Death Sentences: from genesis to genre (Big Mama\'s Parole)

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Death sentences: from genesis to genre (Big Mama's parole) a

Dalton Anthony Jones a

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA Published online: 20 May 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Dalton Anthony Jones (2015): Death sentences: from genesis to genre (Big Mama's parole), Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2014.994840 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.994840

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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.994840

“Big Mama Thornton,” circa 1970. Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

Death sentences: from genesis to genre (Big Mama’s parole) Dalton Anthony Jones* Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA This paper offers a meditation on the life and music of Willie Mae Thornton in order to theorize the production of voice and affect as critical sites of capitalist exploitation. Reorganizing the current discourse on subsumption, I situate the endemic crisis of agency under neoliberal capital in relation to the historical harvesting of black labor, aesthetics and culture. Keywords: Big Mama Thornton; Affect Theory; emotional labor; Afropessimism; subsumption; autonomism

*Email: [email protected] © 2015 Women & Performance Project Inc.

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D.A. Jones Sittin’ by my window … I was lookin’ out at the rain Sittin’ by my window baby I was just lookin’ out at the rain You know something struck me Clamped on to me, clamped on like a ball and chain. – “Ball and Chain,” Willie Mae Thornton, 19671

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A Strong Want is a Justifiable Need – An Entirely New ES. – Is it Possible to Engineer Desire? – Slogans for the 2007 Lexus ES 350

Some claim it all begins with a scream − that the production of voice begins with a decisive negation, with a howl of rage against the “mutilation of human lives by capitalism” (Holloway 2002, 1–10; Shukaitis 2007). Born in opposition, they contend that our urge to emote, to speak, assumes the countenance of a dissonant cry in reaction to a “world which is faulty to the core”: that even as we exhale the sounds ushering from our lips resonate to the tune of a “critical vibration,” a rhythmic mark of refusal even as they are conceived (Adorno 1973, 31). If Du Bois was correct that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, it is tempting to side with the growing chorus who declare that the problem of the twenty-first century is an even more formidable dilemma: that of the “real subsumption” of our desires under the authority and logic of surplus value accumulation. Indeed, “neoliberalism’s victory,” as the late Stuart Hall proclaimed in one of his final editorials, “has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life” (Hall 2013). Living in an age where such a sweeping triumph can even be contemplated, have “we the people who are darker than blue” jumped out of the frying pan of racial domination and into the fire of a more comprehensive and generic crisis?2 Were the years of bondage merely a dress rehearsal for a more systematic and universal form of enslavement? The proposition on the table is not new. In fact, it has become such a dominant preoccupation within the humanities and social sciences that to even address it is by now almost cliché. The argument holds that in the passage from the modern to the postmodern, from Fordism to Toyotism, from text to hypertext, and from analog to MP3, increasingly efficient mechanisms of exploitation have penetrated to the core of subjectivity: mining it as a source of value and appropriating even the most radical performance of identity as an ingredient towards its own valorization. Something called the “general will” has become an adjunct of a financial dictatorship: the “universal subject” a victim of a newly efficient bio-economic totalitarianism. Even the symbolic codes of language, we are told, words and signs, the lynchpins of identity, have become an extension of a fascistic semiocapitalism … mere cogs in the machine of an elaborate social factory that does not hold in regard the nuances of race, gender, or sexual orientation (Negri 1991; Berardi 2012). Caught within an equal-opportunity stranglehold, our lives, from our kinship networks to our most distant emotional affinities, have become as integral to the creation of profit margins as the production of more traditional commodities like widgets or yarn. Our bedrooms

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stand accounted for. Our imaginations channeled into a vehicle of pure consumption. The structure of our feelings at work and play transformed into little more than a theater of collusion with the very systems we may wish to dismantle, disrupt, or at the very least evade. It is a compelling argument and it is gaining currency. We find ourselves, then, at the crossroads of several conflicting theories of subsumption. All seem to agree that the individual is confronting one of the most puzzling dilemmas of modernity with renewed intensity – the power of signification appears to be deteriorating even as the means of articulation, the tools for expressing our voices and desires, have enhanced exponentially. An alliance of anti-capitalists and human-rights activists take to the street, putting their bodies on the line to oppose the institutional apparatuses of global capitalism. Neo-Marxian theorists dissect the political economy, through word and deed, in search of an escape route for the thinking, feeling subject. They join academics in trying to explain the defeat of twentieth-century revolutions and radical social movements by pinpointing general tendencies, laws, and principles of corporatization, finance, and statism, identifying historical ruptures in the continuities of exploitation and resistance. Autonomists theorize new forms of immaterial and abstract labor within the realm of cognition and affect. Deleuzians propose a multiplicity of nodes, of “collective arrangements of the utterance” for the articulation and disarticulation of power, desire, and our strategies of resistance within the process of subject formation. Another group of thinkers meanwhile, drawing heavily upon Du Bois and Fanon, argue that any attempt to address the problematic of human agency must contend not only with capital, but with the deep violations of the colonial apparatus; that liberation is contingent upon what Nelson Maldonado-Torres explains as “interventions at the level of power, knowledge, and being through varied actions of decolonization and ‘des-gener-acción’” – by which he means simultaneously dismantling the apparatus of domination while actively recreating, or regenerating, the self as an autonomous subject. They, along with a new generation of indigenous and immigration activists incriminate the colonial foundations of the nation-state by interrogating the coloniality of being it (re)produces: “the genetic, the existential, and the historical dimensions” of colonial relations that have inscribed themselves on our language, our culture, and “intersubjective relations” at the level of ontology (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Walia 2013).3 And then there is the quandary of black thought, the debates raging around the production and repression of black desires and voices: the insistence that the crisis of subsumption revolves like water circling a drain around the historical capture of the black body. That when addressing the production of subjectivity and its role as a source of value it is impossible to escape the ontological vortex of blackness and how the paradigmatic figure of the black body, forged out of the depths of the slave experience, continues to operate as a point of departure for any number of ongoing structural violations that have only become more general with the increased efficiency and “confidence,” as Hall would say, of capitalist exploitation. On the one hand, we might see this body is an abject space beyond resolution within the terms of modernity: a subject position that is arguably antagonistic on a fundamental level to any and all enlightenment models of freedom and liberty. On the other, we notice that this body is increasingly turned to as the representative figure in the quest for emancipation, the measure against which all aspirations for autonomy must be assessed. Within this context, I am proposing a more synthetic view. It seems to me that understanding the continuities between the production of the radical black imagination – the organization of its desires

