Music, Difference and the Residue of Race

Jo Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415879217
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136191916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Race and music seem fatally entwined in a way that involves both creative ethnic hybridity and ongoing problems of racism. This book presents a sociological analysis of this enduring relationship and asks: how are ideas of race critical to the understanding of music genres and preferences? What does the 'love of difference' via music contribute to contemporary perspectives of racism? Previous studies of world music have situated it within the dynamics of local/global musical production, the representation of nations and ethnic groups, theories of globalization, hybridization and cultural appropriation. Haynes adds a conceptual and textual shift to these debates by utilizing world music as a lens for examining cultural imaginaries of race and analytical nuances of racialization. The text offers a view of world music from 'within,' building on original, qualitative, interview-based research with people from the British world music scene. These interviews provide unique insights into the discursive repertoires that underpin contemporary culture, and will make a significant contribution to the mainly theoretical debates about world music.

1 The Durability of Race

Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualise it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we choose to do now.

B. J. Fields, 1990: 118

Within scholarly writing and research on race, there is a tendency to understand racialisation pejoratively as a normative concept that signals a harmful social process because of the association with racist objectives and outcomes (Garner 2009; St Louis 2005). This is often predicated on an understanding of race as a biological determinant used to support an ideology of racial supremacy and inferiority. Although the precise formation and impact of racism is an important area of sociological focus, racialisation occurs in a range of contexts suggesting a potentially complex set of relationships between the understanding of race—as a discrete biological category or social construction—and corresponding political and ethical positioning than is hitherto acknowledged. Race is not only widely deployed in a range of settings as a political and social resource for the legitimisation and development of diverse social identities and interests, it is also used wittingly and unwittingly to interpret and cognitively order the social world—as a commonsense explanatory lens on everyday cultural phenomena and social activity. Whereas even its commonsense usage reflects ideological positioning, often focus on the ideological dimension obfuscates other important aspects of its routine appeal. It is through everyday cultural imaginaries— meanings, values, beliefs, ideas and their representations—where race is regularly reproduced through discourses of difference relating to popular beliefs about colour, ethnicity and nationality (Nayak 2005). Starting with the premise that racialisation is a useful sociological tool for understanding the process of ‘making race’, this chapter focuses on three dominant concerns within current thinking about racialisation: the routine deployment of race, the existence of multiple forms of racialisation and the significance of the ‘love of difference’ for understanding the interstices between racialisation and racism.

The first concern is the precise nature of what the race in racialisation refers to. Within academic debates about racialisation, the fact that race is used to refer to a particular and narrow biological discourse of discrete groups, a process of cultural differentiation or a sign in which the idea or language of race is absent is a source of tension (Murji and Solomos 2005: 4). Critics argue that this lack of precision has led to confusion over the use of racialisation and worse, its overuse, suggesting that the concept of racialisation is becoming so ubiquitous it has lost its critical and explanatory edge. I argue that the uneven and differentiated ways in which racialisation can occur because of conflation and slippage in the meaning of race is precisely the kind of concern that should be elaborated on further through empirical investigation, because this overlap and confusion constitutes the fundamental power of race—its durability. Moreover, I argue that although there is scholarly and political acknowledgement that race, as an object in itself, does not exist, traces of a biological discourse of race are evident within commonsense explanations of human difference. The second concern is the embedded assumption that racialisation is a process of differentiation that is imposed by the dominant on the dominated and that these broad social divisions map onto a white-black racialised dichotomy. This connects to a longstanding view of British society, for instance where the white majority is homogeneously framed as being in a superior socioeconomic and political position to minority black and Asian groups. Despite research that demonstrates more nuanced and complex positioning based on the intersection of race with other social divisions such as ethnicity, gender and class (Modood et al. 1997), formations of racialised power (and social advantage/disadvantage) still tend to be understood as ‘all or nothing’. By treating racialised power as multiple and differentiated, it is argued that the subtle ways in which race is given meaning within social relationships and activities as part of the fabric of everyday life will be better understood. Following this, the final concern is that racialisation tends to be narrowly understood as a process that assigns characteristics to individuals and groups that are feared or loathed and used as the basis of exclusion or inferiorisation. However, ‘positive’ or more ambiguous forms of racialisation are also identified within empirical research (see for example, Back 1996; Nayak 2005). For instance, certain behaviours, beliefs and cultural styles displayed by individuals and groups and attributed to race are considered to be desirable, rather than feared or loathed. Although the negative and ‘positive’ dimensions of racialisation are in effect ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Pickering 2001), very little attention has been paid to the ‘positive’ dimension. I argue that an acknowledgement and understanding of the often unreflective way in which race is positively and negatively articulated through descriptions and aesthetic evaluations of everyday cultural phenomena such as music, is essential for a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary processes of racialisation.

