Music, real abstraction, and growth in the Black Atlantic
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Abstract
This dissertation argues that reconsidering the history of music and modernity from the point of view of Africa and its diaspora calls for a new approach to the music concept. Breaking with the ethno/musicological orthodoxy that “there is no such thing as music,” it instead draws on recent critical theory to argue that, under global modernity, “Music” exists as a “real abstraction”—one that has exhibited a startling tendency toward ceaseless growth. The argument unfolds through four case studies that show how this Music’s growth has been sustained by repeated accumulation of African and Black musics, which have been framed paradoxically as both its quintessence and antithesis. Chapter One considers the emergence of Music through early modern globalization; looking in particular at the circulation of African musics to the Iberian Peninsula, it draws on the work of Sylvia Wynter to demonstrate how the encounter of European and African musics gave rise to an abstract Music that was implicated in questions of the similarly new abstraction of the Human. Chapter Two offers an examination of Music’s growth by tracing how mixed-race musicians in the nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean developed new forms of racially hybrid, “creolized” dance music through abstraction and how the pressures of racialization incorporated these new forms into Music. Chapter Three studies the work of Nigerian musical intellectuals in the decades around Nigeria’s political independence in 1960 as they reckoned with Music as a colonial legacy; these thinkers became champions of Music’s growth as they argued that postcolonial Nigeria could assume a leading position in the musical world by offering its traditional musics as a means for Music’s progress and expansion. Finally, Chapter Four listens to the hyper-referential sound of contemporary Afrobeats and observes the integration of its producers into the global music industry to ask if Music’s growth may be approaching—even exceeding—its limits.
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2024