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and the strategies used to counter the emotional enclosures imposed upon the black subject’s expressive range – might have a lot to say about contemporary violations of agency and sentiment. Such an investigation, I want to argue, offers clues into the crisis of subjectivization that is increasingly being framed as a general, that is, universal, phenomena (Read 2003; Sharpe 2010, 3–4).4 It is more than a little curious, is it not, that the structural adjustments marking this historical moment − increasingly dense concentrations of wealth, a deskilled, casualized labor force, hyper-intensive modes of surveillance, militarized population control, the privatization of our collective resources, incarceration as a mode of profit, the list goes on − have been imposed in almost direct proportion to the growing level of visibility and sonic resonance of black aesthetic practices? What might this convergence tell us about the escalation of emotional alienation and the general tyranny imposed by the regulatory techniques of late capitalism? What do we make of the fact that each of the tendencies marking the enactment of “neoliberalism” have intensified even as black voices and bodies have come to inhabit public space on a scale unthinkable a mere two decades ago? Are the concerns of the black subject rendered solipsistic and provincial under the configurations of domination we now confront? Do they fall by the wayside as we consider the slavery of the wagerelation, the bondage of state power, the dominion of the sign, and our captivity to the political organizations who would claim to speak and act on our behalf? Shall we abandon identity politics and instead focus our attention upon a more universal question: Are We All Subaltern Now? On the infiltration of desire I am suggesting, of course, that understanding the interventions in the production of black voices can help us diagnose the terms of power governing our desires under the elaborately organized conditions we now endure. Any theory meditating upon the ruptures and discontinuities of capitalist time, any theory proposing to understand “where the past stops and the present begins” is as much a disavowal of trauma’s resonance as it is an insight into capitalism’s strategic shifts or a statement about the latest maneuvers of the state for absolute social control (Endnote Collective 2010). Whether or not we think of the subsumption process as all-consuming – that is to say, whether or not we feel there is sufficient wiggle-room for individual and collective liberation (something that might be thought of as autonomy, sovereignty, or self-determination), within the walls of modern life – the invasion of intimacy, the privatization of the private, begs us to consider the emotional enclosures marking the subjective limits of exploitation. If it is indeed possible to engineer desire at all, it becomes necessary to address the techné of feeling: its configurations, the terms governing its emergence, and the strategies the subject deploys to preserve her sovereignty. It obliges us to raise our thumbs to the horizon and begin to sketch the outlines of our anomic condition, of our individual and collective emotional boundaries. To my way of thinking, the two epigraphs I have chosen to open this essay tell a story. There is a movement, an arc if you will, a progression between the emotional rupture opened up by the legendary blues musician Willie Mae Thornton and the explicit intent to engineer the terrain of desire as it is spelled out so forthrightly by the designers of the

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Toyota Corporation’s luxury sedan, Lexus. The journey begins with an utterance that invokes one of slavery’s most searing images of un-freedom. She is sitting by the window in solitude looking out upon the rain. She experiences a surplus of emotion. It wells up from within and yet she tells us that it “grabs a hold of her” as if from without; that the sensation is like bondage: a ball and chain to be precise. With this metaphor Thornton has taken us into an abyss that defies translation. She conjures a type of subjugation imprinted uniquely on the social body of the gendered black subject. Attempts to voice this trauma are inevitably registered as a speech impediment, a stutter upon the lips or, more commonly, a muteness of the most profound dimension. Edouard Glissant, suggesting an errant poetics lurking through and around the utterances of the black diaspora, reminds us of the latent power of the imagery she deploys. Like Thornton, he calls to life the “balls and chains gone green” that are the “underwater signposts mark[ing] the course between the Gold Coast and the Leeward Islands” (Glissant 2000, 6, 206). These are more than just the balls and chains cast overboard to lighten the slave ship of its bodies, of its unruly and infirm contraband. They are the balls and chains buried within the emotional sub-strata of the slave experience, transcending the carcasses of those who endured its classical age in the fold of the ship and the cotton fields of the plantation to leave their mark upon the speech act. The violation was a rupture in articulation but this should not be confused with a break in the production and flow of affect. Slavery is not a synonym for genocide. Elaborating upon Glissant’s theory of the discourse of captivity and evasion, Max Hantel observes that along with “death and suffering [a] language of pregnancy and generation” evolved during this epoch: “Victims of the slave trade are not only ‘dissolved’ into the hold of the ship, but precipitated in a yet-unknown form; the ship ‘generates the clamor of [their] protests,’ producing ... new modes of resistance and political grammars; initially solitary, new relationships and communities form in the crucible of shared suffering” (Hantel 2012). Bondage, to cite Glissant directly, is “pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death” (Glissant 2000, 6. Italics mine). The career of Thornton, who was so central to and yet excluded from the corporate industry of song, mirrors the precarious relationship between the black subject and civil society. As such, her work makes audible a link in the chain of what Fred Moten points to as the performance “of the theory of the social life of the shipped” (Moten 2013, 744). Relying upon a lyrical metaphor to establish claims about the nature of social death or assess continuities in the circulation of affect under late capitalism is, perhaps, a dubious proposition. But I want to accept Thornton’s statement not so much as evidence but as an invitation to a larger inquiry about the relationship between trauma, articulation, and the political economy of voice – an economy that has assumed a unique place within the circuits binding global culture. Above all, Thornton spells out for us in rather exquisite detail the workings of desiring-production. If the root causes of her trauma remain opaque, even malleable, she structures her feelings with care, shaping them into a recognizable form, giving them expression: and the result is an architecture of value – an emotional commodity which assumes, as it were, a life of its own once it has been appropriated, or to put it more kindly, engaged, by the industry of sound. Her voice becomes a commodity, adding to previous layers of commoditization – all of the techniques of capturing the utterance that came before her own will to speak. An emotional asset, she demonstrates at once the social utility and personal stakes involved in the inheritance, creation, and transmission

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of desire. Her expressions lend context and meaning to our collective investments in passion, to the economy of affect that circulates from subject to subject. Willie Mae Thornton’s life and music bring into focus several questions about the “gen” of articulation – the “that which produces.” A terrain of labor, articulation is both a source of value and a scene of exploitation. Her sobriquet, “Big Mama,” summons the impulse which is generated and regenerated, gendered and engendered. To be a mama is to be a producer, an originator, a potential site at least of reproduction but also the point of an excess, be it of discipline or of care, a node of protection and nurturing; or, to be more precise, the incubator and gatekeeper of a creative process whose masterpiece in the case of Thornton was the imposition of her body precisely where it was unsanctioned, the production of an historically nuanced voice of oppression precisely where it was traditionally called to silence: it was a form of alienation made pliable and subordinate for the use of others through an act of detachment. Examining Thornton’s career invites the discovery of a particular genealogy of sound − an indebtedness of our voices to a messy conception, an act of procreation that is very far from immaculate but instead the result of a brutal intervention that spills beyond the enclosures of this or that particular genre; it allows us to consider a genesis whose labor pains we are indebted to, are intimately a part of (which is also to say implicated in) as individuals and social beings. It is significant in this regard that the root term gen (French, gène and Greek –genēs) is related to the Latin kin, a cognate which gains new meaning when considering Thornton’s role in the relational aspects of the speech act and the commercial evolution of sound. Obviously I do not mean to suggest by all of this that “only women bleed” or that “only blackness feels” – that the production of desire and voice are literally the cherished terrain of a racialized or essentialized female topos, a body whose function is to be a vessel for the production of our social needs, emotional or otherwise. It is, however, to acknowledge how the objectified and dissected figure of black/womanhood has been used to construct an edifice of exploitation for the harnessing of affect-as-value in a way that epitomizes a process that has by now become paradigmatic. When we frame articulation as an exchange that is intensely private yet socially engendered, what, I wonder, might we discover when we insist upon hearing Thornton’s gendered voice, and more specifically its confiscation and exploitation, as taking place at the very point of this transaction? If the image of the mother of invention invites stereotypes of nurturing, the gendering of women within patriarchal society, and even more so black women within white supremacist patriarchal society, summons more than just a notion of a symbolic birth, a Magdalenian Venus, or an encounter with Eros, but a forced entrance, an imposition into a critical generative process: a penetration that suggests both a carnal violation and, to the extent that language, the vehicle of articulation, is a system of codes, a symbolic rape. As late as 1981, just three years before Thornton’s passing at the age of 57 in a Los Angeles flophouse, and even as the neoliberal economic order was establishing its hegemony under the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, bell hooks noted that “[n]o other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women” (hooks 1981, 7). The concern driving much of the insurgent black feminist scholarship of this time had to do with the imposition of silence upon the black female body. Speaking to the black feminist political imperatives of her moment, hooks asserted that, even “[w]hen black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and

