#but that’s more of a general group dynamic interpretation/characterisation discussion more so than one just about peter

[a-wins-a-win]

BAPO discussion question of the day - how clockable is Peter Simmonds?

I’m aware that’s a wild way to start this post but it drives me mad thinking about it - is he externally identifiable as a gay man, even to people who are not, or is it only his anxiety & paranoia making it seem like a bigger thing than it is?

‘Epiphany’ is, of course, an exposition-heavy plot-convenient daytime nightmare sequence, but breaking down the content of the song, it sometimes makes me wonder how key these Queer Flags* are to Peter’s personality as a whole and the way he presents himself to the world.

[actual discussion under the cut for the sake of saving space]

* loves his female singers / loves to cook / looks around in gym / strong as Peter’s attraction to my makeup table / + the Top Gun/Tom Cruise lines in earlier versions of the song

it is also imo worth noting that all of these things (save for loves his female singers - “Fuck me Matt, it’s Diana Ross!” lives in my head rent-free) are basically brought up in ‘Epiphany’ and then not referenced again for the rest of the show

And in considering BAPO as a whole, we know that as a general rule we’re watching the story through Peter’s eyes/from Peter’s POV - so of course his experiences are going to inform the way he views and interacts with the world, and I’m turn how the world reacts to his interactions with it.

That said - Claire obviously had some idea or inkling, whether she liked to admit it or not. There are reasonable counter-points to be made that as his mother, Claire obviously saw a lot of Peter figuring himself out as a small child, back when he maybe didn’t think to hide himself and his interests - and so really if one wanted one could parlay the fact that Claire does have some idea into a point that Peter would be significantly less clockable than he fears himself to be, if his mother had a vested interest in discouraging any perceived Odd or Queer behaviours. So in a sense, individual interpretations of Claire Simmonds, as a mother and as a character, could affect individual opinions.

I personally lean more into the idea that he’s only so hyperaware of these expressions of his queerness because he lives it internally every day, and on the outside no one thinks too much of it - but it is also interesting to consider that had he & his classmates not been raised in such a sheltered (for lack of a better word) environment, no one would have been surprised. But I’m genuinely curious to hear other people’s thoughts on the matter -

[ezrajteboul]

Sonic Bodies (Henriques, 2011)

I wrote this summary of Julian Henriques’ 2011 Sonic Bodies for a reading group I’m in. I thought it might be helpful for other people dealing with this dense but instructive project.

----------------------------------------------

"Sonic Bodies" is Julian Henriques' (currently prof. at Goldsmiths in London) in depth study of Jamaican soundsystem culture. Through extensive observation from both the margins and within this loose set of cultural practices, Henriques develops a theory of knowledge through sound and the bodies that produce and consume it, grounded in carribean culture but with clear relevance to anyone thinking through sound.

Henriques bases his discussion around observations made in Kingston, although these soundsystems are almost by definition touring assemblages of humans and machines. The electrical counterpart for and in some ways powering Reggae's cultural and sonic heritage, soundsystems consist - as outlined over 300 dense pages by Henriques which alternate interviews, descriptions and interpretation - of technicians, managers, entrepreneurs, DJs ("selectors"), MCs, their audiences and the equipment and history that links them across time and space - often, these roles overlap, with even the distinction between machine and human shifting.

The general objective of the book is hinted to in the introduction by Henriques, who writes ominously:  

Starting the journey of Sonic Bodies by thinking through sound, as distinct from thinking about sound as an idea or an object, the next step is to consider talking through sound. This involves an appreciation of the idiomatic vocabulary and nomenclature of those that work with sound in Jamaican popular culture, namely the sound system crew. This leads to a methodology, or a doing through sound, that informs the investigation. Not surprisingly listening to sound is central to this methodology, followed by describing exactly what was heard of the processes and practices of sounding. This leads to a theorising through sound itself, that is, completing the account of the practice and performance techniques of sonic bodies with a theory of a sonic logos. (xxxii)

The cultural premise here is that of Reggae / Jamaica / Soundsystem's culture of bass. The attachment to low-end both requires and shapes the powerful technological apparatus of the soundsystem. Rather than give you an exhaustive catalog of the terms and corresponding examples developped by Henriques over the course of this long book, I want to focus on a couple that I think are interesting to me and central to the argument. Quoting Dennis Howard's review in Dancecult:

[Henrique suggests that] all sonic bodies are configured in these vibrations of bass culture. He proposes that these vibrations can be categorised into three distinctive wavebands. Firstly, they are material, a by-product of the sound system itself and the equipment and its phonography; secondly, there is the corporeal waveband encompassing the crew’s performance and the crowd response; and the final waveband relates to the sociocultural—the interaction, behaviour, traditions, style and cultural practices within the dancehall environ.  (122)

These are summarized in this triangular diagram - one of many such diagrams in the book:

This "waveband" and its multiple forms really interested me because although they are elaborated out of the specificities of dancehall culture (a synonym for the Reggae/soundsystem scene), they map out to my experience of sound and my thinking about / of / through sound productively.  As Henriques writes:

a complex apparatus such as a sound system cannot be reduced to the set of equipment alone, as the material waveband of sounding, or even the crew’s performance as the corporeal vibrations of sounding, or even a phenomenon of the Dancehall scene as its sociocultural vibrations. In short, sounding is expressed in all three frequency bands at the same time, as a triangulation (Figure 1.11).  [27]

What follows is an extremely detailed assessment of those three aspects of a sonic culture. There are fascinating details: I found myself really excited to read about how WW2 and british telecommunications training for the colonial military members brought back a number of role models for younger, technically inclined Jamaicans which learned how to build amplifiers from figures like Headley Jones (also independent inventor of the electric guitar and guitar amplifiers). Henriques traces a genealogy of sonic knowledge, tacit and explicit, through six generations of technician / owners / tuners of dancehall systems since Jones and other foundational figures. This genealogy bears the marks of the colonial / capitalist / non-western context in which it developed and continues to develop: almost everything is DIY, adapted, tuned and modified. Because these systems were developed for the outdoors, they tend to build up power (by accumulating amplifier units) much faster than club PA systems in western sound culture (which tends to be an indoor activity). Prior to the 70's, tuning a sound system require soldering different components in the filters and amplifiers, on the spot, because mechanisms for tuning hadn't been standardized in the assemblage of these soundsystems. Shifting to the practice of the "session" - the party, the event - Henriques details the unique position of the "selector," the dancehall DJ, linking Jamaican practices to those of hip-hop with the use of turntables (as discussed by Mark Katz, whose work is something of an american counterpart to Henriques Carribean perspective). It's impossible to do justice to the diverse yet unequal voices Henriques collects, all fragmented yet all caring for a similar project and assembled artificially in the book: the book is worth reading if only for those.

The travelling nature of these technical systems brought to mind the "large technical systems" of Thomas Hughes and other historians of technology who are enamored with the power grid, the postal service, etc. Henriques' soundsystem occupies a space between the national and international infrastructure of power or transportation, but certainly larger than any one person would ever want to engage with by themselves. Both in terms of artifacts and in terms of sound produced, the Jamaican soundsystem is a powerful, heavy, collective effort leveraged as a form of community building and maintenance.

Where I found myself more lost (drowned in the wavebands) is the encyclopedic catalog of philosophical, social, and cultural references leveraged by Henriques to turn a situated case-study (an extensive, fascinating one) into a theory of sound as experience. Under the auspices of his Sonic Logos Henriques proposes a way of thinking that is even more all-encompassing than Cox's "Sonic flux," since:

the Sonic Logos claims that thinking through sound encourages the kind of sensibility that might prove useful for understanding the ways of knowing to be found in other situations and settings – with nothing to do with a Dancehall session or indeed with sound as such (...)  With a sonic logos, mind and body, viewer and viewed, subject and object, internal and external worlds mingle and merge to render rationality in terms of ratio rather than just representation.  (xxxv-vi)

As I read it Henriques proposes a way of knowing grounded in the insight from his time within and around Kingston's dancehall / soundsystem practitioners, but extending to the history and philosophy of knowledge as a whole.

(267)

In her review of the book (Body Cultures 21(1), 2015) Beatrice Ferrara resumes the last section of the book:

The concluding section, ‘The Sonic Logos’, uses the model of wave mechanics to discuss theoretical questions of sympathy and attunement, in order to contend that knowledge is something that is common and particular, situated and embodied, recursive and innovative. Analogue variation and periodic motion – the kind of movements peculiar to the process of resonation – are proposed as the dynamic pattern of this sonic logos: according to the author, these ways of knowing unfold on the mind–body continuum as they emerge from the triangulation of proprioceptive movement (self-impression), kinetic movement (expression) and haptic movement (impression). (122)

It's fair, but there's a lot going on here. Henriques outlines three things:

1)  The ratios of the sonic logos are recognised through pattern and rhythm, rather than schema and discourse. (256) 2)  the sonic logos can also importantly be characterised as analogy (263) 3)  The third and final aspect of the reason of the sonic logos is expressed in the relationship of triangulation that has been so much in evidence throughout Sonic Bodies. (265)

This idea of triangulation is, I think, clearer to me than Ferrara's summary of the conclusion. Henriques writes:

Auditory propagation can be used to model a set of triadic relationships, as with melody, harmony and rhythm, for example, in the way its visual counterpart favours binaries, as with viewer and viewed, for instance. The importance of the relationship of triangulation has emerged throughout the investigation, as with the frequency, amplitude and timbre of sound, or indeed the three wavebands of sounding.   (265)

I tried writing a clever thing to say about this a few times, without any real success - I guess this is where discussion helps? All I can do is relate Henriques preference for triangles over dualisms to my own interest in the co-construction not simply of music and humans; music and technology; and technology and humans, but of all three at the same time. It seems essential to study all at the same time, because all mediate various agencies on each other and themselves. Henriques' study of dancehall culture is certainly a success in doing that, and a template for future work - perhaps that's all one can ask for?

[i-am-very-very-tired]

There is no love left between a black man and a black woman. Take me for instance. I love white women and hate black women. It’s just in me so deep that I don’t even try to get it out of me anymore. I’d jump over ten nigger bitches just to get to one white woman. Ain’t no such thing as an ugly white woman… and just to touch her long, soft, silky hair. There’s softness about a white woman, something delicate and soft inside of her. But a nigger bitch seems to be full of steel, granite-hard and resisting…I mean I can’t analyze it, but I know that the White man made the Black woman the symbol of slavery and the White woman the symbol of freedom. Everytime I’m embracing a Black woman, I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a White woman, well I’m hugging freedom (Eldridge Cleaver 1968:107).

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women…. When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. (hooks, bell:1981).

Here in the UK, the visibility of black women in representations of mainstream Black British culture is such that you might be forgiven for thinking we are an endangered species. The near erasure of Black British women from this terrain, which is in the main dominated by black men and white women, is rarely commented upon, despite its prominence.  What is actually going on here? Is this some manifestation of the quite frankly ridiculous Eldridge Cleaver quote above. Or is it something else?

The (ahem) ‘urban’ (we know what they really mean) landscape that provides the basis of so much of Britain’s somewhat depressing representations of mainstream youth culture, borrows heavily from black culture, yet sometimes both seem almost entirely devoid of black women. The characters who populate these worlds are black men and white women. Access may be permitted to the occasional ‘mixed-race’ girl but beyond such tokenism, this is the white woman’s world!

From movies such as Kidulthood [1]to the presenters of the Kiss FM Takeaway show, who typify this phenomenon, the symbols of ‘Urban’ or Black British youth culture are routinely Black men and their white female partners.

Recently in conversation with a young black British man, I was surprised when he informed me that he “won’t date black women” the reason being that  “they (we) are too ghetto”.

This individual apparently saw no irony in the fact that he was saying this to myself -a middle class black woman- while his (blonde) girlfriend is white and working class.

Faced with the contradiction between the reality of the situation and a stereotype, this young man still succumbed to the latter, repeating the tired, black girls = ghetto, white girls = status, prestige, and success, narrative.This story is writ large within British popular culture, in which we can find a wealth of examples that illustrate perceptions of what differently racialised women represent. Wileys Heatwave video is a rich site for analysis. Here, the absence of black models- in preference of white- is stark, yet this is far from an isolated example, rather it is an all too common feature of UK Black British popular culture.

Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blue-eyed, blond, thin White women could not be considered beautiful without the Other—Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair. Race, gender, and sexuality converge on this issue of evaluating beauty… African-American women experience the pain of never being able to live up to prevailing standards of beauty used by White men, White women, Black men, and, most painfully, one another. Regardless of any individual woman’s subjective reality, this is the system of ideas that she encounters. Because controlling images are hegemonic and taken for granted, they become virtually impossible to escape (Collins, 2000: 89-90).

Although Hill-Collins is taking about the African-American context, her insights are more then pertinent here.

Referring to Britain specifically, Mama informs us that this phenomenon is reflected in black men’s choice of partners.

As young women, many Black girls experienced rejection from Black males as ‘in white dominated situations black and white boys alike tend to conform to the prevailing aesthetic, and fancy white (if not blonde) girls more.” (Weekes 1997 cited in Mirza 1997).

