Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a "Changing" Same

Abstract

The basic labors of archaeological reconstruction and periodization aside, working on the contemporary forms of black expressive culture involves struggling with one problem in particular, and that is the puzzle of what analytic status should be given to variation within black communities and between black cultures. The tensions produced by attempts to compare or evaluate differing black cultural formations can be summed up in the following question: How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes that, although they may be traced back to one distant location, have been somehow changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through wider networks of communication and cultural exchange? This question serves as a receptacle for several even more awkward issues. These include the unity and differentiation of the creative black self, the vexed matter of black particularity, and the role of cultural expression in its formation and reproduction. These problems are especially acute because black thinkers have been largely unwilling or unable to appeal to the authoritative narratives of psychoanalysis as a means to ground the cross-cultural aspirations of their theories. With a few noble exceptions, critical accounts of the dynamics of black subordi-