I’ve been interested in cultural identity for a long time. I have written 60 (now 61) posts around and about it since April, 2010, when I posted about Shakespeare’s Caliban. That is one of six posts on the topic, Race in the Symbolic Universe, which I had originally written in the mid-1990s, in the early days of the web. My interest in cultural identity is older even than that.
By linking “tribe” or “nation” with cultural repertoire, the concept of cultural identity obscures the complexities of historical interaction through which people populate their cultural repertoires, often forcing individuals to belie their own experience, and reifying cultural forms and practices into a Procrustean prison.
In this post I consider four cases. The first two involve specific people, a White scholar and a Black poet, both American. Then I consider the situation of baseball in Japan and of Arabic mathematics in “Western” culture. I then take an excursion into Shakespeare’s London, and conclude by returning to those four cases.
Other people’s culture
This passage was first published in post at The Valve in a symposium on Walter Benn Michaels back in (2006). Since The Valve is now defunct I have republished the whole post at New Savanna.
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Let us consider an article in Krin Gabbard's anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy” (p. 1). The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948-1958: Ideology and Representation.”
In the course of his argument, Elworth offers this observation (p. 65):
The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one's own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.
While the entire passage is worthy of comment, I want to consider only the first sentence: Just what “culture not one’s own” is Elworth talking about? Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he’s talking about. While the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, jazz has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White - though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue - the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.
That convention leads me to infer that Elworth is White. I do not have any hard evidence for this assumption; I’ve never met the man, I've seen no photographs, and the contributor's blurb certainly doesn't indicate race. But the same set of conventions that dictate that jazz is Black music also make it unlikely that any Black scholar would refer to jazz culture as “a culture not one’s own.” It follows that Elworth is White, or, at any rate, not-Black.
I don’t know anything about Elworth beyond this article and a note indicating that, at the time of publication (1995), he was completing a doctorate at NYU. The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He may also attend live performances, perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; it is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life.
So why doesn't he think of it as his culture? Why must he caution himself (and us) against “reducing it to an ineffable Other”?
The An African-American sonnet
This example comes from the opening of Hollis Robbins’ new book, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (2020) p. 2.
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Trethewey’s reading at Duke was moving: she recited poems and spoke about her family and her early years in Mississippi. She touched on her use of the sonnet form, a “received European form,” and spoke of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde put it. The audience was transfixed.
I asked the first question after Trethewey finished and the applause died down. I said that I loved her work and her reading. But why was she still characterizing the sonnet as a form received from white people? Given the long list of African American sonnet writers–I counted them off on my fingers: Paul Dunbar, James Corrothers, Leslie Pinckney Hill, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walter, Robert Hayden, Rita Dove–how many sonnets have to be written before someone will say she received the form from a black poet? How long until a poet says she received the sonnet from Natasha Trethewey?
Trethewey was silent for a long moment and then said, quietly, “You’re right I can’t say that anymore. I received the form from Gwendolyn Brooks.” She spoke about Brooks, very movingly, and then paused, contemplative. Nobody asked any more questions. The audience got up and moved to the lobby. I spoke to Trethewey near the podium and she thanked me, but there was a tension between us too. My question pointed to a difficult truth in African American poetry: that too many ancestors have been forgotten. Too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too “traditional.” The erasure of these poets long meant the erasure of their legacy.
Japanese baseball
Let’s set those American cases aside for a moment and consider Japanese baseball. I will say upfront that I have never been to Japan. Much of what I know about Japanese culture comes from watching anime and reading manga, in English translation. But certain facts seem obvious enough.
The game was invented in the United States in the nineteenth century. The small city where I currently live, Hoboken, New Jersey, claims to be the home of baseball and has a plaque at 11th Street and Washington Ave. declaring that. The claim is based on the fact that the first competitive baseball game was played in 1846 at Elysian Fields.
Baseball was introduced into Japan in 1872 and has been played there ever since. Professional baseball started in the 1920s but didn’t become successful until the 1930s. Currently the game is enormously popular.
My point is simple: Anyone born in Japan after, say, the mid-1930s would have grown up being familiar with the game. They may know that baseball originated in the United States, but as far as their experience goes, it is as Japanese as sushi and (European style) sailor uniforms for school children.