Despite all this, Weekes goes on to outline Black women’s agency in the face such oppression, and notes that rather than passively accepting hegemonic beauty norms many black girls reject white constructions of beauty. However she acknowledges that despite this rejection whiteness is still too often used as the yardstick against which other types of beauty are measured.

Given this a context, it seems remarkable that researchers and journalists alike would disregard such considerations in their interpretation of statistics relating to Britain’s increasing ‘mixed-race’ population, but this is exactly what they do.

Lucinda Platt’s 2009 EHRC Ethnicity and Family Report, generated a volume ofmedia stories, all heralding the rise of ‘mixed-race’ Britain, a beautiful, brave, new brown future in which the scourge of racism has been vanquished. It would appear that post-racial utopia is achievable – all we need is love (if indeed love is defined as sexual relations between black men and white women).

Seemingly oblivious to the dynamics of relationships between men and women within black communities, and apparently unaware of any of the qualitative research carried out by black female researchers on the subject, the findings that at least 48% of African-Caribbean men are in “inter-racial” relationships, (usually with white women), are interpreted as hugely positive, a thermometer of improved societal interethnic relations, indicating a movement to a less racist society.

In the myopic and a-historical style that characterises contemporary discussions of mixedness, the report notes that ‘inter-ethnic relationships’ “have often been seen as indicative of the extent of openness in different societies and of the extent to which identities are adapting and changing over time”. Further ‘inter-ethnic relationships’ can be “taken to be a thermometer of ethnic relations in particular societies”.

I suppose they are correct, if you discount almost every example indicating the contrary. The slave societies of the Caribbean, North, and South America experienced ‘inter-ethnic relationships’ leading to the unprecedented levels of mixedness which characterize their populations to the present day, yet are not noted for their “openness”, nor their progressive achievements of racially harmonious societies. Likewise the Coloureds in South Africa are recognised as having one of the most mixed ancestries in the world but similarly South Africa is not usually upheld as a paragon of racial utopia.

Modern Britain is in large part the nation it is as a result of the slave trade and the subsequent colonial endeavour. These horrific events were the catalyst for the birth of the anti-black racism, unhappily now a feature of life across the globe.

However, with characteristic sleight of hand Britain inverts responsibility. Where there should be castigation there is instead self-congratulation.

Rather then the nation responsible for the savage kidnapping and life long bondage of millions of human beings, Britain reimagines itself as the nation that was central in the abolition. Rather then acknowledging the flourishing of a culture in which black women are routinely written out of existence, disregarded and undervalued, Britain reinterprets the evidence on mixedness to reinvent itself as the epitome of the progressive post-racial nation.

We live in a society in which damaging folk constructions of race, continue to position black women as less desirable then white, and black men as hyper-sexualised studs. This positioning is equally limiting and damaging to black men whom society attempts to force into a space, identified by Fanon, “fixed at the shifting boundaries between barbarism and civility” where the insatiable fear and desire for the Negro reveals itself “Our women are at the mercy of Negroes … God knows how they make love”; This is in many ways the manifestation of  a combined enduring fascination with, and  a “deep cultural fear of, the Black”,  which is “figured in the psychic trembling of Western sexuality” (Fanon, 1986: xxiv). Of course rather then any engagement with such complicated, and potentially uncomfortable, subject matter, sociologists instead inform us

race itself does not provide as meaningful a basis when selecting a partner, compared to other things young people may have in common like education, friends, attitudes and beliefs (Platt, 2009).

Whether such neat conclusions are wilfully ignorant or just naïve, they remain indicative of Britain’s almost pathological inability to engage in an honest discourse about race that might one day engender any real change.

[1] In Kidulthood, the actresses are in the main white, there is however one ‘mixed -race’ character. I have written elsewhere about how casting directors still seem reticent to commit to featuring darker-skinned black women. A convenient alternative is to employ ‘mixed-race’ individuals who serve the need to represent diversity but are still, less threatening, acceptable faces of blackness.

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Emma Dabiri is an Irish Nigerian writer and commenter. She is currently undertaking her PhD in the sociology. Her doctoral research explores the multiple ways being ‘mixed-race’ has come to be gendered. Her major passions include, African and African Diasporian performative and literary cultures, critical race studies, feminism and folklore. She is regularly invited to contribute to discussions on diverse issues ranging from performance, to race and feminism at various settings including the Africa Writes festival, Film Africa, UK Feminista, WOW Southbank Festival and BBC Radio 4. She blogs as The Diaspora Diva. Follow her on twitter @TheDiasporaDiva

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