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when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women” (hooks). The silence imposed upon the utterances of the black female, in other words, amounted to a restricted covenant that extended even to those who would conjure her name. This preoccupation with banishment – from discourse, from the dominant economy, from the realm of sentimental identification, from history – was still evident more than a generation later when, in 1994, Evelynn Hammonds joined a fresh if not entirely new wave of black feminist writers in extending “the problematic of silence” into the realm of queer theory. Summarizing the previous decade’s work on black women’s desire and sexuality, she noted that black feminists such as Hortense Spillers (with her concern for the unvoiced) and Toni Morrison (with her emphasis upon the unspoken), among others, had largely written about their own and black women’s oppression in terms of an “absence” (Hammonds 1994). However silence, as we know, does not equal subsumption – just as absence does not necessarily equal loss. In fact, they may even suggest the opposite: survival and autonomy. The case of Willie Mae Thornton is instructive in that her life and work epitomize the tensions between the political and somatic, between the emotional and biological that we are accustomed to seeing as exceptional or “authentic” about the black experience. From the outset Thornton’s selling point was her distinctiveness, a difference that implied an outside to dominant norms: an otherness. She was not a subject whose agency was “already vacant” but one who was brimming with excess, an excess that was ceremoniously exploited while she herself was unceremoniously discarded by the apparatus whose contours she helped mold. When she “broke free” into the music business during the late 1940s Thornton was looked upon as the heir apparent, indeed a direct descendant, of the powerful female blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s; women like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter who had, a mere two decades earlier, managed to shatter the lines of sonic apartheid in the recording and broadcasting establishments, asserting a presence that had long been subordinated. Thornton’s muscular style was taken as evidence that this lineage was not extinct, that the emotional terrain her predecessors had charted was being preserved and extended. These women had used their bodies and voices to invade upon the sanctity of public space and intrude, with dramatic assertiveness, upon the domain of commercial sound which took them into the streets, cordoned establishments and domestic spheres of the body politic. In this regard, they were revolutionary women who had created markets, indeed entire genres of sound, where none had existed before. Like this generation, Thornton’s physical presence, including the aural and emotional posture she assumed, exemplified what we might call a politics of radical black subjectivity, a refusal of submission to a set of sexual, racial, and civil norms. She represents what Chela Sandoval has described as an “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval 2000). At over six feet tall, 350 lbs., and an open lesbian during the repressive 1950s when she was at the height of her career, Thornton was certainly a transgressive figure. Described by her own management as “masculine” and a “female thug,” she was a gender outlaw par excellence, difficult to contain and in open defiance of prevailing ideas of women’s sexuality (Salem 2001). She was “very blunt,” remembered one of her booking agents, who went on to claim with an air of sensationalism that she drank whiskey “like a man” and “used a lot of bad language.” Her provocation of social norms was only accented by the fact that she wore overalls, khaki pants and “plaid shirts, all of the time” (Salem 2001). As a result, Thornton’s demeanor and the texture of her utterances have been described

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as a form of “proto-feminist assertiveness,” a force from the margins that made her one of the “trailblazing voices of emancipation,” and a presence that literally and symbolically “suggested a female identity thwarted by social and sexual containment but always liable to break free” at any moment (Ellis 2008, 36). Placing Thornton beside her black female contemporaries of the period − Sister Rosetta Sharp, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, the girl-group phenomena of the late 1950s and 1960s – helps rectify what has been at best a marginalization and at worst a complete annihilation of black women’s contributions to what was a revolutionary cultural, political, and economic landscape. But what are we to make of such a social function for the gendered black subject, these mercenaries in the war for the liberation of desire? Discussions about Thornton inevitably turn to questions of cultural appropriation, or to put it more bluntly, aesthetic theft. She is still best recognized as the lead plaintiff in a set of litigations concerning the commercialization of black culture. As the catalyst behind two massive cross-over hits that are considered milestones in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, “Hound Dog” (Thornton 1952/Presley 1956) and “Ball ‘n’ Chain” (Thornton 1967/Janis Joplin 1968), she is famous for playing a largely uncompensated role in crafting the rhythm and posture of a nation: for providing an expressive blueprint for American popular music while reaping few of the economic rewards her work generated for white artists. Cultural historian Maureen Mahon’s recent work on Thornton’s life and career expresses the view of many critics. Impressive for the comprehensiveness of its argument, Mahon’s piece marks a fairly decisive statement about cultural appropriation and the set of long-running contests over the racial and gendered legacy of the black aesthetic. Mahon sets out on what she describes as “an expedition” to disclose Thornton’s unconventional, “transgressive sound and image” and to reclaim her formative impact on the crossover of black music into dominant culture. I will leave it to Mahon to describe the quality of Thornton’s voice, her most distinctive and salient emotional product: “[Thornton] approached her songs with verve, openness, and flexibility. There are moments of joy and sweetness, such as when she extols the virtues of a generous lover. Sometimes melancholia seeps through as she renders the whipped despair one feels when a love affair goes wrong. She could also be downright playful … [s]ometimes when singing a blues song in concert she would shift into a spiritual, running roughshod over the sacred-secular divide.” Noting the “resonant dimensions” of Thornton’s sound, Mahon argues that despite her oppressions, Thornton managed to use the registers of her voice and body to tap “into a liberated black femininity through which she freed herself from many of the expectations of musical, lyrical, physical, and sartorial practice for black women” (Mahon 2011, 7, 11). Rectifying the history of popular music in the interests of accuracy is important, however the celebratory tone underlying much of the recent work on the black vernacular makes me pause. Given the general crisis of articulation, I am not so much concerned with recuperating the influence of black women or black culture on particular genres of sound or of establishing the integrity of the black body within them so much as understanding the processes by which an artist’s feelings, or style, come to be appropriated for mainstream consumption. Instead of using Thornton to celebrate the history of the black vernacular − its tenacity, creativity, and institutional power, its residues within mainstream culture – for the remainder of this essay I want to think about Thornton’s exploitation in relation to the multitude of intimate ruptures and infringements that facilitate the determination

