What do you think?
Rate this book
Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz
Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban and Latin salsa to disco and rap, is overwhelmingly neo-African. Created in the midst of war and military invasion, and filtered through a Western worldview, these musical forms are completely modern in their sensibilities: they are in fact the very sound of modern life. But the African religious philosophy at their core involved a longing for earlier eras—ones that pre-dated the technological discipline of labor forced on captive populations by the European occupiers. In this groundbreaking new book, Timothy Brennan shows how the popular music of the Americas—the music of entertainment, nightlife, and leisure—is involved in a devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening. In doing so he explores the challenge posed by Afro-Latin music to a world music system dominated by a few wealthy countries and the processes by which Afro-Latin music has been absorbed into the imperial imagination.
- GenresMusic
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2008
4 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 25, 2023
June, 2010:
Brennan was in town today but I missed his talk. I would have asked him to sign my copy of his book.
This is one of the best books I have read in really long time. It ranks right up there with John Miller Chernoff's work.
The individual chapters are gems -- mini-books unto themselves. Together the chapters don't live up to the promises of the introduction, but then how could they? The introduction is among the most powerful 14 pages I have read.
Brennan's contribution is to say in clean clear prose something either all of us know or suspect.
The discussion we had in class at PUC-Rio a few weeks ago was amongst the most intense I have had in a classroom (which is saying something given I have been teaching for 24 years now). Brazilian students intuitively grasp Brennan's argument with a Brazilian pride. But they also resist it with their Third World shame.
One way to understand Brennan's argument is to say that it answer's that famous (and in my view over hyped) question "Can the subaltern speak?" Brennan's answer: The subaltern or slaves speaks with music and dance. Most important: the slave knows that s/he so speaks. Still more important: the master knows -- but in an utterly divided way -- that the slave speaks because it is the music and dance of the slave that fills the master's lack.
Here is a bold claim for you: I don't know if I can think of a more important book out there. To read this book is to understand that we have always been undoing the seductions of modernity. And it is to own up to our simultaneous valorization and de-valorization of neo-African music -- what counts as world culture. In a sense, this book is the musical equivalent of Karl Polanyi's work on cultural political economy.
What follows below is what I wrote a few years ago after reading only the introduction.
*******
I have read 14 pages, i.e. the introduction. I am moved enough to provide a review just of the introduction. Indeed, at this stage, I will do little more than provide some quotes.
Why is it worth my time to reproduce these quotes? For two reasons. First, I think Brennan is making some astoundingly important connections. Second, his first 14 pages have the effect of taking what seemed like disparate threads in my life and weaving them into whole cloth. I feel like I have been bursting to say something like this for a long time. Ready?
First line: "Popular music in the Americas, although derived from a number of Arabic and European (especially Spanish and French) influences, is overwhelmingly neo-African -- even in genres like ballroom, disco, and Broadway where the African elements are far from obvious." (1)
line 9: "This observation can be put more strongly: there is a massive African subtext to American everyday life and leisure." (1)
"...the idea that there is a an African unconscious to our most unguarded moments is still too disturbing for many to admit... (1)
"Even less conceded, I would argue, is the claim that I take as the point of departure for this book: namely, that the New World African music extending from northern Brazil to the southern United States is hostile to the dominant religious impulses of modern life, to forms of Western labor, and to the commercial assault on demotic traditions and other types of unscripted human contact." (1)
"...popular music offers its listeners a coded revenge on the modern, and that this is why it is popular. (2)
"African New World music is political not because it is always, or even usually, a carrier of political messages (it isn't) but because the saturation of New World sensibilities by African religion and philosophy is, by its nature, political -- an aspect more difficult to co-opt since the African presence is part of the leisure and entertainment in the Americas at a cellular level, so to speak." (2)
"In this book, I have given this counter-monotheism and pre-modern embrace the name "secular devotion." By this I mean the resilience in contemporary popular music of African religious elements that are not perceived by listeners religiously, but to which they are, often unconsciously, devoted." (2)
"The popularity of popular music is grounded in aesthetic choices traceable to Africa, a fact that suggests that apart from being an immense continent of great complexity, it is also an idea -- an idea that haunts the West given its unasked-for role in the West's development. It has become the ethical destination of those who want to flee all associations with that earlier and tainted relationship...(2-3)
"In the chapters below, I examine in some detail how actual pieces from the New World African music create a sonoric environment that amounts to a vision of society that is attractive in the West for being a non-West. (4-5)
