50 Blues performers and virtuosi openly sang about their bodily desires and how the conditions of the plantation economy impeded their ability to maintain loving relationships. The honesty implicit in both blues lyrics and the sensuality of the blues music was unapologetic and was often seen by more “sensible” Afro-Christians as an impediment to “uplifting the black race.

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