Transcendence through Aesthetic Experience: Divining a Common Wellspring under Conflicting Caribbean and African American Religious Value Systems

This essay concerns how transcendence through aesthetic experience might serve as a common theme for organizing knowledge about expressive behaviors in the African diaspora. By transcendence, I mean a change in a person’s physiological or psychological state that engenders an awareness or sensation of going beyond one’s usual experience of time, place, or being. In 2002, Gerard Béhague discussed the problems and potential solutions of conceptualizing a “unified African diaspora” that includes both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the Americas. On the one hand, he concluded that “one should recognize that there can hardly be such a thing as a unified African diaspora throughout the Western Hemisphere for the simple fact that the ethnohistorical experiences of the Afro-American communities of the hemisphere differed widely” (9). But, as a student of Professor Béhague’s since 1991, I have observed that although he was relentlessly critical of all received wisdom, he always offered a constructive way through the rubble of shattered orthodoxy. With regard to the African diaspora, then, Béhague proposed a way forward by urging scholars to focus their empiric, ethnographic investigations upon the processes of music making and its meanings as a way of illuminating the relevant similarities and differences between diasporic traditions (9).

I take Béhague’s general proposition as my own starting point for this essay. To his priorities of researching processes and meanings, I also add my own predominant concern with investigating values—aesthetic, religious, or moral. In the following pages, I will explain my own attempt at a holistic view of musical meaning and the role of music in engendering transcendent experience, and the vital and ubiquitous role of transcendence in human life and society. I question here whether the lens through which we view the meanings of music (among other modes of human communication) affects our ability to discover common values and processes underlying different African diasporic cultural traditions. And if so, then perhaps a different focus might help us discover which common values unite even the most antagonistic religious systems within the diaspora, such as what I witnessed between Haitian Vodou practitioners and Haitian Protestants in the Northern Department of Haiti, or between the theologically divergent worship traditions of Haitian Vodou singing and black gospel singing in Austin, Texas. My hope is to better explain similarities and differences between African diaspora cultures with divergent ethnohistories, as well as to better account for fluid membership exchanges between apparently antagonistic cultural domains within a population, such as between Vodou and Protestantism in Haiti, or between even blues, soul, or hip hop and gospel in the United States. My question is whether or not conceptualizing a continuum of human expression as ranging between the predominant (but never mutually exclusive) functions of transcendence, on the one hand, and communication, on the other, can free us to see similar values underlying a multitude of expressive behaviors that are often purported to lie in opposition to one another.

Figure 1 derives from my belief that expressive behaviors—whether, music, speech, movement, dance, or plastic or visual arts—can function as transcendence and communication to varying degrees. According to this model, any human action undertaken with (or viewed for) aesthetic intent strives for transcendence. Although expressive behaviors often achieve or are directed toward one function more so than to the other, the continuum represents an overlapping of transcendence and communication—not a Cartesian dualism between them—since one function always works to some degree in tandem with the other. Moreover, expressive behaviors from both sides of the continuum—even very stylized and aesthetically directed behaviors—accomplish important work in the social world: they persuade, inspire, comfort, provide escape, create community, foster a sense of well-being, instill concepts of morality, and motivate commitment to community. At the same time, any working musician can tell you that even music can be perfunctory, serving social function without intent to inspire.

Continuums are useful tools for organizing knowledge about comparable phenomena. And yet many of the conceptual continuums that I inherited for thinking...