Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (review)

Different Drummers presents a compelling interdisciplinary exploration of rhythm and sound in the circum-Caribbean. This ambitious inquiry into issues of race and racism, class and culture, politics and aesthetics thoroughly considers the appreciation and even mobilization of rhythm in a variety of New World contexts. Analysing rhythm's shaping influence on transatlantic discourses of racial hierarchy and social value, Munro insists that 'European' and 'African' 'are not in themselves stable, fixed categories, and their encounter in the New World rendered them ever more unstable and unreliable' (p. 15). Tracing the 'anti-rhythmic impulse' (p. 9) that travelled from Europe to the Americas, only becoming exclusively directed at Africans with the growth of the slave trade, Munro emphasizes the commonalities that originally existed between the Afro- and the Euro- before being disavowed 'in the tensions and paradoxes of the Enlightenment era' (p. 11). Munro's first chapter works to undo the assumption that 'the repression and denigration of rhythm, music, and dance in the New World' (p. 21) was a strictly dualistic phenomenon. In readings of both literary and historical sources, Munro evokes the persistent hierarchy that pitted elite against popular culture in post-revolutionary Haiti. He posits that successive political leaders — not unlike their colonial French predecessors — expressed a deep mistrust and misunderstanding of the rhythmic Haitian peasant, revealing a 'longstanding racist view of black musical practice' (p. 27) that, arguably, persists into the present moment. In Chapter 2 Munro considers the suppression of drum-based black popular music by British authorities in colonial Trinidad in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as 'a classic case of colonial fear and repression of rhythm' (p. 78). He rereads the history of Carnival in light of State efforts to contain perceived threats to its classist sociopolitical and moral order. Chapter 3 addresses literary expressions of rhythm by writers in, primarily, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Munro looks at the synonymy of black rhythm and consciousness in the writings of Negritude poets Léon-Gontran Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor and then considers the critiques of an essentialist 'European Africanism' (p. 145) in the work of Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and Joseph Zobel. Munro argues that 'post-Negritude rhythm has become less a fixed, closed marker of black identity than a floating, malleable signifier of lived Caribbean experience' (p. 148), and illustrates his point with an insightful reading of the improvisational rhythms that subtend Daniel Maximin's novel L'Isolé soleil. The final chapter examines the link between music and radicalism in the civil rights era United States. Taking James Brown's musical trajectory as his point of departure, Munro posits an 'Africanist interpretation' of rhythm, espoused principally by poet-activist Amiri Baraka, against what he deems 'the more historically and critically engaged approach' (p. 188) articulated by scholar Fred Moten. In siding with the latter perspective, Munro emphasizes his own critical discomfort with the tendency throughout the Americas to project 'racialized, often primitivist notions of culture' (p. 194) on to black music, a limited perspective that Different Drummers goes a very long way to upending.