Art-for-Life’s-Sake in the African Diaspora: Education for Sustainability

• In Event: Narratives and indigenous ways of being across the African diaspora

Proposal

Over the turbulent course of their histories with the west (slavery and colonialism), African descendants in the Diaspora retained certain essentials of their ancient oral traditions such as ’art-for-life’s-sake’ - the sine qua non of their community survival. These socializing modes of oral communication facilitated the rebuilding and sustaining of African lives and culture under slavery in America, but were viewed by the predatory and culturally-biased white gaze as mere ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ expression. When America’s entertainment industry was built on the racist lampooning of this African cultural expression as such by whites in blackface, it fell on Blacks to foster a new, post-minstrelsy level of civil discourse within the greater society. Jazz, which had been born in New Orleans’ Congo Square, thereafter became America’s popular entertainment genre and quintessential art form. Indeed, Black popular music genres which, unlike any other, went on to captivate and cultivate the human imagination globally have represented an informal educational experience in the universe outside of the elitist purview of the knowledge industry, or university.

According to Sir Ken Robinson (2016), a “new” educational model is needed to link learning processes organically to the natural ecosystem to which humans belong, nurturing the powers of creativity rather than characteristically reinforcing a culture of standardization. His concerns are in concert with those of this 63rd annual CIES conference which ask, what is the [long-term] cost of an education that promises - and sometimes delivers - productivity, industrialization, modernity and consumption? ‘Education as a driver of economic growth’ as advocated by the UN in the 1960s implies that educational institutions are merely a link in service to the larger industrial pipeline whose ‘sustainability’ then represents the ‘greater good’ for mankind. Programs emphasizing extraction, higher yield, accumulation, standardization, market-interests, consumption, etc. would thus be of highest-value to maintaining the dehumanizing mindset that took hold during the mid-1700’s with the Industrial Revolution.

Martin Bernal (1987) states that modern disciplinary scholarship, pioneered at the German University of Göttingen [UG] in 1734, still bears the intellectualized racism of the European interests and historic forces of the day. He says UG’s account of civilization promoted imperialistic, religious and racist elements of ‘Romantic Hellenism’ through their Christianized myth of Greece being the epitome of European civilization and its ‘pure’ genesis. Greece’s ancient Egyptian predecessor was then recast as a static civilization, according to Bernal, in order to manufacture a linear ‘paradigm of progress’ which held that later is better and that the conqueror (Europe) is superior to the conquered (Africa). This in turn fueled the rise of the racism which was needed as justification for African colonialism and enslavement (already underway), as well as the American policy to exterminate indigenous peoples.

Patricia Hill Collins (2000) argues, “Because elite White men control Western structures of knowledge validation, their interests pervade the themes, paradigms, and epistemologies of traditional scholarship.” Many scholars have argued similarly that education is the intellectual domain of Euro-patriarchal special interests, protecting their hegemonic status quo within an industrialized matrix of what counts as knowledge. The conceptual frameworks of compartmentalized academic disciplines thus often become limited by their intellectual exclusivity from the larger existential context of humanity from which scholars harvest in order to construct and sustain a parallel universe of interests.

“Music is culture and what musicians do is society… Of all the functions of music, the communicative function is perhaps the least known and understood.” This argument by American-school ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam was aimed against the preoccupation with lab-based analyses of music samples collected in Germany’s African colonies - the scientific research method which helped birth the comparative-musicology discipline. Mantle Hood similarly believed that in the latter half of the 20th century, the very existence of humankind may well depend upon the accuracy of their communications, therefore this should be ethnomusicology’s critical mission (Waterman, 1993). However, according to Marshall McLuhan (1964), communication studies in the same American knowledge industry are themselves preoccupied with ‘transportation theories,’ which (i) are intimately tied to the western phonetic alphabet’s linear patterns, a sequential technology which suits industrial-mechanical processes; (ii) confuse this single technology of literacy with a “universal” thesis of reason, uniformity, and progress; (iii) thus provide a “rational” basis for the objectification of different communication paradigms and conquest of those who operate from them. This ‘conquest’ has often been waged through the execution of contracts…

This presentation proposes to present how the communicative function of Black popular music on its own art-for-life’s-sake cultural terms rebuilt communities, sustained lives, and transformed societies in the African Diaspora and across the globe - despite the great duress imposed upon its cultural custodians during slavery. It will be argued from the scholar’s original oral-aesthetic perspective of music (Mutere, 1995, 2012 & 2018). As such, the scholarship will demonstrate the existential viability and proof of African oral traditions both as a unique globally-significant communication model in comparison to prevailing ‘transportation’ theories, and as a paradigm of “Education for Sustainability.”

Author

• Malaika Mutere, University of California