Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon

9. Sampling the Sonics of Sex (Funk) in Paul Beatty’s Slumberland

nine sampLing the soniCs of sex (funk) in pauL beatty’s SLUMBERLAND L. H. Stallings For the nigger, it niggereth everyday. —Charles Schwa afro-german identity emerged as a relational concept where the construction of race/blackness and identity are constituted through a sense of community and relation both to those positioned in similar ways, as well as to the discourses and categories of racial difference and identity through which this process of positioning is enacted. Black german identity is thus the product and process of importing individual, social, and cultural meanings to blackness as a strategic form of self-definition and identification. —Tina Campt Blackness. even as historians and critics have attempted to articulate the historical beginning of blackness, as well as the modernity of it, who can say when or where this phenomenon of blackness, a force akin to the start of a world religion rather than the beginning of a racial identity , will end. Though in vastly different contexts, scholar tina campt and charles schwa—a minor but important character from paul Beatty ’s novel Slumberland—provide insights as to how american and german black identity might be conceptualized, while also privileging the experience of being black over the debates that race is a false social construct . The question as to whether there is, in fact, an end to blackness is one of the major considerations of this essay, which examines how con189 190 · L. H. Sta llings temporary african american literary and cultural theories have grappled with and continue to grapple with this question. Through a close reading of paul Beatty’s Slumberland, and through an engagement with scholars ’ focus on periodizing african american literary and cultural traditions , i explore how black literary production and blackness itself resists moves to mark it. i suggest that critics must form new conceptualizations of time and space in order to change the trajectory of future discourses about race and racial identity. standard, western, or straight time may be useful for charting the representations or performances of blackness, but they have ofen failed to fully delineate the experience of being black. in Slumberland, Beatty proposes that rhythmless constructs of time can never represent indeterminate blackness. Further, as he diagrams this blackness as the funkiest break beat1 in the world, his novel implores people of the african Diaspora to form complex identities that elide restrictions of time and space imposed on black bodies and communities by tradition, nation, and modernity. Slumberland tells the story of Ferguson W. sowell aka DJ Darky, a DJ, jukebox sommelier, and porn musical scorer/composer. as a result of having a “phonographic memory,” DJ Darky’s livelihood and passion in life is his talent for reproducing sounds and creating sick beats. afer receiving a video of a man having sex with a chicken accompanied by a musical masterpiece composed by an unnamed musician, DJ Darky decides that he knows who composed the porn score, a jazz musician by the name of charles schwa. he resolves himself to find “the schwa” and have him bless his own magnificent beat. DJ Darky’s quest takes him out of the united states and to Berlin where he works as a jukebox sommelier at slumberland Bar, a cruising utopia for persons wanting to engage in interracial sex. symbolically, though, DJ Darky’s search for the schwa ends up being a mission to explain the value of indeterminate blackness, made indeterminate by one’s own individual experience and relationship to blackness, and its intersectionality with a collective identity. With Slumberland Beatty updates african american expatriate fiction that typically represented a black american’s journey to resolve the conflict between blackness as it intersects with american identity and citizenship by moving to a purportedly more progressive country. Works such as nella larsen’s Quicksand or John a. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Sonics of Sex (Funk) in Paul Beatt y’s Slumber la nd · 191 Am inevitably revealed that the process of attempting to resolve those conflicts could then produce a different sense of alienation even more difficult to overcome. Beatty’s revision stems from his protagonist’s interactions withandcommentariesonotheru.s.expatriates, Black germans, and east germans. in Slumberland, the misnomer of “the” black experience is contested by the way Beatty refuses to situate blackness as bound to the u.s. or connected to uncontested concepts of time. Beatty’s novel experiments with fictionalizing the global and diasporic...