MAPPING THE COMPLEXITY OF RACE

The reason why race is a “persistent and seductive fiction of the twenty-first century” (Nayak 2005: 141) is because it offers a convincing explanation. It is widely acknowledged by social and natural scientists that although the term ‘race’ has no fundamental scientific basis in biological terms (Fenton 2003; Miles 1982), nevertheless, its lack of scientific credibility is not widely comprehended and the complex scholarly arguments about its conceptual status are relatively vague or unknown. Guillaumin (1995: 105) argues that the idea that “human beings are ‘naturally’ different, and that the great divides in society (national, religious, political, etc.) reflect ‘natural’ differences” is unlikely to be eradicated on the basis of scientific (or some other disciplinary) challenge anyway. Many people continue to believe that they belong to a particular race that defines an aspect of their social identities (Dardar and Torres 2004). Furthermore, race is firmly embedded within the institutional and discursive practices of many societies, it has a “legal, political and a historical” presence regardless of its ontological status as a ‘fact of nature’ or a ‘mental reality’ (Guillaumin 1995: 105–106). For this reason, it appears to be a commonly accepted way of making sense of some observable phenotypical differences, as well as behaviours or attitudes and thus continues to be used widely and uncritically within ordinary communication and media and political discourse.

Rather than reproducing and getting trapped within circuitous arguments about the theoretical status and efficacy of race—aptly captured by the following conclusion, “race does/does not exist and we should/should not use the concept” (St Louis 2005: 29–30)—this research focuses on the work race does at an empirical level. A working definition for this purpose therefore is that race is not an essential or immutable attribute, but rather the conditional, socially constructed outcome of the processes and practices of differentiation and exclusion. It is invoked to interpret and order difference and does not require explicit phenotypical or biological difference, as it can also incorporate cultural characteristics as the foundation of differentiation. When the idea of race is appealed to through the interpretation and ordering of the social world, a combination of biological and cultural markers of difference are often drawn on, as they are not mutually exclusive. Hall (1997a) draws our attention to the way in which through cultural processes a range of visible differences are used to signify biological characteristics of human beings. Empirically, therefore race can incorporate a range of meanings from a biological discourse of discrete groups to a process of cultural differentiation. In this sense, it reflects Hall's depiction as a ‘floating signifier’ (Hall 1997a)—a discursive category whose meaning is never fixed and where potentially, it is a sign in which the idea of race itself may be absent.

There are competing motivations for and different stakes in the appeals to race that derive from a variety of social and political locations. This variability is exemplified by its importance within epidemiological research, its use as the basis for political action on behalf of individuals, groups and institutions and its routine deployment within the everyday organisation and interpretation of the social world and cultural phenomena by a range of social actors and institutions. The variety of uses depends in part on the particular mode of ontological understanding of it as either a real (for example, a biological category that reflects natural differences between human population groups) or socially constructed category that represents groups (Mills 1998). Whether or not the idea of race constitutes a compelling political ideal or not and irrespective of its status, Guillaumin argues, “imaginary and real races play the same role in the social process and are therefore identical as regards their social function” (cited in Wieviorka, 1995: 1). However, although the distinction between its imaginary or real conceptual status is irrelevant, in order to challenge its ongoing appeal it is important to identify and understand its deployment within different contexts.