"The global spread of Latin music took place without occupying armies, high-tech distribution networks, or a well-developed advertising apparatus...It needed a worldview in order to be passed on and to circulate intact....this book is an attempt to describe and assess that worldview." (5)
"...what went under-reported was what might be called Afro-Latin music's guilty popularity based on a counter-Christian allegory working through symbolic form and sonoric structure. Buried within its sounds was the architecture of African religion preserved at various levels of intensity. It was popular given its ability to mount a protest that was not just mixed with fun but in which fun was the protest itself. Stalked by a highly disciplined and militant Christianity, the Americas adopted popular music as an underground religion that found its cathedrals in the communal sites of dancehalls, ballrooms, and the street, publicly sharing an agenda of ideas that did not seem religious to the Western mind at all: animism, polytheism, political satire, transcendence through sex, and a secular humanism indistinguishable from all of them. This was not just a matter of youth breaking out their parent's conservative straitjackets. The historical memory of a bad colonial inheritance was embedded in the leisure-form, and had continually to be exorcised by a cultural conversion. In a manner the guardians of order sensed popular music was a rival and nemesis of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In many places and times, it was so deliberately. (6)
"It is not simply as release or play, in other words, that popular music saves society from its routine murders; it is not just relief from the long day's work or the joy that comes from cutting loose or the affirmation of community that makes it attractive, although all of these play their parts. In the Americas, popular music is a mission and strategy to recover the deep theoretical roots that extend far into the past and constitutes nothing less an alternative history of Western civilization. (7)
"Under a firestorm of abuse, forms like rap, the son, rumba, and calypso staked out a position of morality in a society drunk with the hollow virtues of corporate greed. These types of music were for much of their audience a moral center, even though in ever instance...they were attacked as immorality incarnate. (7)
As the earliest European travel narratives to the Americas show, music was described from the start as writing's other. (8)
There is a war between literature and music. Any moderately well educated college student in the US or Britain takes a few courses in literature, and these are identical in their minds with studying "culture" and the humanities. Far rarer for them to have gotten anywhere near a course in music, and far rarer still a course on Afro-Latin music. Meanwhile, outside the university walls, the culture with which almost everyone is "literate" is overwhelmingly musical. What they are devoted to -- their time, their emotions, their sharing are all invested in it -- is popular music. Broadening the canon with more course offerings, or requiring more music appreciation courses, does not begin to get at this unforgivable absence in our cultural training. (11)
My starting point in "World Music Does not Exist" (chapter 1) is the observation that the music that really is "world" in the sense of being globally familiar and admired is European classical music and jazz -- two forms never included under the term's rubric...I dwell on the fact, first of all, that the greatest cultural influence on the West by the global periphery is in music, and that the idea of world music structures the reception of these sounds and styles not unlike trade embargoes do, or the filtering of foreign news by government spokespersons. (12)
Can I get an "amen"?
Brennan was in town today but I missed his talk. I would have asked him to sign my copy of his book.
This is one of the best books I have read in really long time. It ranks right up there with John Miller Chernoff's work.
The individual chapters are gems -- mini-books unto themselves. Together the chapters don't live up to the promises of the introduction, but then how could they? The introduction is among the most powerful 14 pages I have read.
Brennan's contribution is to say in clean clear prose something either all of us know or suspect.
The discussion we had in class at PUC-Rio a few weeks ago was amongst the most intense I have had in a classroom (which is saying something given I have been teaching for 24 years now). Brazilian students intuitively grasp Brennan's argument with a Brazilian pride. But they also resist it with their Third World shame.
One way to understand Brennan's argument is to say that it answer's that famous (and in my view over hyped) question "Can the subaltern speak?" Brennan's answer: The subaltern or slaves speaks with music and dance. Most important: the slave knows that s/he so speaks. Still more important: the master knows -- but in an utterly divided way -- that the slave speaks because it is the music and dance of the slave that fills the master's lack.
Here is a bold claim for you: I don't know if I can think of a more important book out there. To read this book is to understand that we have always been undoing the seductions of modernity. And it is to own up to our simultaneous valorization and de-valorization of neo-African music -- what counts as world culture. In a sense, this book is the musical equivalent of Karl Polanyi's work on cultural political economy.
What follows below is what I wrote a few years ago after reading only the introduction.
*******
I have read 14 pages, i.e. the introduction. I am moved enough to provide a review just of the introduction. Indeed, at this stage, I will do little more than provide some quotes.
Why is it worth my time to reproduce these quotes? For two reasons. First, I think Brennan is making some astoundingly important connections. Second, his first 14 pages have the effect of taking what seemed like disparate threads in my life and weaving them into whole cloth. I feel like I have been bursting to say something like this for a long time. Ready?
First line: "Popular music in the Americas, although derived from a number of Arabic and European (especially Spanish and French) influences, is overwhelmingly neo-African -- even in genres like ballroom, disco, and Broadway where the African elements are far from obvious." (1)
line 9: "This observation can be put more strongly: there is a massive African subtext to American everyday life and leisure." (1)
"...the idea that there is a an African unconscious to our most unguarded moments is still too disturbing for many to admit... (1)
"Even less conceded, I would argue, is the claim that I take as the point of departure for this book: namely, that the New World African music extending from northern Brazil to the southern United States is hostile to the dominant religious impulses of modern life, to forms of Western labor, and to the commercial assault on demotic traditions and other types of unscripted human contact." (1)
"...popular music offers its listeners a coded revenge on the modern, and that this is why it is popular. (2)
"African New World music is political not because it is always, or even usually, a carrier of political messages (it isn't) but because the saturation of New World sensibilities by African religion and philosophy is, by its nature, political -- an aspect more difficult to co-opt since the African presence is part of the leisure and entertainment in the Americas at a cellular level, so to speak." (2)
"In this book, I have given this counter-monotheism and pre-modern embrace the name "secular devotion." By this I mean the resilience in contemporary popular music of African religious elements that are not perceived by listeners religiously, but to which they are, often unconsciously, devoted." (2)
"The popularity of popular music is grounded in aesthetic choices traceable to Africa, a fact that suggests that apart from being an immense continent of great complexity, it is also an idea -- an idea that haunts the West given its unasked-for role in the West's development. It has become the ethical destination of those who want to flee all associations with that earlier and tainted relationship...(2-3)
"In the chapters below, I examine in some detail how actual pieces from the New World African music create a sonoric environment that amounts to a vision of society that is attractive in the West for being a non-West. (4-5)
"The global spread of Latin music took place without occupying armies, high-tech distribution networks, or a well-developed advertising apparatus...It needed a worldview in order to be passed on and to circulate intact....this book is an attempt to describe and assess that worldview." (5)
"...what went under-reported was what might be called Afro-Latin music's guilty popularity based on a counter-Christian allegory working through symbolic form and sonoric structure. Buried within its sounds was the architecture of African religion preserved at various levels of intensity. It was popular given its ability to mount a protest that was not just mixed with fun but in which fun was the protest itself. Stalked by a highly disciplined and militant Christianity, the Americas adopted popular music as an underground religion that found its cathedrals in the communal sites of dancehalls, ballrooms, and the street, publicly sharing an agenda of ideas that did not seem religious to the Western mind at all: animism, polytheism, political satire, transcendence through sex, and a secular humanism indistinguishable from all of them. This was not just a matter of youth breaking out their parent's conservative straitjackets. The historical memory of a bad colonial inheritance was embedded in the leisure-form, and had continually to be exorcised by a cultural conversion. In a manner the guardians of order sensed popular music was a rival and nemesis of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In many places and times, it was so deliberately. (6)
"It is not simply as release or play, in other words, that popular music saves society from its routine murders; it is not just relief from the long day's work or the joy that comes from cutting loose or the affirmation of community that makes it attractive, although all of these play their parts. In the Americas, popular music is a mission and strategy to recover the deep theoretical roots that extend far into the past and constitutes nothing less an alternative history of Western civilization. (7)
"Under a firestorm of abuse, forms like rap, the son, rumba, and calypso staked out a position of morality in a society drunk with the hollow virtues of corporate greed. These types of music were for much of their audience a moral center, even though in ever instance...they were attacked as immorality incarnate. (7)
As the earliest European travel narratives to the Americas show, music was described from the start as writing's other. (8)
There is a war between literature and music. Any moderately well educated college student in the US or Britain takes a few courses in literature, and these are identical in their minds with studying "culture" and the humanities. Far rarer for them to have gotten anywhere near a course in music, and far rarer still a course on Afro-Latin music. Meanwhile, outside the university walls, the culture with which almost everyone is "literate" is overwhelmingly musical. What they are devoted to -- their time, their emotions, their sharing are all invested in it -- is popular music. Broadening the canon with more course offerings, or requiring more music appreciation courses, does not begin to get at this unforgivable absence in our cultural training. (11)
My starting point in "World Music Does not Exist" (chapter 1) is the observation that the music that really is "world" in the sense of being globally familiar and admired is European classical music and jazz -- two forms never included under the term's rubric...I dwell on the fact, first of all, that the greatest cultural influence on the West by the global periphery is in music, and that the idea of world music structures the reception of these sounds and styles not unlike trade embargoes do, or the filtering of foreign news by government spokespersons. (12)
Can I get an "amen"?
November 29, 2012
Tim was my undergraduate advisor but only after completing my masters in Latin American studies (and reading this book) did I realize the resource once available to me. This book is for Western audiences, as it takes aim at what constitutes a cultural canon in the West as well as the Western disjointed geography of culture that views Latin America as distinct from the United States- when a fundamental commonality is Afro-Descendants and their cultural production. For non-academics who can get past the jargon, this book is worth reading both to grasp a new geography of culture with a unique common denominator as well for as all of us who have long suspected that there is more to the exalted expression of being human than words on a page.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews