Vol. 4 (2018): post(s) 4
Akademos

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

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  • Robin James
Robin James
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18272/posts.v4i1.1311

Published 2018-12-21

Keywords

  • Popular music,
  • race,
  • gender,
  • postcolonial theory,
  • coincidence

How to Cite

James, R. (2018). On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory. Post(s), 4(1). https://doi.org/10.18272/posts.v4i1.1311
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Abstract

This essay argues that while most scholars in this area treat music as an example of race, racial embodiment, and racial politics, this "example" model inaccurately treats each area (race, music, and sometimes gender) as a distinct discourse. If what is at stake in defining what constitutes music and what constitutes race is fundamentally the same issue "” the determination of the relationship between raced, colonized, or resonating bodies and the social forces which operate in, through, and on these bodies"” then the relationship between raced and resonating bodies is not so much exemplary or representative as it is what I call "coincident." While Angela Davis"™ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) explicitly examines the coincidence of gender, race, and class as it is "expressed" in the music of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, it also implicitly begins to draw out the coincidence of gender, race, and class with the discourses and practices which came to constitute "the blues." Thus, I turn to this text as an instance of how the "example" model is transformed into a coincidental or conjectural model of the relationships among race, class, gender, and music. I have adopted the term "coincidence" to describe the relationships among race, gender, and music because it is a more accurate metaphor than the widely used and critiqued language of intersectionality.

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