Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity by Weheliye Alexander G

Author:Weheliye, Alexander G.
Language: eng
Format: epub

Sounding Diasporic Citizenship

The previous four chapters interrogated the crucial difference that sound recording and reproduction have made in twentieth-century black culture and vice versa, focusing on cultural utterances that explicitly address these questions in their content and/or structure. This final chapter, in some ways, takes the importance of sonic technologies for granted, instead centering on the fragmented and at times contentious communities enabled by the global circulation of African American popular music—which is to say, this chapter concerns itself not so much with the recording and/or reproduction apparatus per se as with the effects of these technologies’ extensive infiltration of modern life worlds. Today, one would be hard pressed to find any location around the globe where sonic technologies are not a forceful presence, and, given this widespread presence, these technologies do not engender the same sorts of anxieties as they once did. Moreover, as a result of the increased globalization of the recording industry, African American music enjoys an unprecedented international popularity and constitutes a movement that has spawned a plethora of related cultural practices. Popular music, generally in the form of recordings, has and still continues to function as one of the main channels of communication between the different geographical and cultural points in the African diaspora, allowing artists to articulate and perform their diasporic citizenship to international audiences and establish conversations with other diasporic communities.1

Surely, hip-hop represents an increasingly global cultural phenomenon, not only being consumed by various international audiences, but also, and perhaps more important, functioning as a foil for a host of identifications and cultural practices. As a direct outcome of its growing sonic and visual presence hip-hop has come to define what it means to be black and ‘‘modern’’ within a global context and particularly in youth cultures. Because of hip-hop’s preeminence, Afro-diasporic youth populations habitually identify with or define themselves against hiphop culture, creating identities suspended between the local and global.2 This chapter turns to that global context and scrutinizes the complexities set in motion by the presence of non-U.S. voices in hip-hop. While international contributions may not have the same ramifications in the States as they do abroad, black popular music, and hip-hop in particular, serves as a global forum through which different black diasporic subjects negotiate shifting meanings of blackness, as well as other forms of social and political identification.3 This negotiation, far from being uncomplicated or uncritical, entails facing the prominence of African American cultural practices such as hip-hop within the continuum of the African diaspora. The Haitian American rap group the Fugees, the black British artist Tricky with his partner Martina Topley-Bird, and the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry all engage with hiphop, transmitting global messages in their music, lyrics, videos, record covers, and promotional photographs that thematize the tricky singularities of Afro-diasporic identification. To this end, I will analyze the work of these performers in order to conjecture a distinct manifestation of the vicissitudes of Afro-diasporic subjectivity provoked by the becoming-global of hip-hop.

Questions of citizenship have

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