Podcast S1 E1 What Does "Gender and Spirituality in Postcolonial Liberation Musics" Actually Mean?

Welcome to Jahmi Roc’s Jottings, your seriously silly space to hear deep insights on music, especially reggae and samba reggae. It is my intention to share meaningful musicological arguments and observations, to inspire and, frankly, pass my doctoral exams. Welcome all! I’m your host, Jahmi Roc aka Racquel Bernard. Let’s start jamming!

Welcome to Jahmi Roc’s Jottings! A brand new podcast that centers on Gender and Spirituality in Postcolonial Liberation Musics. Now that is a very loaded reference to a field that brings in scholarship from many different areas. Put a bit more plainly, how and why do people sing for freedom? On each episode of this podcast, you will hear me talking about at least three scholars and how their contributions impact my understanding of liberation tunes. In this episode I am focused on elaborating on the terms “postcolonial” and “gender”. When I talk about “postcolonial” I am thinking about terms like “decolonial” and about the ways nations formed after the end of colonization. Like literary and colonial theorist Leela Gandhi does in her book Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, I am thinking about how nations relate to the colonial past, how they remember it, and how those memories inform the present relations of power. When I talk about “gender,” I am focused on the role of women and scholarship that considers “womanism” and “feminism”, but I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that gender identity is much more capacious and vast, bounding beyond the experiences of cis-women. Today, I will be sharing my jottings about three scholars. You’ve already heard me name one, Leela Gandhi, who is a literary and cultural theorist, who writes about transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other two scholars are Gary Okihiro and Zoe Sherinian.

Okihiro is a scholar who got his PhD in African Studies. Currently at Yale in American Studies, he was a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City and the founding director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He was instrumental in founding the field of Asian American studies. I enjoy his style of writing because it is clearcut and direct. In his book Third World Studies he charts the emergence of the field, especially its entrance at San Francisco State College. The Third World Liberation Front is the name of the student group that demanded the field be institutionalized. Their focus was on creating a new humanism, a new consciousness that empowered third world people. Self determination is the goal of the field. In fact, he goes as far as to say that liberation is called self determination. For my interests, an understanding of Third World studies is pivotal. I am interested in the ways that women of color use samba reggae and reggae to combat racism and sexism. The locations that center my work are indeed Third World countries: Brazil and Jamaica. At the same time, I cannot properly position my research without drawing from my lessons in African and African American Studies and Cultural Studies, my BA and MA respectively. Scholars like Zoe Sherinian point to this field from her position in Ethnomusicology when she recounts the work of African American feminist Frances Beale who “outlined the impact of racism, sexism, and capitalism on the lives of African American women” (Loc 439). Beale founded the Black Women’s Liberation Caucus which over time became the Third World Women’s Alliance because “women of color and Third World women faced similar forces of oppression and exploitation that cut across racialized divides,” (Sherinian Loc 439).” Zoe C. Sherinian is Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnomusicology at the University of Oklahoma. A percussionist and filmmaker, her ethnographic film on the changing status of Dalit drummers is titled This is a Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum.

Okihiro explains that this field did not last in its original construction. He explains how ethnic studies was the replacement (so to speak). Third world studies and Ethnic studies are distinct fields that converge in some ways and are disparate in others. He posits “at its inception Third World studies gained institutionalization as (Chicago) ethnic studies and, like the independence movements in the Third World, the field turned to (cultural) nationalism and the nation-state” (Okihiro Loc 332). Okihiro takes up various relevant studies that influence Third world studies such as feminist and queer theories. He identifies the grounding tenets of post-1968 Ethnic studies, African American studies, Native American studies, Chicano Studies, and Asian American American studies and points to how they “clarify and explain the subjects of Third World studies” (Loc 465). Respectively, these tenets are land and labor for (post-1968) ethnic studies, indigeneity and sovereignty for Native American studies, transnational community for African American studies, migrant labor for Asian American studies and borderlands for Chicana/o studies (Loc 465). It’s no wonder that I am thrilled about the subject of liberation as an African and African American studies graduate. Okihiro recalls that Nathan Hare, the principal scholar of Black Studies at San Francisco State college and PhD of University of Chicago’s Sociology Department, regards the field as “a mass movement and a mass struggle” formulated “to rid the world of racism and achieve black self determination” (Loc 546). So I ask, how do women present black self determination? A song like Judy Mowatt’s “Black Woman” calls out oppression. For me, I think this is the first step at self-determination, bringing light to the imbalance of power. This song is a rallying cry that encourages black women with words like “Don't give up now / Just pray for strength now”. This is a call to invest in the struggle for freedom. Thinking about these lyrics is part of why the larger field of Jahmi Roc’s Jottings brings together both gender and spirituality. Mowatt aligns black women with Biblical women who faced horrific circumstances and frames their quest for liberation in spiritual terms.

