6.2: Key Theorists, Movements, and Principles

What is Culture

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”- Frantz Fanon^[2]

Deciphering the codices of culture can be a daunting task for the uninitiated. Culture is a manifestation of numerous signifiers that denote a communal understanding. For instance, a specific combination of articles of clothing can signify the wearer’s religious, ethnic, or even organizational affiliation. These codices are entrenched in all facets of society, binding individuals into a larger common collective. These complexities hinge on mutual understanding and interpretation of customs. For example, an individual wearing a hat bearing a sports logo may signal that they are a fan or denote a connection to the same city/region as the team. Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall states, "culture is about shared meanings.”^[3] These shared meanings create a dialogue representing shared heritage, ideologies, or other possible connections. Beyond conceptualizing culture, its physical representation is constantly displayed through the prime example of artistic expression. Culture is characteristically linked to the arts, representing humanity’s highest intellectual achievements.

The hierarchy and presumption of what or who is cultured tends to be tethered to Eurocentric hegemonic notions of knowledge. To dismantle these hierarchical assumptions of culture, we must strip down the definition of its fundamental reality. We must ask ourselves, what does culture do? Is culture more than famous paintings hanging in climate-controlled mausoleums, or is it a cosmic energy perpetually in revolution? Culture is more than physical creations; it is a development or movement of ideals and customs. Hall implies that culture is dialectical when he explains that:

Culture, it is argued, is not so much a set of things- novels and paintings or TV programs and comics- as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings- the ‘giving and taking of meaning’- between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other.^[4]

Through dialogue exchanges, individuals can develop a greater familiarity with their identity while constructing boundless communities. However, it should be noted that culture and identity never stagnate; instead, they are involved in an endless cycle of negotiation. This lends itself to the fluidity of cultural identity.

The roots and routes of colonization, commerce, and migration impact cultural identity development. Societal shifts in geopolitics, especially during the colonial period, scattered new fauna, flora, and practices beyond the Atlantic. The mixing of these alternative ways of being creates a space of hybridization where cultural identity is reformulated, renewed, and reaffirmed. These effects can be seen in the children of the Black Diaspora. Their cultural practices amalgamate Afrikan epistemology while adapting to life in diverse new soils. Hall writes that “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories…but, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.”^[5] One of the histories that drastically shaped the black experience within the United States is the colonial trauma inflicted upon the body and psyche of enslaved Afrikans. The forced migration and the deliberate attempt to strip enslaved Afrikans of their identity created an epistemological break where cultural practices were recodified to subvert their captors' authority.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Afrikan Diaspora. (PDM; Darryl Leja and NHGRI via Flickr)

The resistance towards forced assimilation took many forms for enslaved Afrikans throughout the Americas. In some cases, the Catholic saints were recodified by enslaved Afrikans to maintain their religiosity and traditions that the European captors so viciously attempted to strip away by either the waters of Christian baptism or in the wake of the Atlantic saltwater. Albert Raboteau, an American Scholar of Afrikan and African-American Religions, postulates that the thriving remembrance of the Afrikan deities and customs on the American Shores can be attributed to adaptability by writing:

One of the most durable and adaptable constituents of the slave's culture, linking African past with American present, was his religion. It is important to realize, however, that in the Americas the religions of Africa have not been merely preserved as static "Africanisms" or as archaic "retentions." The fact is that they have continued to develop as living traditions putting down new roots in new soil, bearing new fruit as unique hybrids of American origin. African styles of worship, forms of ritual, systems of belief, and fundamental perspectives have remained vital on this side of the Atlantic, not because they were preserved in a "pure" orthodoxy but because they were transformed.^[6]

Adaptability becomes an integral technique that allows Afrikan religiosity and traditions to thrive in the most inhospitable environments, such as chattel slavery. Hidden in the practice of Christianity were hymns of freedom, which allowed the enslaved to pass encrypted messages or warnings without alarming their captors of planned escape or uprising. Songs like “Wade in the Water” were considered warning calls along the underground railroad to inform runways to hide in the water to mask their scent from the hounds used by “slave catchers.” These religious spirituals shepherd numerous Black lives away from the atrocities of human bondage. Generations later, these same spirituals that carried souls toward freedom became the rallying cry for the civil rights movement, which called for the dismantling of the oppressive regime known as Jim Crow and campaigning for fundamental human rights.

Musicality is a central theme where adaptability and improvisation grant practitioners a space to navigate and push beyond the limitations of the current known reality. Through music, cultural heritage is often reaffirmed and utilized to create dialectical avenues of freedom. In addition, music carries a sonic genealogy that enables its listeners to experience the polyrhythmic patterns found in West Afrikan drumming, which has become the backbone of popular music. In the following sections, we will explore how music and fashion are used as tools of liberation in both the physical and theoretical realms. By paying homage to the sonic revolution of Black popular music, you will be introduced to various theories and key figures such as W.E.B Du Bois, Paul Gilroy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, Cedric Robinson, and Malcolm X. In addition, topics such as Black respectability and the Black radical tradition will be analyzed for their efforts in the fight towards civil rights and equality. The civil rights movement is symbiotically attached to the arts in many respects. Both entities engage in a utopian conversation of fugitivity, futurity, and world-building that allows the “undercommons” to survive and thrive.^[7]

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Endnotes

[2] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 27.

[3]Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon. Representation (London: Sage Publications, 2013), xvii.

[4] Hall, Evans, Nixon. Representation, xviii-xix.

[5] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 260.

[6] Albert J Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4.

[7]Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and Jack Halberstam. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 31.