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of “voice as value.” When we do so, it may help bring into focus our current state of literal and symbolic incarceration – our dull incapacity to articulate and circulate a political, anticapitalist form of desire. In terms of Thornton’s stylistic contributions I will not attempt to re-adjudicate polemics about the “racial determination of American vernacular music” for the simple reason that I believe this debate has been exhausted (Sanjek 1996, 120; Monson 2007).5 Instead, I am far more interested in asking how the commercialization of music discloses interventions in the subjectivization process and how these intrusions have become an endemic feature of late capitalism, ordering its structure and oiling the wheels of its operations. One thing Big Mama Thornton’s life attests to is the presence of an intervention that took advantage of a vulnerability that preceded her exploitation. This is the liminal moment I hear articulated in the lyric to “Ball ‘n’ Chain” and the contested tension that animates her voice. How might the intrusion upon the labor-process of articulation, upon the transmission of desire and affect that takes place between subjects via a linguistic and corporate infrastructure work in practice? To address the limits of subsumption it is helpful to recognize how the circulation and exchange of desire operate at what the late Lindon Barrett (1999b) has called “the point-of-articulation”; how our voices are modulated by social authority through hierarchies of power and privilege that include but are certainly not limited to whiteness, maleness, class status, technology, and the regulatory powers of the state. It might clarify the role of such alliances in the authorization of capital’s emotional foundation, the core substance of its value, which is arguably the production and configuration of desire. Some notes on emotional apartheid Placing Edouard Glissant’s notion of a diasporic poetics next to Barrett’s insistence on recognizing articulation as a location of value suggests that it is the performance of the black voice and the ritualistic display of the black body that offers the connective tissue, the unifying site of a particular type of exploitation that has become endemic under global capitalist relations (Barrett 1999a, 33; Glissant 2000). It is at this point of production where the process of subjectivization is and has historically been most vulnerable. The deep articulations and sonic nuances of the gendered black body provide a blueprint for the systemic violation of desire as a general tendency under late capitalism. It is the integrity of our desires that is precisely what is at stake during this time of widespread, endemic emotional crisis. We all confront the crisis of audibility and it is this crisis, more than our successful maneuvering of the apparatus through deft strategies of articulation, that can be said to unify us. Any claims to a zone of liberated black femininity, any claims to having orchestrated an escape from the domineering expectations (shall we say requirements?) of the repressive apparatus of articulation, must be met with apprehension and taken seriously. Focusing on expressive freedom may legitimize the presence and integrity of black voices within mainstream culture, it may provide evidence for an unjustifiable exclusion from the financial apparatus of sound − but it does not necessarily address the peculiar dilemma confronting our black voices in their effort to desire freely, openly, and radically. Instead of helping us locate the continuities of oppression, it may reinforce a repressed desire for assimilation into the corporate system and prolong the fantasy of social inclusion within a domineering

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commercial culture and the paradigms it attempts to establish for the circulation of affect. But if a zone of liberation does exist, I suspect that pinpointing the maneuvers away from the exploitive apparatus, not merely indicating the presence of the gendered black body within them, might become a vital measure of true expressive freedom and emotional autonomy. A concern with the detritus of affect, with the irresolutions, the castaway emotional currents and the historical baggage of the speech act, the confiscations of desire that lead to an accumulation of unrequited and unresolved sentiment, dictates a cross-examination of any utopian assessments of the black aesthetics’ contribution to commercial practices. It demands a suspicious posture towards the “play,” the reciprocity − the open, emancipatory, and ostensibly democratic field of negotiation – within this domain. It asks for us to focus upon the violations, the habitual inequalities that a more cynical view of discourse implies. What does it mean, in light of these questions, to place Big Mama Thornton at the forefront of the integration of the black vernacular? This question gains potency when we recognize that her role was not just about the articulation of blackness but the engendering of blackness, and the engendering of voice. When we understand Thornton’s body and voice as the site of production for emotional commodities, producing an exchangeable good through the transformation of affect into a product through the creation of style, it helps us understand the displacement and enclosure of desire more generally. To understand an intervention at the point of genre (i.e., the commercial category of rock ‘n roll) is to already miss the violation. One way to understand Thornton’s exploitation is to see it as an indication of the taming, the substitution and discharge, of radical black subjectivity: something that is part of a larger organization of radical feminist assertion and, in turn, essential in determining the quality and behavior of neoliberal commodity culture. The production of radical posture, as the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Hip Hop demonstrate all too tragically, has a broad social function within the confines of capitalist relations. Thornton’s life spanned the Great Depression, the industrial boom that came out of the Second World War, the phobic anti-Communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Revolution and the radical economic downsizing of the 1970s. She passed away, as I mentioned, in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan-Thatcher era. But the first thing to recognize if we are to consider the arc of articulation, the progression that moves through these changes, is also fairly obvious. She was born and learned to speak within the context of the brutally enforced regime of racial apartheid that continues to define post-emancipation black life. Although it was long claimed that Thornton was born in Montgomery, she was actually a country girl from the small town of Ariton, Alabama, an hour south of the city. She came into the world a minister’s daughter, in the pivotal year of 1926. There were many factors involved in ordering the production of voice-as-value in Alabama during these years. In addition to mass black disenfranchisement, it was a time when a loose ruling coalition between the Ku Klux Klan, white evangelicals, and prohibitionist advocates such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, held sway over the state’s political process. Advocating a low (no) tax, anti-Catholic, anti-Mexican, anti-Jewish, anti-Communist populist agenda under the banner of “one hundred percent Americanism,” it was, in other words, an alliance between the state and civil society eerily reminiscent of today’s right-wing populist agenda (Rogers et al. 1994, 438–439). The Alabama of the early 1930s mobilized the Left with the infamous Scottsboro Boy’s

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Case, in which nine black youths were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death row for allegedly raping two white women on a train; and it was home of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the 40-year study begun in 1932, when Thornton was just six years old, in which 600 black men were left infected with the deadly disease by the United States Public Health Service in order to track its long-term effects. Despite such realities, if we return to the conjecture laid out in the opening of this essay – that capitalist relations have managed to colonize the whole of social life – I want to argue that for Thornton this period cannot be said to mark one of absolute subsumption. Her crisis was subordination not subsumption. She is dominated, that much is clear, but the point I am making is that she produced her emotional product at the outset of the elaboration of a more general tendency towards subsumption within society as a whole. The crisis she faced was one of autonomy framed within a limited political and cultural spectrum that denied, marginalized, exploited, and this is crucial, ignored her. Thornton’s alienation and estrangement from the nation-state were real, her economic subordination undeniable, but socially and spatially there were still semi-autonomous zones available for the expression of black life. Universal questions about the nature of free will aside, there was still a line for her to cross between social and political empowerment; an “other side” to attain. One of the most significant factors in this regard, at least in terms of the tone, texture, emotional substance, and development of her sound, was that Thornton was nurtured, along with her six brothers and sisters, in one of the state’s nearly 2500 Baptist houses of worship. Her father was a minister and her mother was director of the church choir. It was within this emotional community that she began to play drums, blow the harmonica, and sing. As such, Thornton was a product of the same network of resistance that would ultimately play such a pivotal role in staging the sweeping resistance to black segregation.6 The Baptist Church offered something of a refuge for the production of black subjectivities, for the nurturing of voices that posed something like a radical alterity: a position distinct from the dominant sexual and political order of the time. We could say much, much more about the various enclosures placed upon black voices during the decade and a half that Thornton was living in Alabama. But let us consider just one example of how these adverse conditions can be understood as both comprising yet extending beyond questions of racial terror and the blatant injustices of public segregation. These restrictions were used to mediate emotional value at the point of articulation – that is, they worked as a form of economic and political biomediation, intruding upon the realm of subjectivity in a way that was both parasitical and exploitive. Let us consider the following example. In 1926, the year of Thornton’s birth, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the widely cited case of Wyatt v. Adair. It was one of a string of “Race-Restrictive Covenant Cases” – legal decisions pertaining to residential segregation – whose expressed purpose was to bypass constitutional restrictions on housing discrimination. These covenants were an explicit attempt to bring domestic coherence to the fundamental incoherence of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine. In their decision, the State Court ruled that Alabama’s white citizens, in this instance J. E. Adair, had the legal right to sue for personal damages incurred by non-consensual integration: that is, financial compensation for living within “immediate proximity” to the bodies who in sum comprised the state’s black community.7 The legal definition of a restricted covenant, as home owners and

