Constructing the Break

Abstract

In modern European discourses of the humanities and social sciences, ocular understandings of knowledge have dominated perception in ways that ramify the parsing and policing of social space by means of the categories of race. In response, oppressed African diaspora communities have repeatedly mobilized an alternative episteme of the ear to carve out hidden life-worlds inside of Western hegemonic formations (Berendt, 21–23; Esteva and Prakash, 75–76; Gilroy, 1993, 73, 198–202). Time (!) and again, Afro-diasporic political and cultural resistance has exploited time and timing as a modality of innovation “inside” the modern capitalist project of rationalizing labor and routinizing the body through the envisionments of race (Gilroy, 1987, 197–209). The result has been trickster-like alterations of a construct so thoroughly subjected to the regime of production as to be almost unthinkably unalterable (Gilroy, 1993, 37; Hopkins, 100–106; Willis, 37).

The African singer alternates head and chest voice like a game of hide-and-seek in a labyrinth of rhythm….and it throws open the gates of time to reveal a glimpse of the future.

—Francis Beby (African Music, 132)