Content
1. Other
2. Colonialism and representation
3. Black Atlantic cultural production
4. Voodoo Child
Bibliography
Photograph
Postcolonialism is a term for disparate critical frames on post-colonial and colonialism. When hyphenated, the concept is diachronic and privileges the historical moment as binary event, as if to mark the beginning of a clean slate at the departure of the coloniser. Without the hyphen and with the –ism attached, postcolonialism is a critical approach that recognises the synchronic trace of colonialism and pre-colonisation in the present and ongoing moment. In other words, it implies the impossibility of a clean slate. While forms of structuralism such as the binary politics of black-consciousness would be more common to the hyphenated post-colonialism, postcolonialism gravitates to certain theories of poststructuralism, amongst others, anti-essentialism and constructivism. In general, postcolonialism “is that which questions, overturns, and/or critically refracts colonial authority –its epistemologies and forms of violence, its claims to superiority” (Waugh 2006: 341-2). In addition, postcolonialism challenges social structural inequalities in general, and beyond the frame of the post-colonial situation, and aims to bring about a consciousness of social justice and intercultural social diversity (Young 2003: 120).
This essay traces the effect of one particular poststructural frame operative in the index of postcolonialism, Lacan’s theory of the big Other. I will begin by explaining Lacan’s “three orders that structure human existence” (Macey 2000: 324), the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which Lacan names as the Other (Carusi 1988: 270). The Other works in conjunction with the imaginary and Real, I will therefore refer throughout to all three in order to trace the effect this frame of the Other has on postcolonialism and through the work of the theoretician Homi Bhabha. Both Lacan and Bhabha are indebted to post-Saussurean linguistic theory.
At this point an interruption is vital; we must remember that Lacan began his work under the auspices of psychoanalysis. In time, his doctrine began to clash with the didactics of the International Psycho-Analytic Association and was forced out in 1953. Today, we do not reread Lacan for his association to psychoanalysis; instead, we recognise his teaching as significant for a contemporary reading strategy in reference to post-Saussurean linguistics, poststructuralism and postcolonialism (Zizek 2006:5).
The body of this essay will trace the genealogy and production of Black Atlantic culture in context to the Other and postcolonialism. It will conclude with a reading of the musical performance ‘Voodoo Child’ by Jimmy Hendrix.
1. Other
Lacan’s theory has multidisciplinary sources. An important source is his re-invention of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. Lacan rereads Freud’s three terms: ‘ideal ego’ he interprets as the subject’s idealized or imaginary self-image; ‘Ego-Ideal’ is the big Other agency against whose symbolic order the subject measures his own actualisation; ‘Superego’ is the same agency but without form and order, it is the Real and mirrors the subject’s failure to symbolic function. Against these, Lacan invents the triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real (Zizek 2006: 80). Lacan’s triad has an interdependent relationship, in other words, to trace the effect of Other, we need to see it by difference to both the Imaginary and the Real.
The Imaginary (cf. Macey 2000: 200) is an illusionary realm in which self and Other merges. It is not imagination, instead, it gives freedom to the imagination; it is an aspect of fantasy or daydreaming often active in artistic creation. In other words, it is like a self-experience of crafting or carving a physical shape of letters, say, from clay, to represent a repeating trope in a visual narrative, which we then use to tell ourselves or others about whom or what we are. As in the shape of an alphabetical letter, it has an arbitrary and conventional relationship to the sound it represents and to its meaning in symbolic function. It is always interchangeable in shape and can be exchanged with alternative codes in order to represent different symbolic function. The spell of illusion has no self-reflexivity; in order to break the over-identification we have with fantasy, dramatists often employ metadramatic technique to ‘awake’ the audience to the fiction at hand.
In other words, the Imaginary screens the Real, it keeps the Real at bay and invisible.
