The third culture--a conversation about truth and reconciliation: an African Americanist's reflection on the "Two Cultures" debate in post-modern society.

AuthorWright, Josephine R.B.

Abstract

  1. P. Snow launched the "Two Cultures" debate in 1959 during the Cold War era. While lamenting a widening gulf in communication between scientists and literary theorists, he championed the supremacy of scientific inquiry over canonical Western European literary traditions of his day. Globalization has forced many academics in the United States to (re)think how they prepare students today for leadership in a world overwhelmingly populated by peoples of non-European ancestry. At stake in this debate is the political contention over culture--specifically, whose culture is more valued than others and whose culture will be privileged in contemporary society. Such a topic should command greater attention within the academy, if we as educators hope to promote better understanding by students of diverse peoples and cultures around the world.

    One marker of globalization has been the widespread exportation of African-American music from the United States, a phenomenon documented as early as the antebellum period. Most black American musical traditions before 1960 evolved historically within a defined social-political framework of racial oppression, and any attempt to isolate the music from these realities obfuscates its connection to a collective history that all Americans at some level share. (Re)examination and "interrogation" of accessible historical documents (often selectively suppressed in standard American textbooks) help promote a "Third Culture." Such inquiry lays bare the irony/ contradiction of excluding widely exported repertories of music, arguably the principal representations of what is uniquely "American," from Western canonical traditions. This paper examines from such historical perspective two of black America's gifts to the world: the Negro spiritual and the blues.

    Introduction

  2. P. Snow launched the "Two Cultures" debate in 1959 during the Cold War era. While lamenting a widening gulf in communication between scientists and literary theorists, he championed the supremacy of scientific inquiry over canonical Western European literary traditions of his day. Globalization has forced many academics in the United States to (re)think how they prepare students today for leadership in a world overwhelmingly populated by peoples of non-European ancestry. At stake in this debate is the political contention over culture--specifically, whose culture is more valued than others and whose culture will be privileged in contemporary society. Such a topic should command greater attention within the academy, if we as educators hope to promote better understanding by students of diverse peoples and cultures around the world.

    One marker of globalization has been the widespread exportation of African-American music from the United States, a phenomenon documented as early as the antebellum period. (1) Most black American musical traditions before 1960 evolved historically within a defined social-political framework of racial oppression, and any attempt to isolate the music from these realities obfuscates its connection to a collective history that all Americans at some level share. (Re)examination and "interrogation" of accessible historical documents (often selectively suppressed in standard American textbooks) help promote a "Third Culture," defined here as a long-standing intellectual tradition among

    African-Americans rooted in rigorous examination and reconciliation of these shared, collected histories. (2) Such inquiry lays bare the irony/ contradiction of excluding widely exported repertories of music, arguably the principal representation of what is uniquely "American," from Western canonical traditions. This paper examines from historical perspective two of black America's gifts to the world: Negro spirituals and the folk blues. Both have impacted the modern world in a myriad of ways, moving from oral tradition into classical and popular music, gospel, and jazz.

    Modern audiences, particularly young people, vaguely associate Negro spirituals with songs of the slaves and the blues with folk ballads created by impoverished blacks in the Jim Crow South. Few grasp, however, the social histories and conditions under which each genre evolved or the deeper, intrinsic meanings these songs held for their creators. As oral traditions, Negro spirituals and the blues mirrored the lives and immediate concerns of common black folk in the United States (3)--spirituals reflecting their antebellum experiences of slavery and the blues their post-Civil War experiences as emancipated men and women adjusting to freedom in an increasingly hostile and racially-divided America. (4)

    Due to the broad scope of this topic, as well as time limitations, my paper examines selected primary sources that shed light on the historical origins of the Negro spiritual and the blues. It explores the contexts in which these repertories evolved as well as the meanings of these songs for the untutored folk who created them--individuals rendered voiceless and seemingly irrelevant in C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" debate.

    Negro Spirituals

    Although authenticity of Negro spirituals as a genuine genre of slave music should seem self-evident (at least it was for numerous northern European-American missionaries and Union Army soldiers who first heard them in the South during the American Civil War), (5) lingering controversy over slave authorship of the spirituals has muddled slave song scholarship since the Fisk University Jubilee Singers first unveiled them to world audiences in the 1870s. (6) Among notable critics who have expressed skepticism were Richard Wallaschek, who summarily dismissed them as crude imitations of European hymns that slaves adopted for their own use; (7) George Pullen Jackson, who relied upon extensive analyses of texts and melodies to demonstrate similarities between slave spirituals and camp-meeting revival hymns sung by rural white southerners; (8) and most recently Ronald Randono, who focused upon gaps in the historical record of African-American music before 1750 to advance an interpretative theory that Negro spirituals evolved "within a sociodiscursive complex in which Europeans, Africans, and heterodox Euro-African populations engaged and interacted." (9) Such hybridity theories, particularly those that assume a white-to-black transmission, dehumanize American slaves once again, this time denying them even autonomy over creation of their own expressive culture. (10)

    From all accounts, only a relatively small number of blacks were converted to Christianity at any given time during their enslavement in North America. As early as 1680, for example, Anglican missionary Morgan Godwyn, a graduate of Christ Church (Oxford, 1664), reported that many slaves in colonial Virginia clung to African religious practices and beliefs, despite missionary efforts to convert them. (11) Similar observations resonated about African slaves singing, dancing, and drumming during the 1739 Stono Rebellion, the first major slave uprising in colonial South Carolina. (12) Approximately a century later, the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones, a nationally renown Presbyterian cleric, also reported that a small percentage of slaves participated in Christian worship. (13)

    During the colonial period Christian slaves worshipped in churches along side their masters, segregated for the most part in the gallery. Some participated in clandestine nocturnal prayer meetings in defiance of their masters, as noted during the mid-1770s by John Marrant, a free-black. (14) When slave plantation churches emerged ca. 1780, some (where permitted) sought solace in these congregations, which were presided over by slave preachers under supervision of white clergy or deacons. (15) At formal services, they sang the Protestant hymns and psalms of their masters. In private devotionals, with no whites present, they sang religious songs of their own composition, variously called hymns, plantation songs, "sperichils," (16) sorrow songs, (17) or hallelujah songs. (18)

    Some slave holders in the rural South forbade slaves from participating in Christian worship and even discouraged them from singing mournful songs, such as dirges or laments, which might impede the efficiency of their work. British actress Frances Anne Kemble documented that practice, for example, in her travel narrative of life on St. Simons and Butler Islands, Georgia, during 1838-39:

    Many of the masters and overseers prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character ... having reference to their particular hardships. (19) Detection or suspicion of violating any rules imposed by white authority meant corporal punishment, sometimes death, for the slaves. (20)

    Thus, within this context emerged a distinctive black religious experience among Christian slaves in colonial and antebellum North America. Superimposing African beliefs and practices upon Christian theology of a decidedly Protestant persuasion, (21) African Americans evolved their own brand of black folk religion, which in turn generated a voluminous body of sacred songs flowing out of oral expression. In the sacred songs they improvised, they recorded through text and music the history of their captivity and oppression in North America. (22) These songs, performed most often in communal settings, reflected a shared group experience of the slaves, rather than the singularly personal experience expressed by solitary blues singers. (23)

    Negro spirituals may be classified in four distinct categories of sacred slave songs:

    1. Praise spirituals sung at private devotionals;

    2. Shout spirituals (also called jubilee or hallelujah songs) sung to accompany the Shout (or "Holy Dance");

    3. Freedom songs;

    4. Sorrow songs.

    Since laws...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT