Sounds of Dissent and Solidarity in Africa and the Americas

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This session explores how dissent and solidarity were fostered through music and media linking and traversing Africa and the Americas. Building on Shana Redmond’s and Tsitsi Jaji’s studies of pan-African solidarities engendered through music and sound technologies, we show how Third World and Tricontinental solidarities produced and were produced by North African jazz and Black Power radio programs in dissent from colonialism, Cold War U.S. hegemony, and white supremacy. While drawing on Redmond’s notion of the “sound franchise” and Jaji’s “stereomodernism” to investigate cultural forms that give rise to interactive, relational, and alternative Black diasporic politics and experiences of modernity, we further account for intersections of the Black Atlantic with Bandung and Afro-Oriental cultures that spanned Africa and the Americas. And we show how the vernacular phonograph music and technology that paved the way in the 1920s and 1930s for decolonization, as Michael Denning has argued, reverberated in the Bandung Era and the Year of Africa into late capitalism.

In “Black Power Radio Waves,” Cheryl Higashida argues that radio history is integral to understanding hemispheric and transnational dimensions of Black internationalism and Black Power. Higashida examines the reception in Cuba of Radio Free Dixie, Robert and Mabel Williams’ Havana-based show in support of African-American struggles in the 1960s. She then positions the show in a broader history of U.S. Black Power radio. From considering radio’s amplifications of African-American struggle in Cuba, the panel turns to Egypt’s diverse musical cultures in relation to the African diaspora. In “Old Nubia, New Egypt, and the Cadence of the ‘Black Land,’” Sophia Azeb investigates how and why different forms of Egyptian music have or have not represented anti-colonial nationalism and African decolonization. Azeb compares the Egyptian singers Umm Kulthum, renowned for her support of Nasser and her popularization of Egyptian aural traditions, and Ali Hassan Kuban, who mixed American jazz instrumentation with Arabic lyrics and Nubian sound. Finally, in “‘Ramadan in Space Time’: Sonic Infrastructures of Afro-Arab Solidarity,” Alex Lubin contends that music formed a crucial “infrastructure of feeling” that gave rise to the more visible and official institutions of Afro-Arab solidarity. The collaboration between African American saxophonist Max Spears and Egyptian drummer Salah Ragab, which blended the sounds of Black Islam and Arab nationalism, was integral to the Afro-Arab decades in Cairo. With introductory comments by Shana Redmond and commentary by Michael Denning, this session will amplify the role of music and sound technology in producing geographies of pan-African, pan-American, and Afro-Arab solidarity and dissent.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Shana L. Redmond, University of California, Los Angeles

Individual Presentations

• Black Power Radio Waves - Cheryl Higashida, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Old Nubia, New Egypt, and the Cadence of the “Black Land” - Sophia Azeb, New York University

• Ramadan in Space Time: Sonic Infrastructures of Afro-Arab Solidarity - Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico

Comment

• Michael Denning, Yale University