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  • Refraining, Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People
  • Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio)

Repetition and difference—those poststructuralist buzzwords—are certainly no strangers to African-American cultural and political traditions. From the slave narrative to the postmodernism of Toni Morrison and Clarence Major; from The Souls of Black Folk to The Signifying Monkey; from what Amiri Baraka calls the “willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of bebop” (1963, 181–82) to rap; from Prince Hall to Malcom X, African-American traditions have deployed “repetition with a difference” as a key concept in maintaining a vibrant culture on the margins of the American mainstream. Certainly there is a kind of repetition of standard Western forms in, for example, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or in the scholarly anthropological prose of W.E.B. DuBois, but it is precisely the difference—the displacement, the question posed from within—that renders a singularity or irreducibility to African-American traditions. 1

Such repetitions cannot simply be conflated with received notions of imitation or representation. As Gilles Deleuze notes in Difference and Repetition, there are perhaps two kinds of repetition: the static, “reterritorializing” of repetition-as-representation; and the dynamic, “deterritorializing” of repetition with a difference. As Deleuze writes, “The first repetition is repetition of the Same, explained by identity of the concept or representation; the second includes difference, and [End Page 83] includes itself in the alterity of the Idea, in the heterogeneity of an ‘a-presentation” (1994, 25). So when Charlie Parker covers “White Christmas,” for example, what you get is not so much a re-presentation of Irving Berlin’s vacuous classic, but what Deleuze calls an “a-presentation”: a presentation that marks and “includes difference” rather than effacing it. This “second” repetition—repetition with a difference—inhabits a traditional form in order to further open the “Idea” to “alterity” and “heterogeneity.” 2 In Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s words, such a repetition inhabits an accepted form “in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it” (1987, 349).

However, just as African-American culture cannot simply be thought of as the “opposite” of a Euro-American tradition, for Deleuze and Guattari such a “deterritorializing” repetition with a difference does not exist in binary opposition to a “territorializing” representation or imitation. In fact, according to Deleuze, reducing the productive potential of repetition to a binary skeleton has gone a long way toward “confusing the concept of difference with a merely conceptual difference, in remaining content to inscribe difference in the concept in general” (Deleuze 1994, 27). In other words, when difference is thematized as a “concept in general,” it loses its “deterritorializing” power of becoming. When difference becomes a theme—merely to be found, pointed out, located—it loses its critical force to change or disrupt, to become-other. 3

Likewise, when we take difference and repetition to be conceptual themes, we mirror the mistake that Baraka argues mainstream critics have consistently made in the face of African-American culture. In Blues People, which Bruce Tucker has called “the founding document of contemporary cultural studies in America” (v), Baraka argues that the “assimilation” of African-American music has demanded the imposition onto black culture of a narrowing, reterritorialized “parochialism” (1963, 185). In mainline culture’s [End Page 84] appropriation of the blues tradition, a verb is made into a noun (1963, 212). As Nathaniel Mackey elaborates, Baraka’s

“From verb to noun” means the erasure of black inventiveness . . . . On the aesthetic level, a less dynamic, less improvisitory, less blues-inflected music and, on the political level, a containment of the economic and social advantages that might accrue to black artistic innovation. The domain of action and the ability to act suggested by verb is closed off by the hypostasis, paralysis, and arrest suggested by noun.

(266)

To imbricate Mackey’s Barakan vocabulary with Deleuze’s, perhaps we could say that the deterritorializing, verb-al quality of African-American culture is consistently reterritorialized (noun-ed, as it were), and that this movement from verb to noun is precisely a strategy of cultural and political “containment.” So it’s not just that a verb is mistaken for...