My fundamental perception of African/Black diasporic (Afro-diasporic) performance is as a living body of social theory that both enriches and develops work that supports an ever-deepening understanding of the linkages and interplay between individualism/identity, collectivity/group dynamics/subculture, and institutionalization/the state/nation-state. My personal and particular interests rest in the highly artistically productive web of relations between racially/ethnically marginalized subcultures and the hegemonic/national culture they inhabit.
Groups inhabiting the margins of this country continue to strive for still-underachieved integration. Often, they devise innovative and time-tested methods of injecting themselves into the very core, indeed the mainstream, of U.S. culture. More often then not, the testing ground for experiments in inclusion is the realm of popular media and culture, especially music and entertainment, if for no other reason because the tropes of resistance practices have been coerced into this field, principally for Afrofolks in the U.S. Whatever our divisions in our everyday lives, popular culture is often the location where (U.S.) Americans are positioned as a unified front to both a domestic and a global audience that devours mass media and has made it perhaps/arguably the most successful product the U.S. offers. Ironically, although we are confronted with, participate in, and are surrounded by our own diversity on a daily basis, we often do so at various levels of (dis)comfort and (mis)recognition of the heterogeneity of perspectives and identities, even within the Diaspora. Consequently, popular entertainment media is often used (to various ends, in various racial projects, and in the absence of more institutional and political tools) as the “great equalizer”: by attending concerts singing along to the same lyrics and even imitating a singular style of a performer, for example, we, for brief intervals, at the very least share a singular cultural understanding.
To illustrate, hip-hop as culture, while rooted in largely local/regional economies and occupant Afro-diasporic (African-American, West Indian/Caribbean/Latino, and its intersections) cultures and the Diaspora’s youth subcultures, exists today as a global, multi-ethnic, -racial, -cultural market that has progressively become far more representative of and embraced by a nearly immeasurable diversity that rivals and permeates its pop, rock, and R&B music siblings. Hip-hop is also recognized as a culture and community with Utopian features (economic prosperity and multiculturalism potentially accessible by every citizen) yet to be realized in the U.S. or any other society. Still, hip-hop remains a U.S. invention and within it, is encapsulated the social ills that pervade its sociocultural capital (including its stylizations of misogyny, sexism, classism, homophobia, and racial stereotypes and marginalization). Nevertheless, it is the open-forum dialectical structure of the genre that facilitates a broad dialogue and range of voices on the aspirations and obstacles of its original Afro-Diasporic communities in relation to all citizens who share the dominant national culture, as well as to the nation itself.
Thus, my teaching and investigative interests: the convergence of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and culture discourses in the U.S. at the site of our popular culture. In particular, I focus on Afro-Diasporic formats (especially hip-hop and Chicago house music genre and subcultures) uprooting creolizing practices herein that can facilitate local/regional/national dialogue and provide a foundation for nation-building and national identification specifically among marginalized groups. What new codes of nation, race/ethnicity, and culture are resurrected, reconstructed, and/or invented and structured at this convergence and then reproduced in micro-level, everyday social interaction? Though seemingly divergent, I view hip-hop as one template for future interests centering Chicago House praxis that recasts (Afro)Utopian ethos (per Neal’s “chocolate city”) by simultaneously interrogating, complicating and making more inclusive, gender and sexuality spectral theories and narratives. As such, I am interested in a reexamination of the critical role of these popular music fields as U.S. “ambassadors” to the global market of (black and other Afro-Diasporic) identity, citizenship, and class negotiated in the realm of mass-mediated popular culture. How do we move beyond the well-known, but oversimplified dichotomy of hegemony and resistance that frames sociological analyses of hip-hop (and other blackness-based expressivities)? How do we address the critical importance of the artists’ sociocultural capital and location as Americans (not just African-, Latin-, West Indian/Caribbean-, and Asian-American) intimate with the inner workings of U.S./Western capitalism, a positionality which is often overlooked? And, how do we address the persistent exclusion of music produced by women of color?
I view a (much needed) revisionist and matured analysis of hip-hop, one that includes the omnipresent work of Afro-Diasporic women, as one both intimately tied to and useful for locating these features within the realm of Chicago House subcultural production and practice wherein black women archetypes and vocalities continue to be its core, even if invisible, expression. Black women and narrative caricatures of black womanhood in hip-hop and house music use these codes to vocalize the contemporary practices, performances of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and culture in this country.
These patch-worked/quilted codes and markers constitute an American “Creole,” a multiracial/ethnic, socioeconomic cross-sectional, national language that, while rooted in (U.S.) Africanism(s), speaks to other societies (and Diasporas) about America’s current state of social affairs, namely those centering black (but also ‘Other’) people(s). Further, this perspective emphasizes the necessity of both the aforementioned lens onto Afro-Diasporic performatives, AND the performatives as lenses in and of themselves, to view and analyze/critique these nuanced, subtle, disparaging and contradictory practices and symbols, carried and expressed by women of color in popular, mass mediated, and fine arts.
Finally, the utility of these frames de-veils not only a lengthy dialectic with (and per Patricia Hill Collins’) ‘matrix of domination’ but an equally abundant body of statist/institutional response-praxis of ‘racial erasure’ that publicly/discursively disconnects/displaces these performances, practices and symbols from the blackness(es) and black women’s pop art production that constructed them, even as these women concurrently act as socializers of multiple cultures, especially those in Diaspora, both at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’.
© 2011 Abra M. Johnson
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