Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (review)

Informed by Foucault's concept of "heterotopia" and by its utopian values, Kun offers his readers various interdisciplinary, oppositional and interartistic case studies that he considers audiotopias, the spaces "within and produced by a musical element that offers the listener and/or musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world" (pp. 22-3). Kun compels readers to think across static categories of race, culture, language and the arts in order to reimagine a more complex and dynamic view of the articulations between music and race in America and the Americas. It is the postnational heterogeneity, interracial, and interdisciplinary texture of the book that makes for such compelling reading. If, in the Introduction, Kun insists on the critical meaning of the act of listening to music as a process of acknowledging difference, throughout its chapters Audiotopia offers us a complex, profound (yet enjoyable) reading of various audiotopias that cross cultural, racial and artistic borders.

He begins Chapter 1, "Against Easy Listening," by examining Walt Whitman's poem "I hear America sing" (1860) as a nation-building text that refused to acknowledge cultural, racial, and gendered differences within the United States. By reading Whitman's poem as a foundational text for nation building and for other, later texts inspired by it—particularly "America, I Hear you Singing," an album recorded by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Fred Waring in 1964—Kun is able to tease out the ways in which United States national identity was rhetorically identified as "the symphonic nation" (p. 41), as "a unified, ordered body of harmonic and orchestrated sound" (Ibid.). This rhetoric of the nation predicated upon by a metaphor of seamless, musical harmony is challenged by the discourse of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement, as well as by other figures in the entertainment world. This is the basis for the rest of the book, which concludes, rightly so, with a diverse racial and cultural return to Whitman's "I hear America singing," a more heterogeneous re-writing of the United States social reality triggered by the racial debates and cultural border-crossings analyzed in the book's chapters.

Rather than obscuring differences, figures like Mickey Katz, a Yiddish-English parodist and singer/entertainer who was quite popular during the 1950s, performed difference. Katz was, as a result, quite popular but also disavowed by many Jewish American audiences for his high degree of Jewish performativity, as in his use of Yiddish dialect comedy on stage, his unexpected musical breaks and "violent klezmer 'breaks'" (p. 55), and his "dialogizing English-language pop sounds with Yiddish" (p. 67). In fact, Kun concludes "hearing Katz as 'too Jewish' cannot be separated from a long tradition of anti-Semitic literature and ideology that hears the Jewish voice as emblematic of a hidden mysterious, and secret inner language that specifically signifies Jewish difference" (p. 67).

In Chapters 3 and 4, Kun examines the interrelations between the arts (writers and music, painters and music) and their impact on race. By focusing on James Baldwin as a listener of blues (and particularly of Bessie Smith) when he lived in Switzerland and during a nervous breakdown, Kun clearly shows how listening can be "an emancipatory performance" (p. 91) and reaffirms the power of black music as liberation and survival for a queer, black writer. Likewise, for Haitian-Puerto Rican artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose 1983 tryptich, "Horn Players," visually speaks to the importance of the ear and of listening, and for Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a blind, black musician, listening was an act of cultural survival. In fact, Kun stresses how Basquiat "used the visual to hear," while Kirk "used the aural to see" (p. 115), two artistic processes that challenged Western culture's "ocularcentrism" (p. 116) in the construction of race and racial difference.

The chapter on Langston Hughes, which foregrounds the black poet's trips to Mexico and the presence of Afro-Cuban rhythms in his poem, "Ask your Mama," challenges national...