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students of American apartheid know, pertains to contractual agreements, sub-clauses in real-estate transactions that bind an owner to a set of obligations designed to enhance and/or preserve property values. These typically indicate regulations on, say, the height of a dwelling, free access to adjoining private or public resources, or limitations upon an owner’s right to divide property into sub-plots for re-sale (see, for instance, Drake and Cayton 1945).8 By the late 1940s, 21 states − as far north as Michigan, as far east as New York and as far west as California − passed rulings affirming formal and informal restrictions on use or occupancy of private property between the races as constitutionally “valid and enforceable” (Pogue 1952, 288–290; CWY 1948, No 3., 306–314).9 But while the material impact of these codes is fairly easy to decipher, less clear and thus lacking in most analyses of restrictive covenants are how the spatial dynamics of the political economy intersect with the emotional economy – a realm of surplus value creation that has only gained in importance with the rise of the cultural economy under late capitalism. Challenges to race-specific restricted covenants rested, like the Plessy v. Ferguson case before them, upon interpretations of the 14th Amendment: which is to say, the terms governing citizenship, defining alien status, and the constitutional rights and liberties afforded the body politic. That such grievances persistently clogged the circuit-court system and even regularly worked their way up to the Supreme Court for adjudication underscores the inconclusiveness and ambivalences surrounding the decommoditization of black bodies in the wake of emancipation. What I think makes the Adair case, and restrictive covenants in general, so relevant to broader concerns about the production of voice, the determination of emotional value (and the inherent value of commodities more generally), the nature of subjectivity, and the dissemination of affect, is noting that the court awarded Adair back rent and moving expenses as well as direct financial compensation for the so-called “mental anguish” he and his family suffered as the result of living in a building with a black family who had leased an upstairs apartment and with whom he was forced to share a communal bathroom. Here is an open acknowledgement of an open secret: articulation is an exchange process, a laboring verb that is the nexus of the libidinal economy’s ability to produce and accumulate surplus value. Even when legally mandated and even under the most stringent and imaginative civil regulations, segregation did not stop the flow of desire across racial lines, whether this violation was expressed as allure or repulsion. But these enclosures, however permeable, insured that Thornton’s body was a contested zone where the friction between subjectivation and subjection, where the dance between self-creation and self-discipline, where the struggle between autonomy and dependency, was a potential blueprint for addressing larger questions about the variables of resistance, the integrity of sentiment, and the precarity of voice. In the case of Thornton, social relations mingled with the social space she traversed and as she matured in lock step with the political drive for integration, the potential ecstasy of affective solidarity, particularly when it came to crossing racial lines, was tempered by the reality that such moments were policed, economically appropriated, and redirected at the intersection of self and social inscription. Her body, in other words, was an agent and symbol of collective repression (stored value) as much as it was a marker of individual liberation (realized value). In effect, I am arguing that legal sanctions against racial commingling were transgressed and ultimately eliminated only to the extent that the cultural

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limits, the cultural barriers, of exploitation were overcome and abolished. The Adair case and others like it allow us to see that Thornton was immersed within a system of value production whose pivot was the accumulated, fungible excess of affects which marked – as the “covenant of affect” attests – human bonding as tentative, disposable, exploitive, and traumatic as well as potentially liberatory. Certainly, the relationship between financial loss and emotional trauma, particularly whose trauma is valued and how the violation of one’s emotional well-being is restituted, draws our attention to affect’s significant role in the biomediation of the money form as a symbolic representation of social value. It forces us to reconsider our definition of what is meant by labor power, by “economy,” and to highlight the ways in which various modes of production are as much about the “production of people and social relations” as they are material objects of commercial exchange. (For a recent extended discussion on this point see, Graeber 2007, 85–112). What I want to recognize right now is how the logic and practice of the restrictive covenant forces the acknowledgement that not only do affects and emotions circulate, but that they also comprise a formally and informally regulated system of value that takes place precisely at the point of articulation: a new frontier, if you will, for the post-industrial capitalist order. The color line was not, in sum, just an exclusion from the lines of power; it was also a system for governing the appropriation of labor power and value in its physical and emotional/affective expression. Du Boisian double consciousness, a form of Dissociative Identity Disorder, a psychosis induced by the system of racial hierarchy, was and is more complex than a mere confrontation with the unjust rules of spatial segregation would suggest. Let us remember that Du Bois’ moment of awakening in the Souls of Black Folk is triggered by contact, not by the pain of isolation or psychosis of solipsism (Dubois 1903/1999, 12). It was an act of refusal within the terrain of desire – the rejection of a childhood visiting card (a Valentine’s Day card we might presume) by a white girl at a New England elementary school – which shocks him into an awareness of his emotional subordination and the precarity of his words and voice. The rejection was not only about refusal; it was about the structure of articulation within civil society, about where and how black desire might fit into the social order. The power that the object of his childhood affections held over him was the ability to say: “Love me (or hate me) in this place, at this time, in this way.” When we think of assimilation in these terms (as the measured intensification of emotional exploitation) we begin to recognize the system for regulating the transmission of desire that has always been integral to the construction of race. After Brown vs Board of Education signaled the commencement of the modern Civil Rights Movement in 1954, a date which roughly coincides with the release of Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” cultural proximity to the black subject rapidly became a vaunted token of experiential authenticity for white Americans, immigrant settlers, and the corporate infrastructure of capital. Within the realm of the cultural economy, racial blackness did not shed the mark of degradation, but the mark of abjection became integral to the expression of a new proletariat national identity. The Adair case was a clear nod to the libidinal economy of race, of which sexual desire is only a limited part. It indicates that Thornton was born into more than just a set of unjust legal constraints governing her physical mobility. She was a subject decisively on the discursive margins whose value resided at the intersection of the “highly prized point of articulation in which one also views an (over)determined foreclosure of

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other possibilities of desire, phantasm, social production.” Again, drawing upon the process of “desiring production” put forth by Deleuze and Guattari that I hoped to illustrate in the example of “Ball ‘n’ Chain,” Barrett notes how “the individual subject is always both desired and desiring” and that “the problem for the interests of collectivity is rendering these two positions fully coincident” (Barrett 1999b, 306–307). This division between the “body and soul” was one of the foremost challenges of desegregation. This recognition has everything to do with the valuation and, more importantly, the liberation of desire. What I am most interested in here are the ways in which such territorial re-groundings of voice, the nomadic movement of the speech act or parole, might be thought of as propelled by an instance of colonial encounter, of economic violation, or, conversely, a successful statement about what Glissant calls “linguistic intransigence” or “vernacular anti-colonial resistance” (Glissant 2000, 15).10 In the commercialization of black voices we see a prototype for the organization of desire and the inoculation of capital to resistance under new, more fluid methods of affective value. The black voice epitomizes the process by which “forms of cultural exchange” are marked by the reterritorialization of “various forms of social stratification over time” and more specifically how they are facilitated at the level of emotional transmission (Monson 2007, 78). To return to the idea of the point-of-articulation as the site of such a violation, voice, the speech act, is a unique site of production that offers a port of entry and exit for the subjectivization process, what Bakhtin (1968) called the “permeable boundary” of discourse. In this regard Thornton’s work becomes an interesting standard by which to assess the internal tension between the “virtually invisible system and logic that might be called capitalism as culture and culture as capitalism” (Barrett 1999b). This “invisible system and logic,” operates through a distinction between the commoditization of effects (forms) and the commoditization of affects: those processes, impulses, and trigger mechanisms that mark an individual’s generation and reception of emotions, sentiments, and desires. In this regard, the manufacture of the scream says as much about how the social ear is aligned as it does the desperation or reactionary impulses of voice. We scream in the hopes of being heard, not only to resist injustice or decry alienation. When she left home at the age of 14 after the death of her parents to begin her musical career, contact with Thornton’s body was cause for legal action: an encounter that could, quite possibly, demand compensatory measures. Before recording a note of music she not only already had a market value, she already mediated market value. She not only had a voice, she was an essential source for the social reproduction of value. With this status, she confronted an affective economy in which, as Brian Massumi has observed, State and “capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically uninhabitable space of fear.” It is uninhabitable not because her own body, like that of the Other she comes into contact with, does not dwell in a state of fear and anxiety but because, for the racialized, gendered, sexualized black subject, this anxiety is designated as an imminent zone of “immobilization and exclusion” for the benefit of capital and its allied systems of social control (Massumi 1993, cited in Sexton 2008, 240–241).11 The perfect instrument Aside from the music she left behind there is very little surviving first-person testimony from Thornton herself. We do have a brief 15-minute interview recorded with Chris