Arabic numerals and Western culture
I don’t recall just when – middle school most likely – I learned that the system of numerals we use for arithmetic calculation was introduced into Europe from the Middle East. That is why they are called Arabic numerals. For whatever reason, that fact stuck with me.
Years later I realized that what we have come to think of as the modern West would have been impossible without Asian mathematics systematized and conveyed to 12th century Europe in a ninth century treatise written by Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm, from whose name we have the term algorithm. His treatise was Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala, from which we derive algebra. That mathematics made it possible to calculate tables of logarithms, and those tables were important in long-distance oceanic navigation. Without them the vast network of trade and imperial exploitation that was to become so important in the economies of Europe and the Americas would have been much riskier, perhaps all but impossible. The scientific revolution would have been impossible as well – David Hays and I discuss these matters in greater detail in “The Evolution of Cognition” (1990).
Take away the trade and conquest and the science and what’s left? Could the modern world have been built on sonnets, novels, and the equal temperament tuning that Bach celebrated in The Well-Tempered Clavier? I doubt it.
In short, what we think of as modern Western culture would have been impossible without this absolutely critical contribution from Asia and the Middle East. And yet those people came to be grouped together as the Oriental Other, an ideological fiction Edward Said examined in Orientalism (1976). “The West”, I suggest, is an ideological fiction as well. They are two sides of the same ideological coin, with African culture on a third side.
What of Shakespeare’s London: Our culture?
Let us continue, for a moment, with the idea that the West is a geopolitical fiction and not a concept supported by serious cultural analysis.
Let us return to Steven Elworth, from our first case, and transport him back in time to Shakespeare’s London. Shakespeare is at the center of the Western literary canon and so of the Anglophone literary canon. Elworth lives in a Western nation and speaks English, so he should be right at home, no?
No.
He’d likely recognize the language of late 16th century London as English, but he’d find it a bit difficult to understand. And to speak as well. The locals are not likely to understand him. There’s the matter of pronunciation, but of vocabulary as well. And that’s not all. Would Elworth be comfortable with a theater where the women’s roles were played by pre-voice-change boys? Maybe yes maybe no, but mostly WTF! What about public executions, torture, and bear baiting? Would he be prepared for a world where public speech is much more circumscribed than in 20th century America? Monarchy? The role of the church is public society?
My point is simple: Elizabethan London may be central to this thing called Western culture, but whatever that thing is, it’s pretty far from the lived behavior and experience of individual human beings. Western culture is an ideological fiction. Ancient Greece and Rome, not to mention Palestine, would be stranger still than London. It’s all “Western culture” and none of it is Elworth’s own, his lived culture.
We can work our way back to Elworth’s contemporary situation by considering an opinion piece that appeared in The New York Times in July. Maya Phillips critiques so-called color-blind casting in movies and plays because:
Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation.
One example she gave was Mickey Rooney’s role as a Japanese American in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an absurd performance in an offensive role. She also mentioned Olivier playing Othello in blackface.
What are we to make of that? While she specifically mentioned blackface makeup, I doubt that she would have approved if Olivier had played the role without the blackface. She’s objecting to the fact that a white actor is playing the role of a black man. However, the argument demonstrating that Steven Elworth would be out of his cultural milieu in Shakespeare’s London also leads to the conclusion that any contemporary actor or actress playing any role in a Shakespeare play would necessarily “step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs”.
How far do we want to push that line of reasoning? Perhaps Shakespeare should have only have written roles for contemporary white male Elizabethans, no Antony, no Cleopatra, no Shylock, no Lady MacBeth, no Prospero, no Beatrice, no Falstaff, no Romeo, no Juliet, no Hamlet, and so forth. In short, no Shakespeare.
And without Shakespeare, what happens to Anglophone literary culture?
Ways of coping with the West
Let us return to our four cases, starting with Elworth. I’m willing to hazard a guess at what he had in mind when worrying about “how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other” Consider this passage from Charlie Keil’s now classic study, Urban Blues (1966) 34-35:
The criteria for a real blues singer, implicit or explicit, are the following. Old age: the performer should preferably be more than sixty years old, blind, arthritic, and toothless (as Lonnie Johnson put it, when first approached for an interview, “Are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?”). Obscurity: the blues singer should not have performed in public or have made a recording in at least twenty years; among deceased bluesmen, the best seem to be those who appeared in a big city one day in the 1920’s, made from four to six recordings, and then disappeared into the countryside forever. Correct tutelage: the singer should have lived the bulk of his life as a sharecropper, coaxing mules and picking cotton, uncontaminated by city influences.