St Louis (2005) provides a provocative account of how the politics of race is structured and is worth engaging with further. He argues that the deployment of race will also depend on the extent to which it is considered a convincing moral principle; in other words, the degree of moral concern for the social implications of race will partly influence whether social actors are predisposed towards it, particularly as a biological notion. However, the correlation between whether or not it is a compelling moral ideal and the acceptance of a biological notion of race can be counterintuitive. Even those who reject race on moral and/or political grounds can articulate an understanding of difference that draws on a biological discourse.

The rhetoric that associates processes of biological racialisation with a “regressive racial political project” is challenged by St Louis (2005: 39), who highlights as an example, the paradigm shift in biomedical science in the aetiology and treatment of specific diseases that target populations as opposed to racial or ethnic groups. Although the construction of such population groups mirror already known racial and ethnic group categorisations, they are understood to be distinctive populations only through shared genetic markers that are examined as the basis for specific genetic disorders. Caucasians/Northern Europeans for instance are an identifiable group because of a high incidence of being heterozygous for meta-methylhydrafolate, which is linked to spina bifida or a higher incidence of cystic fibrosis. Human biodiversity is declared to be the focus for the mobilisation of the idea of population groups rather than a reimagining of race at the genetic level, but clearly population groups may be synonymous with racial categories in biomedical practice given the already established categories of understanding amongst scientific and health professionals. Various ‘population’ groups may wish to ensure adequate treatment and resources by promoting the self-identification of the group. Thus, the same appeal to biodiversity and the human gene as the basis of biological categorisation (to treat diseases) is appealed to as a resource for both the medical experts and those potentially at risk from specific genetic disorders. What of course is kept at a discursive distance from the construction of ‘population groups’ following St Louis (2005: 38), is any notion of the “subjective intellectual and moral qualities spuriously imputed to races”. Putting to one side the political or ethical objections to the deployment of race, as an idea, race is used within a wider spectrum of political and discursive spaces than is typically envisaged and therefore constitutes complex formations that cannot easily be described as racist or non-racist. An a priori link between the adoption of or reinforcement of a biological sense of race and a specific sociopolitical or moral position cannot be assumed.

What is not explicitly highlighted within St Louis' discussion of the political complexity and moral imperative around race is its more mundane, routinised usage where motivation, moral positioning and political ideals are not clearly articulated or easily discernible because it is produced through commonsense discourse. By suggesting that race occurs in this way is not to ignore relations of power and the influence of particular ideologies. Given that commonsense¹ involves multiple, competing fragmentary discourses, it is often understood to be an ambiguous product of the negotiation of political and ideological views that involves a range of social actors and groups. Commonsense discourse is therefore very much consequential. In adopting this approach, it paves the way for exploring the extent to which, if at all, race is appealed to in order to make sense of everyday encounters, social relations and cultural processes. Dardar and Torres (2004: 11) problematise the everyday sense in which race occurs and caution against support for commonsense notions of race believed to be implicit within processes of racialisation. In other words, there is a danger that it reproduces a reified folk concept of race—where race just is. This, they claim, can enable elites to assert meritocratic views whilst reaffirming a racist vision of the social world. Dardar and Torres (2004: 11) also suggest that “commonsense reified notions of race” maintain the race-relations framing of the social world, whereby society is determined through membership in races. Whereas they argue against “attributing explanatory or descriptive value to ‘race’”, they concur that it still has social reality because as a fiction it is “produced in the real world, thus serving to legitimate it and give it conceptual meaning and social life” (2004: 12). Focusing on the production of race through commonsense discourses is not a way of attributing explanatory value to race itself. Rather, in doing so, it enables further insight into how biological and cultural notions of race retain their status and are produced by social actors through interpretation and explanation of perceptions of difference in settings that are not prioritised within research and scholarship on race.

Before concluding this section, it is important to highlight that the meaning of race within commonsense discourse is inconsistent. This ‘slipperiness’ and the imprecise usage of cognate terms—ethnicity, nation and culture—is indicative of the ideological handiwork of racialisation itself, whereby its conceptual instability serves to increase the power of the idea of race (Radano and Bohlman 2000).