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Strachwitz, founder of the Arhoolie Record label, made while she was on a European tour for the company in 1965. In this rare conversation she spends a good deal of time dwelling upon her geographic mobility. We hear a voice laced with a heavy Alabama dialect and an edge that sounds at least like it was earned through a life of hard living. But it is nonetheless clear and sturdy as she recounts with humor the details of her life’s journey from Montgomery as a teenager singing with Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue to following the tightly organized network of black communities and performance venues throughout the southern Black Belt known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. By the mid-1940s she had settled in Houston, at the time the cultural capital for black music in the southwest. The city was an urban point of concentration for black migrants making the transition from the cotton fields to the post-war industrial jobs along the Pacific coast. The only other surviving record of Thornton’s voice that I was able to find comes from 1971, when she conducted a brief five-minute interview while on a revival tour with Muddy Waters and Big Joe Turner. On it her voice is slurred and heavy from alcohol and she allows herself to express some resentment, albeit playfully, over the lack of respect she feels she had received from the music industry. When the interviewer asks her if she ever received anything from Elvis for his rendition of “Hound Dog,” Thornton replies that she never got a dime: “He refused to play with me when he first come out and got famous. They wanted a big thing called Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley … he refused. And I’m so glad I can tell the world about it.” The first of Thornton’s most famous emotional/ fiscal transmissions began in 1952, 15 years before she wrote and recorded “Ball ‘n’ Chain,” when she followed the migratory corridor up the west coast and stepped into a Los Angeles recording studio to lay down vocal tracks for “Hound Dog” under the auspices of two imposing figures in the development of what was already being called Rhythm & Blues: Don Robey and Johnny Otis. Together, Robey and Otis were the Jekyll and Hyde, the Good Cop/Bad Cop in the project of harvesting black voices. Each of these figures is fascinating in his own right, and each played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the mingling, and often colliding, affective/fiscal economies that make the recording session in Los Angeles so interesting. Otis is significant for his ability, as a Greek American who could pass as black, to negotiate the realm of affect at the point of articulation: to identify its lucrative currents, to harness and shape it into a commodifiable form and then package it for sale across racial lines (Otis 1968, 12; 1993, xv).12 On the surface at least, Otis and Thornton enjoyed a strong relationship. When she died in 1984, it was Otis, an ordained minister, who delivered the tearful eulogy at her funeral. For his part, Robey was an entrepreneur, a black American who brought to the table a ruthless reputation for strong-armed business practices. His reputation may have been largely due to the stigma of being black in a whitedominated industry, but he had risen out of Houston’s rugged 5th Ward to build a musical empire that eventually became one of the only black-owned labels, aside from Barry Gordy’s Motown, to survive the voracious corporate consolidations and takeovers of the small “indies” that defined the sound of Rhythm & Blues and Gospel music during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.13 The woman they called “Big Mama” was a perfect foil for Otis and Robey’s mission to capitalize on the nation’s rapidly evolving multicultural consumer base. During the mid- to late- 1940s, some of the most important figures of what was still called “Race

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Music” – including epic personalities such as Ruth Brown, Louis Jordon, Lionel Hampton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and T-Bone Walker – graced the stage of Robey’s high-end luxury club. Joining this stable of talent, Thornton inked an exclusive five-year contract with Robey’s label, Peacock Records, in 1951. Although she only scored one major hit with them, she stayed with Peacock until she was let go in 1957 even as Elvis was topping the charts with the song she had leant her emotional authority to. Released in March of 1953, Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” spent seven weeks on Billboard’s R&B charts, selling half a million copies. Within a year it would be recorded by seven other acts, all of them white Country musicians. I will not say much about what happened three years later when Elvis recorded the song. By now the story has been worn threadbare and at the end of the day, this is not the story I want to tell. Suffice it to say that the first wave of sales from Elvis’ version alone sold nearly 4 million copies and irrevocably transformed the affective boundaries of the nation. Robey paid Thornton US$500 for the session. She swore that she never saw another cent from it until the day she died. Enough said. When she first began to encounter the capitalist infrastructure of sound, the policies of race-restrictive covenants were officially being transformed into state policy through redlining. With the Truman administration’s Housing Act of 1949 the expansion of cities morphed into white suburban enclaves with the nation’s black poor concentrated into towering public housing units under the guise of “urban renewal,” or, more accurately, what James Baldwin famously described as “negro removal” (Baldwin, Standley, and Pratt 1989, 42). These spatial changes, adjustments in the lived dynamics of racial apartheid, were reflected in the sonic economy. Thornton’s commercial downfall, really the declining economic need for her embodied affects, corresponded, in almost direct proportion, to the rise of Elvis and the genre of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The year of “Hound Dog”’s release, 1957, was also the year when Little Richard, whom many claim is most responsible for the feel of the genre, bowed out of the public eye after scoring a string of consecutive hits. What had been spearheaded by Little Richard’s ambiguous sexual identity and Thornton’s “robust, powerful voice” and gender defiance culminated in the gyrations of a white male pelvis (See, http://encyclopediaofalabama.org accessed March 11, 2014). At any rate, the songs Thornton released under Robey were, at best, strained, contrived and aimed for a novelty market. They bore titles such as “I Smell a Rat,” “Just Like a Dog,” and “Tarzan and the Dignified Monkey” which, while certainly full of double entendre and sartorial power, did nothing to showcase the actual emotional depth she exhibited when set free of these constraints. Most would agree that a more full measure of Thornton’s talents can be found on her later recordings for Arhoolie and a string of almost a dozen labels in the 1960s and early to mid-1970s. Attempting to force her into being the Mammy figure she so brazenly demolished, Robey and Otis were apparently unable or unwilling to help Thornton challenge the recording industry as a radical emotional trailblazer. Treated with all of the grace of a laboratory rat, Thornton’s experience in the recording studio amounted to a series of surgical interventions that not only violated her own identity as a racialized subject, but might be compared to a cultural, historical amputation at the level of affect. The substitutions, exchanges, and fluid relations that comprise what I am encouraging us to think of as “articulation-as-value” are, to lean once again upon Barrett’s trailblazing work, inaugurated “by way of a violent agency” by acts of dispossession, “an impeachment

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of the Other, a wresting of autonomy from the Other, a vanquishing of danger implicit in the Other − in short, the willful expenditure of the Other in an imposing production of the self” (Barrett 1992, 77–79). Such a conception demands a bi-focal critical lens, what Barrett describes in Du Boisian terms as “seeing double” in order to first recognize then disentangle the production of excess and violence at the core of an individual commodities value but also the reproducible logic governing the system of value accumulation more generally. The trick here is that while the subordination of black subjectivity may lie at the historical core of this process, it could no longer be contained or confined within these boundaries. As Barrett notes:

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The release of African-Americans from the muteness and illegality of chattel slavery marks the emergent visibility of an excessive and residual Otherness long essential to the normative enterprise and the dominant orders of the American landscape. (1992, 79).