While admitting to some exaggeration in this characterization of blues scholars of the time, Keil was simply pointing out that they had a romanticizing agenda which privileges rural life over city life, poverty and misery over material comfort, and old black men over white people of any kind. By those standards, the musicians who interested Keil, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, James Brown, Bobby Blue Bland, and a host of others, were not real, authentic, bluesman.
That romanticizing impulse did not die just because Keil critiqued in back in 1966. It was, for example, alive and well in two of the blues documentaries Martin Scorsese produced in 2003, as I explain at some length in, “Three White Men Look for the Blues: Wenders, Scorsese, and Pierce. One of Them Finds It.” In his own contribution, (Feel Like Going Home), Scorsese sends a young black bluesman, Corey Harris, in search of the blues. What Harris finds is interesting, but its connection to the blues is not at all clear. For example, there is Otha Turner, who plays a cane flute with a group of drummers. He’s old, black, no doubt authentic, but what he plays is not blues; it’s something else, something worth documenting, but not as blues. Harris then goes to Mali and talks with Salif Keita, Habib Koité, and Ali Farka Toure. They’re all fine musicians, and may well themselves have learned from American bluesman, but including them in a documentary about the blues dilutes the term to the point where it means, well, whatever Martin Scorsese wants it to mean.
Wim Wenders does no better (The Soul of a Man) but, beyond noting that he indulged himself by presenting film-school exercises for the first half of his segment, I’ll leave it alone. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to my critique.
The third piece I examined, Richard Pearce’s (The Road to Memphis), is something else, a fine piece of work. He follows three bluesmen on their way to Memphis for the W. C. Handy awards: Bobby Rush, Rosco Gordon, and B. B. King, with an excursion to visit Ike Turner talking with Sam Phillips, who recorded both Turner and Elvis Presley. Pearce gets out of the way – a deliberate process – and lets the musicians talk about and show us their lives.
What Elworth is asking for, then, is possible, but not easy. It requires rigorous intellectual craft and attention. Still, I’d have been happier if Elworth had given more attention to this part of his statement: “In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.” He could have pointed out that his cultural milieu includes jazz – he’s as familiar with it as apple pie, or whatever, and if he’s a player, that too – but that it also includes an intellectual culture that all too often directs its study of black music and culture to ends that owe as much if not more to ideology than to history and culture.
The ideological aspect of Trethewey’s ambivalence toward the sonnet form seems obvious enough. As Robbins pointed out, it was “the 1960s”. In this case, the Civil Rights movement called forth various forms of black nationalism that led many artists to deliberately reject European-derived artistic forms, the sonnet among them. This rejection affected not only the contemporary output of African-American poets, but led to the erasure of a significant portion of their aesthetic heritage.
Both Trethewey and Elworth are heirs of the complex interaction between Africans and Europeans in the United States – I’ve said a bit more generally about this in a recent post, Frameworks for Identity [in America]. Neither is free simply to enjoy and express their heritage. In order to act, each must consciously consider both that history and current circumstances, and choose how to move forward. Their situations are not, however, symmetrical. As a white male, Elworth as more options available to him.
Japan’s relationship with baseball is also, of course, in the shadow of this thing we call the West. But it is otherwise quite different from that of the two Americans. Except for a brief period of Allied (mostly American) occupation after World War II, Japan has been an autonomous nation since forever, or at least as long as we have recorded history. The Japanese can easily note that, yes, this game originated halfway around the world somewhere in North America, but that recognition has little purchase on their lived experience. It’s a Japanese game they’re playing.
Finally, we have the case of Arabic notation for arithmetic calculation and the correlative role that Asian mathematics played in the development of modern European culture and society. As far as I’m concerned that’s only one of many historical and cultural phenomena that cast doubt on the existence of a continuous cultural essence, or Geist – "the West" – originating in ancient Israel and Greece and then expressing itself through the subsequent history of Europe, its conquest of the rest of the world, and then the collapse of those empires after World War II. The various forms of African American music and dance are another of those phenomena.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to list and think about others.
Who’s going to write THAT history?
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