The etymological and historical antecedents of the terms ‘ethnicity’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ suggest that they all share common ground and for this reason can be difficult to untangle, both analytically and in terms of their everyday usage. It is often said that the concept of ethnicity is descriptively and analytically preferable to race; however, ethnicity is often used synonymously performing the same work race does in assigning people to fixed groups (St Louis 2009). Ethnicity is understood as the outcome of a “group formation process based on culture and descent” (Omi and Winant 1994: 15). Culture² here is being used in its anthropological sense—namely, a way of life and a set of values and beliefs, which are shared by a group on the basis of socialisation. Descent involves heredity and a sense of group origins, which gave ethnicity its ‘primordial’ status in one tranche of scholarly writing about the term. In addition, because ethnic groups are understood to be formed through lines of descent, this paves the way for ethnicity to be understood as biologically driven. Nations are also believed to incorporate a common line of descent but they also reflect a territorial dimension, with the political and racial dimensions being forged later. The key component of the common ground between all three terms is culture because they all refer to descent and culture communities (Fenton 2003)³.

Sharing a culture can imply more than a socially constructed set of behaviours, beliefs and practices as well as strong ties to the same place. Fenton suggests (2003: 21–22) that given that “the claim to share a culture is so commonly a key component of the claim to ‘sharedness’ alongside common descent” the relationship between ethnicity and culture has become blurred. On this basis, sharing a culture is more than the values and beliefs we are socialised into; it is associated with lineage, in the sense that people, or a nation or an ethnic group, come from the same stock and have lived in the same place. Following this, the ontological distinctions between race and culture are easily conflated within ordinary conceptions of having a shared descent.

The distinctive properties of the idea of race are that it implies a set of physical or visible differences that are believed to be biologically determined within a universal system of categorisation (Fenton 2003). However, race and culture were considered by some racial theorists to have a biological link. Knox's racial typology for instance suggested that variations in the forms of individual behaviours were considered expressions of “underlying biological types” (cited in Banton 1977: 47) and that differences between these racial types could explain cultural variation. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racial scientists sought explanations for the cultural and behavioural variations between human groups (for example, predisposition to crime and intellectual ability) and proposed that biologically determined races could explain social and cultural phenomena (Banton 1977).

Biological and cultural differentiation understood through the ideas of race and ethnicity are not distinct systems of meaning. Although the meaning and usage of these terms over time remain context dependent and subject to change, nevertheless from the brief outline of their etymological provenance, it is clear that they share common ground. Consequently, it is not surprising that in everyday usage the terms are used interchangeably or there is overlap or slippage in their meaning when they are deployed.

THE INTERSTICES BETWEEN RACIALISATION AND RACISM

Racialisation occurs when race is appealed to in discursive and institutional practices to interpret, classify and shape social relations and cultural phenomena (Banton 1977; Barot and Bird 2001; Murji and Solomos 2005; Omi and Winant 1986). Thus, racialisation is a process that orders and gives meaning to perceptions, interpretations and representations of national, cultural and/or phenotypical/biological traits. By incorporating forms of difference represented through national and cultural categories, this definition is broader than some well-documented formations such as Miles' (1989), who states that racialisation refers “to those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities” (1989: 75). This research proceeded on the basis that race—as a social construction—is central to processes of racialisation, and that it is the “negative valuation” of race that converts racialisation to racism (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 11; Miles 1989: 84). Given this, racism is more likely to be, although not exclusively, associated with fear and hatred as responses to difference. Having said that, processes of racialisation and racism itself are not typically homogeneous, nor do they necessarily follow a singular logic of either inferiorisation/domination or differentiation/exclusion (Wieviorka 1995).

Rattansi suggests that one of the problems of the concept of racialisation relates to its explanatory potential, whether it can actually help in “differentiating what is and what is not to count as racism” (2005: 273). Similarly, Barot and Bird (2001: 602) ask whether the concept of racialisation can “provide the key to understanding forms of racial discrimination and hatred” within the contemporary world. Although it is important to clarify the relationship between racialisation and racism in order to get a better purchase on discriminatory practices and hatred, it is also prudent to expand on this and ask whether racialisation provides a lens for understanding other social pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Durability of Race
• 2 Configuring Music and Race
• 3 Difference and Differentiation
• 4 Difference and Hybridisation
• 5 Music Affinity
• 6 Conclusion: The Residue of Race
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index