The production of value is not only the violent disruption of agency at the point of articulation, but the very foundation of a broader system of exchange and distribution. To disrupt and resist such mutating processes at the point of articulation is a deeply political maneuver. Thornton’s violation is not so much about the loss of financial gain from the commodity she invested herself in, but the redirection of voice that occurred in the Los Angeles studio itself. (This can be said for all the years she was under contract to Robey.) As I have mentioned, aside from her recordings, it is extremely hard to find the voice of Willie Mae Thornton anywhere. It is not, however, very difficult to find the voices of those talking about her, describing her, or classifying her. In fact, one of the themes that unifies all the actors who came into contact with Thornton is the way they use her name and legacy as a means to lay claims to their own emotional integrity, as if being an adjunct to her presence lends their narratives of self-construction meaning, authority, and even economic legitimacy. Without exception, almost all will infer that their encounter with Thornton places them on an inside track, one that makes their right to commoditization not only valid but valorized in some unique way. Virtually every biographical snippet of Don Robey’s life is accompanied by the name of Willie Mae Thornton. It is clear from the way she was discarded, however, that aside from her generative capacities Robey cared little about the intrinsic value of the emotional laborer he appropriated in the production of his commodities. In terms of the role Otis and Robey played in the exchange that took place within the Los Angeles recording studio in 1952, I see their contributions as relating more to the technological and fiscal apparatus of sound than the transaction of desire at the point of articulation during the session itself. Robey provided the capital, supplied the factory, and arranged for the product’s distribution and sale. Otis’s role was more complex in that he orchestrated, or engineered, the creative dynamics of the session. But in order to interpret the intimate economy he was overseeing, the micro-politics of capturing the moment of desire’s actual transmission, it might be helpful to turn our attention to two other crucial figures who were involved in the recording session that day and who, in fact, have made substantial claims to its myth of origins. This second tag team I am referring to was the legendary songwriting duo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who “wrote” the lyrics for “Hound Dog” as well as literally dozens of crossover hits too numerous to mention.

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Their compositions helped define the era known as Rhythm & Blues. Like Johnny Otis, Leiber and Stoller have made little effort to conceal their pride in the fact that their success and reputation rested on their ability to transcribe the emotive structures of black culture. “Almost all of our audiences thought we were black” says Leiber, “[a]nd when we took some of our music to a performer, to show it to him for approval or to teach him how to sing it, they were absolutely amazed” (“Leiber and Stoller: The Bluerailroad Interview,” conducted by Paul Zollo, http://bluerailroad.wordpress.com/leiber-stoller-thebluerailroad-interview/ [last accessed December 29, 2014], emphasis added). At the time of the “Hound Dog” sessions they were only 19 years old, recent high-school graduates who had borrowed money from their parents to go into business. As it was for Don Robey, the song was one of their first major hits, helping to launch their careers as more than just interpreters of black sonic impulses but also their very construction. When thinking about “Hound Dog” one thing we are able to diagnose about the assembly of this commodity is that it relied on a privileged access, a proximity, to Thornton at the direct point of articulation, at the level of the utterance where affect is transformed into effect. According to their own version of events, we can see the impact of this transmission and we begin to decipher the initial moments of the imposition of the restricted emotional covenant upon their subject. Stoller and Leiber tell us that they came up with the lyrics and basic melody after having seen and heard Thornton at a rehearsal session arranged by Otis. Stoller recounts the emotional impact of the moment this way: “When Jerry and I arrived and heard her start to sing, we looked at each other in amazement. In her combat boots and oversized overalls, she was formidable and a bit frightening. Her voice was a force of nature. Big Mama was absolutely magnificent” (Lieber, Stoller, and Ritz 2009, 61–66, emphasis added). Leiber describes his first encounter with Thornton using very similar language but with even more vividness. His reflections point directly to the trauma and “mental anguish” that was the very basis for the disarticulation of subjectivity that inaugurated Thornton’s entrance into the world as a youth. It indicates the sustained legacy of what occurred some 26 years earlier in the Wyatt v. Adair ruling; only now, we have a more direct indication of the appropriation of affective value. “There was something monstrous about Big Mama,” Leiber tells us, “[b]ut I wasn’t looking at her that way. I saw Big Mama as the perfect instrument for just the kind of deadly blues that Mike and I relished. We went over and heard her and said, ‘Whoa!’ We ran over to my house in my car, wrote the song, and came back” (Lieber, Stoller, and Ritz 2009, 63, emphasis added). The “perfect instrument” indeed. Thornton becomes the apparatus for the realization of something that Leiber and his partner, bound together in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a “homosocial” covenant of desire, already crave and relish (Sedgwick 1985, 25).14 Thornton becomes an extension of their subjectivity, a technology for an essentially adolescent yearning with far larger social consequences: the severing of desire helps nourish their own emergence into white patriarchal subjects. There is something perverse, is there not, about two teenage boys calling a grown black woman “Big Mama” within the context of the early 1950s? There is something even more degenerative and ominous about their not recognizing this fact some 40 years later when they recounted the tale. The invocation of creative maternity draws our attention to the relationship between the appropriation of affect and the genesis of style: the birth of genre and the designation of

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genius that allows private citizens to make claims on value. For Thornton, the expropriation can be understood as something akin to a natal alienation, a removal from something she has given birth to with an act of labor. Stoller’s account of the Los Angeles (lost angel in terms of the surgical dispossession of affect) session makes it clear how the shock and awe of emotional encounter quickly turned into an act of privatization. In describing the act of production it is portrayed as one of singular agency, allowing him to make immediate claims upon the affective transmission he participated in. After running back to Stoller’s house (who was “still living with his parents”) and writing the song in a matter of minutes, they brought the song back to the studio and sat down with Thornton to review their work. “Mama grabbed the lyric sheet out of my hands. Then she began to croon – not belt, mind you, but croon. ‘Big Mama,’ I said with all the delicate charm at my command, ‘that ain’t the way it goes’” (Lieber, Stoller, and Ritz 2009, 69). Delicacy vs. Monstrosity; the lightning bolt of creativity vs. a voice so magnificent it is a “force of nature.” It is not hard to see how the most elementary forms of colonial ideology are enacted at the moment of creative dispossession. The years between 1952 and 1967, dates that mark the actual recording of “Hound Dog” and “Ball ‘n’ Chain,” signaled a remapping of affect’s political potential: a time when its transmission across the racial divide appeared to shimmer precisely because it was thought to mirror a subversive capacity to transform the lines between oppression, repression, and freedom. “Soul” was a concept turned product forged, as white and black theorists alike would affirm, “in the furnace of black American music” and constituted through the “simultaneity of economic and musical evolution” (Attali 1985, 10). While the economic and musical may have “evolved” in tandem, as a consequence of its position as an agent in the steady, unrelenting commoditization of sound, the legacy of black music is implicated in a larger, society-wide trend of emotive dissipation. This presents something of a challenge for those accustomed to exalting the black vernacular. If black culture was at the expressive core of a revolution in sound and yet black bodies were either systematically denied entrance into its economic benefits – or, as is the case with Thornton, admitted upon a restricted basis − just what, aside from style, was being appropriated and consumed in this collective moment of aesthetic creation? Today we look out upon a corporate landscape in which the flexibility of capital, the colonization of social space and the reordering of our voices within a maze of industrial procedures present an even more formidable challenge than it did in the past, one that renders narrow appeals to racial self-determination difficult to even conceive as a viable avenue of escape. Within this context, the question of genre and style become a distraction to the anxieties produced by structural efforts to contain articulation. To move beyond genre is to recognize the uniformity of the diverse disciplinary procedures that are brought to bear on black voices, and, increasingly, all voices of whatever stripe. When we consider the contest at the point of articulation that we now face, nuances of genre-as-value begin to be rendered moot. Understanding how we got “here” from “there” entails more than a simple re-mapping of the corporate genealogy: it begs us to first recognize the disturbing fact that our voices, and the affects they contain, have become the essential vehicle for commoditization because they traverse a road that is paved in advance. These sets of covenants, which gave rise to the economic, cultural, and political efficacy of emotion, dissolve into a troubling incoherence, an ominous disillusionment when they