Both Okihiro and Gandhi mention Albert Memmi to invalidate the process of ‘mimicry’, this is a process by which colonized people emulate the colonizer. Gandhi turns to Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy to speak about the problematic nature of this desire of the colonizer from the colonized in specific terms. She then turns to Foucault to speak more about power saying “According to [him], there is no ‘outside’ to power- it is always already, everywhere” (Loc 553). For me, the omnipresence of power is why exercising it is so potentially destructful. Okihiro talks about the mental enslavement that Carter G Woodson calls miseducation while Gandhi turns to Ashis Nandy who says “This colonialism colonises minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all” (Loc 573). When I classify Mowatt’s “Black Woman” as a postcolonial liberation tune I am thinking of the way she demands a new cultural prioritizing by singing “I see your affliction, to you I dedicate my song”.

“Black Woman”s reference to biblical women makes Zoe Sherinian’s book Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology a powerful source for dialogue. The text is focused on former untouchables who have been oppressed by the caste system in India since birth. It is an ethnographic work and the central trickster figure is Reverend J. Theophilus Appavoo. The “community of Tamil Dalit Christian villagers, seminary students, activists, and theologians who have been inspired by Appavoo's music to work for social justice” are part of a reform movement within the mainline Protestant Church of South India in Tamil Nadu, the tenth largest state in India (Loc 118). Recall that I am framing Okihiro, Gandhi, and Sherinian together to make clear the connections of postcolonial thinking within a Third World Studies paradigm. The same camaraderie that Okihiro points to among third world actants is reaffirmed again when Sherinian explains that this movement of anti-caste former untouchables “borrow ideas from Latin American liberation theology” (Loc 125). At the same time indigenous roots are at work, namely the nineteenth century Indian social gospel missions and the early twentieth century secular/social equality Dravidian language movement (Loc 125). Sherinian points out that Tamil folk music has transformative power which led the Christian believer to adopt the term Dalit which according to Appavoo means “an identity of the oppressed people fighting for liberation” (Loc 131). In Appavoo’s music and the Dalit musico-theology movement, indegenization of Christianity through theology, language, and musical style sets the purpose of religious discourse back to emancipating the poor and oppressed (Loc 139). Additionally, social identity reformation for Dalit Christians is made possible by the transformative recreative power of music in context of performance (Loc 139). This is precisely the work I propose Judy Mowatt’s song achieves.

Consider the second verse of “Black Woman”:

We are forsaked once in the plantation

Lashes to our skin

On auction blocks we were chained and sold

Handled merchandise

Highly abused and warmth we were refused

And thrown in garbage bins

But no need for that now

Free us, stand on back now

And help me to sing my song

Mowatt sets the stage for the religious discourse in the third verse which brings in Rachel, mother of Moses, Mary and Joseph to be directly applicable to African descended women whose ancestors faced the cruelty of slavery. When she sings “Free us, stand on back now” she makes use of the transformative recreative power of music. Put another way, this is not simply singing, this is catalyzing real world change. She engages listeners and encourages them to sing with her, not because the chorus of voices will sound sweet, though it will, but because those crooning listeners will achieve transformation when they join. How is this possible? Well, we can return to Appavoo who actually wrote a book about Tamil folklore called Folk Lore for Change (1986) and imagine, if you will, the remix “Black women’s reggae for change”. Appavoo investigated the ways that Tamil villagers used folk music as an “everyday form of resistance” (Loc 175). Indigenizing Christian music with Tamil folk music was a way to change attitudes toward oppressed communities, even in the reflexive. Sherninan goes as far as to compare tamil folk music in this context with the use of “We Shall Overcome” in 1940’s Labor movements and 1960’s Civil rights music. According to Sherinian, “Music is a means to dialogically generate the sources of empowerment and the motivation toward action” (Loc 649).

On that note, I’d like to conclude this episode of Jahmi Roc’s Jottings with a personal anecdote. When I was a senior at Dartmouth College, I took a class with the powerhouse freedom singer Bernice Reagon Johnson. She taught our approximately 40 person class that freedom songs (which were often remixes of church hymns) was a way to defy racist oppression. She talked about the ways that a protester could be getting arrested and still singing, in a way that they were refusing the power used to arrest them. I will always remember her words about the ability of singing to transform emotional and mental states. She would say you could be depressed and bogged down but when you run sound through your body you can shift that energy entirely. This is part of the reason I am thrilled to continue defining the field of Gender and Spirituality in Postcolonial Liberation Musics. As a Jamaican immigrant and American citizen, I identify with Frances Beale and her move to align the struggles of African American women and Third World Women. The terms I set out to contextualize “postcolonial” and “gender” create an orbit that acknowledges the power of education to liberate once enslaved minds and the need to “chant down” patriarchy. Mowatt’s outro to “Black Woman” resounds

Black woman, ooh, black woman

I know you've struggled long

I feel your afflictions

To you I dedicate my song

The struggle of women of color is central to my research and music centered on liberation or self-determination is my jam. Join me next time as I consider theories of nation. This has been Jahmi Roc. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Jahmi Roc’s Jottings! I hope you enjoyed! Don’t forget to subscribe and hop on over to my artist page to hear some music that I hope changes the world for at least one soul!

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I look forward to sharing more musical moments with you next time. Take care and keep jamming!