Music and Racial Formation in Leroi Jones’ Essay Example for Free

Music and racial Formation in Leroi Jones Es verbalizeIn many ways, music is inseparable from burnish. In the context of those cultures that nurture been dominated and marginalized by others, music takes on a special significance. Leroi Jones Blues People fit into the simulation of trying to envision the role that music plays in the ethnic lives of people who be abundant to displaced communities. In his book, he identifies the ways in which genres in music culture develop, which may be linked to Omi and Winants (1994) creative activity of racial formation. As Omi and Winant (1994) observed in their seminal theory on racial formation, We define racial formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories ar created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed (p. 55). The authors debunk the accepted notions that consort is either biological or an illusion, suggesting instead that it is a distinctly sociological phenomenon. Race is also identify as based on a power hierarchy, definable in price of the pattern of impinge and accommodation which takes place over time between racially based social movements and the policies and programs of the state (p.78).This stupefy of racial formation may be applied to Jones text, particularly in terms of their assertion that racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represent and organise (pp. 55-56). In Blues People, the author examines how the process of being enslaved affects the people of Africa, situating the racial conflict in terms of geographical as well as historical contexts. Jones thesis rests on the concept of difference.He outlines the manner in which the bondage of Africans in America was different from other harmings of slavery. An important point that Jones raises is that slavery was prevalent in Africa as well, long before the whites arrived. He likens the process to the way in which the Greeks set their slaves, sh owing us that in every other system of slavery, the enslaved people were allowed to retain their sense of cultural identicalness, but not so in the case of African slaves on the American plantationsMelville Herskovits points out, Slavery had long existed in the entire region of West Africa, and in at least one of its kingdoms, Dahomey, a kind of plantation system was found under which an absentee ownership, with the ruler as principal, demanded the utmost return from the estates, and thus created conditions of push resembling the regime the slaves were to encounter in the New World. But to be brought to a country, a culture, a society, that was, and is, in terms of purely philosophical correlatives, the complete antithesis of ones own version of mans life on earth that is the cruelest setting of this particular enslavement. (p. 1) As Jones points out, it was extremely difficult for Africans, who later became African-Americans, to retain a sense of cultural individuation in a f oreign culture that refused to give any validity to something it did not understand. According to Omi and Winant, racial formation may also be linked to the the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled (p. 56).In such a hegemonic society driven by concepts of hierarchy and social superiority, the identity of a marginalized class may become problematic. Jones opines that music such as jazz and blues was in some ways the except medium through which Africans could try and retain a sense of who they were. In this context, the integration of music into their existence as slaves allowed Africans to retain a sense of the past, and also come to terms with the effect that the process of being enslaved had had on their psyches.Cultural domination was an insidious process of identity-negation, and music culture was one of the prominent ways through which the enslaved people could enable themselves to survive within a hateful foreign culture. In Blues People, an interesting aspect of performance is brought in when the author shows us a typical American reaction to the African native in the form of an excerpt from the actress Frances Anne Kembles journal of a Residence on a Georgia PlantationThe only exception that I pay off met with yet among our boat voices to the high tenor which they seem all to possess is in the person of an idiosyncratic named Isaac, a basso profundo of the deepest dye, who nevertheless never attempts to produce with his different register any different effects in the chorus by venturing a second, but sings like the rest in unison, perfect unison, of both(prenominal) time and tune.By-the-by, this individual does speak, and therefore I presume he is not an ape, orangoutang, chimpanzee, or gorilla but I could not, I confess, have conceived it possible that the presence of articulate sounds, and the absense of an articulate tail, should make, externally at least, so completely the only appreciable difference between a man and a monkey, as they bulge to do in this individual black brother. (pp. 2-3).The actress biased and judgmental perception of the natives places them in such a position as not to be considered human at all. Interestingly, she examines their tones of voices as indicative of the degree to which they are human, or not they all have voices of a high tenor. She says this is the manner that one might say that all dogs bark, or all lions roar. Language is almost completely redundant in this context. Unable to understand the languages of Africa, Kemble contents herself with ruminating on the tones in which the foreigners speak.The exception to the other slaves is determined by Kemble on the basis of the point that he has a bass voice, while the others use higher tones of voice. withal in this exception she says that it is only the absence of a tail that reluctantly, albeit wonderingly, forces her to accept that he is a human being and not an animal. Even under this extreme racial p erspective, it is the musical tones of voice that the actress and performer relies upon to make her judgments.