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encounter the 1970s. There are no shortages of explanations for this waning of affect: the rise of identity politics and black power, the consolidation of corporate control over the music and radio industries, the evisceration of black urban communities through government neglect and the increasingly desperate crisis confronting predatory capitalism which leads it to hunt for new forms of surplus value, encroaching more and more upon the sovereignty and autonomy of human beings. If there is a crisis of articulation, and I believe that there is and has been for some time, certainly it is matched by a corresponding crisis in the sovereignty of capital, in the ideological pillars of liberal-humanism, and in the ability of power to police the geography of subversive desires. For my part, I have never been convinced that our voices, be they a whisper or a cry, explicitly subversive or otherwise, are over-determined by a reactionary impulse. If there is an “infinite regress … at the heart of identitarian thought” – something akin to a child’s relentless “why?” – I suspect it derives from an irresolution of identity whose trademark is a reluctance, not an inability, to speak aloud, to confess, a range of complicities with regimes of terror, genocide, sexualized violence, and torture (Holloway 2002, 106). Infinite regress, another way of understanding the negative dialectic, is not the inability of the victims to articulate the burdens of such unspeakable, untranslatable traumas. It is not the duty of the oppressed to give cohesion to what Saidiya Hartman calls the “world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror” (Hartman 1997, 3). The resonance of Afro-pessimism as a critical trope and the recent (relatively speaking) focus on the heliocentricity of “anti-blackness” to the cosmos of modernity’s episteme and ontology, is not first and foremost the result of an immobile melancholy towards our unfulfilled creative potential or some tragically restricted ontology of blackness. Rather it is a political response, an objection to the ways our suffering is made central to and thus complicit in a system of domination that continues to disfigure the face of modernity.

Acknowledgments I would be remiss if I did not express my utmost appreciation to the folks at Café l’Artère in Montreal for their kindness and radical energy over the course of writing this essay. The same goes for all of the musicians, some hauntingly beautiful, who performed on the open mic at Le Dépanneur Café. Merci beaucoup!

Note on contributor Dalton Anthony Jones is Assistant Professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.

Notes 1. 2.

Ball and Chain. Written by Willie Mae Thornton. Used by permission of Bro ‘N Sis Music, Inc., and Bronx Flash Music, Inc. Curtis Mayfield, “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” from the album Curtis, Curtom Records, 1970.

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 3. 4. 5.

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Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism is a superb study of how the recognition of colonialism’s human and territorial legacies intersect with ongoing indigenous struggles for selfdetermination which are, in turn, fundamental to understanding the international border crisis. I am referring most immediately to the prolific work on Anti-blackness and Afro-pessimism produced in the past decade and a half, but the black critique of the Western episteme is as old as the apparatus of Eurocentrism itself. Monson, in particular, provides an in-depth look at the cross-pollination of jazz during the 1950s and 1960s. At this point linguistic and musical exchange between cultures is an accepted fact and nobody in their right mind would deny that the black aesthetic has offered significant stylistic contributions to the development and character of white musical styles from bluegrass to rock ‘n’ roll. The same, of course, can be said about the impact of European techniques upon the production of black sound. Most famously, of course, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, which saw the entrance of such key figures as Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage – and again some 10 years later with the bloody showdowns between the Selma to Montgomery Freedom Marchers who were rallying for black voting rights, and the state of Alabama’s White Citizen’s Council, Ku Klux Klan, and a Democratic Party led by Governor George Wallace. Wyatt v. Adair emerged out of a conflict in which J. E. Adair, a white tenant, sued his landlord for damages when the upper floor of the apartment complex he lived in with his wife and teenage child was rented to a black family. Adair was awarded back rent, moving expenses, and financial compensation for his family’s emotional suffering. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s groundbreaking study of Chicago’s black community during the 1920s and 1930s, Black Metropolis, repeatedly point to these codes as key to the economic and political elaboration of white supremacy. They systematically illustrate how Chicago’s black newspapers and civic leaders worked in unison to “bitterly attack” and “smash” the restrictive covenants that “created an overcrowded Black Belt,” a virtual “iron ring” around black communities that reduced “most negro families to intolerable, unsanitary conditions” and abject poverty (201). “The courts of Alabama, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have held restraints on use or occupancy valid and enforceable. The West Virginia court has indicated by way of dicta that a similar result would be reached in that state. The courts in Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and the District of Columbia have found restraints on alienation as contained in race restrictive covenants to be valid.” For Glissant, this colonial violation would begin, quite simply, with the fact that Thornton is speaking in English: her voice hidden, or more accurately constrained within her language and thus structurally framed and coerced by it. In truth, however, it is territorially English only in suffix, not in prefix. Resisting and transgressing these confines is the de-colonial moment of language of which Thornton was clearly a master technician. Writing about sound is, perhaps, as futile as screaming against capitalist exploitation. If the reader hasn’t done so, I suggest putting down this essay immediately and picking up some of Big Mama Thornton’s recordings, particularly her post-Peacock Records work with the Arhoolie, Mercury, and Vanguard record labels. I take this passage from a particular reading of Massumi offered by Jared Sexton who places it in relation to the trope of the “imperiled white woman vulnerable to sexual violence.” Otis not only lived in Watts, but participated in the upheavals that rocked the community in 1965 and, later again, in 1993 when the streets of Los Angeles erupted in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. He wrote eloquently in his two published autobiographies about what he felt were the underlying causes of each of these conflicts, pointing his finger directly at the emotional and fiscal economies of race as the chief culprit for the nation’s problems: “What we have in America is predatory capitalism,” he wrote. “We are told we live under a free enterprise system

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D.A. Jones but, not so. We may feel good about calling it free enterprise but Conspiracy of the Rich and Greedy is a more accurate description. The average white American is a victim of predatory capitalism’s conspiracy too, but people of color have an extra demon to cope with in racism” (Otis 1993, xv). The stable of artists who either made their name with or recorded a significant body of material for Peacock and later Duke/Peacock Records attests to Robey’s central importance to the commercial assimilation of black music in the second half of the twentieth century. To list a few of the major names: Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Little Richard, Memphis Slim, Betty Carter, Buddy Ace, Johnny Ace, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Clarence ’Gatemouth’ Brown, Junior Parker, O.V. Wright, Fenton Robinson, Otis Rush as well as gospel acts such as The Dixie Hummingbirds, The Mighty Clouds Of Joy, The Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi, Reverend Cleophus Robinson, and The Sensational Nightingales. To cite Sedgwick at more length on this topic: “[i]n any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.”

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