The Symbolic can best be explained in terms of language; it is the performative rules of grammar that provides a code of authenticity to the speaking subject, it marks his public image and social role. The symbolic is a communication that operates through the subconscious and guides the subject to social interactions such as prohibitions, pretence, and politeness. To put it differently, the symbolic order is what the infant, and throughout the later stages of socialising, receives as gift from society –a transformation follows, through animated mimicry and desire for recognition –from primordial organism into the social I. Into adulthood, it is the cause of the subject’s ideological loyalty, his appearance of being a capitalist, communist, or national. It is not a natural substance inherited at birth, instead, it is a fragile, virtual, and unsubstantial social performance that lasts only as long as the subject sustains the enactment. The symbolic order is the impersonal addressee of the subject, that what Lacan means by ‘the big Other’. The symbolic order, society’s unwritten constitution, is the second nature of every speaking being: it is here, directing and controlling my acts; it is the sea I swim in, yet it remains ultimately impenetrable –I can never put it in front of me and grasp it. It is as if we, subjects of language, talk and interact like puppets, our speech and gestures dictated by some nameless all-pervasive agency. (Zizek 2006: 8)
Lacan does not mean that we are without power and responsibility, instead, his constructivist theory provides us with tools for self-reflexivity and self-questioning within the symbolic matrix. Lacan foregrounds the symbolic order as mediating presence “between me and the double of myself, as it were with my neighbour” (Carusi 1988: 270), meaning, the image of the subject is mediated by the Other, in which it recognises and measures itself as public persona.
The Real (cf. Macey 2000: 324) is the realm that is antonymous to the Imaginary and, unlike the Imaginary, has no distinct and differential signifiers. Whereas the Imaginary is heterogeneous, the Real is homogeneous; it resists signification and symbolisation. Whereas the Symbolic is unsubstantial, the Real is de-substantial. It is the space of desire and fear in Lacan’s primordial organism, in its pre-language natural, or for a better word, alien, horrific-microscopic-subatomic ‘thing-like’ state. In other words, it is the space of gaps, of in-between lapses between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. To put it differently, it is the obscenity and unnameable living-dead that wake us up in our nightmares; it is the ‘Horror’ that silences Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness. The Other acts as a form of surveillance, guarding us in our day-to-day automation against anxiety of external and unpredictable intrusions of the Real. On a different level, metafiction is the Real of the text that acts like a shock to awaken the reader from the inconsequential aesthetic of the phantasmatic netherworld of realist fiction. Let us now illustrate an example of the conjunctive Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad.
In a musical performance, say the 1969 Woodstock musical festival, the symbolic would be the matrix of conventions that the musicians, organisers, and audience cannot consciously comprehend at any one time. For the audience, it is the small print of rules of conduct attached to the purchased ticket, the program line up, and routine of applause at the appropriate time; the appropriate attire and code of social interaction with fellow members of the audience. All these, the symbolic order, synchronises at once when the spectator walks onto the grounds named Woodstock –the open-air ‘auditorium’ that faces the stage – and recognises his or her own image in the attire and speech dialect of the other spectators. In addition, during the musical performance, the audience will give credit to the playing musician every time the performance mirrors their image. The spectator assumes an unwitting responsibility over his or her organism, limbs, gesture and mental capacity, submitting his or her being to the role of pretence that the big Other , the unconscious demands. The Woodstock experience exists for the spectator as long as the spectator recognises its own image in the collective audience, in the big Other. To put it differently, the pleasure of experiencing the Other is when spectators confirm their function in the event to one another.
These same rules and more apply to the musician, and the musician’s performance would fall apart if he or she attempts to bring the symbolic order to consciousness while performing. When the musician walks onto stage at his allocated time slot, and the audience applause to his presence, from that moment on and until the end of his performance, the musician surrenders his or her being to the big Other and assumes a façade of appearance that matches his function to the symbolic order. Here, the big Other is the event as cause; the musical genre, its history, and the desire of the individual artist to be recognised by that cause.
The imaginary is the stage construction and the adjacent open ground that serves as auditorium, the music instruments and audio equipment, and the music score. These are interchangeable, for example, the stage could be used for another purpose such as a political rally; the music instruments and score could be used for karaoke, or another symbolic function. The Imaginary has an arbitrary relationship with the Other. For example, the map of the ground that serve as auditorium-stage could be almost anywhere on Earth, until someone writes ‘Woodstock’ across it.
The Real is the unpredictable circumstance, such as weather condition, traffic congestion, psychedelic drug use, food shortage, sanitary conditions, and instances of death amongst spectators. In a way, these contingencies are the gaps during which spectators are awakened from the illusionary screen of Woodstock. Moreover, these are the in-between moments that will provide factual proof that Woodstock did take place. When a spectator, on return from Woodstock, relay the experience to friends who were not in attendance, fragments of dialogue about rain, mud, drugs, and death, in conjunction with physical evidence such sunburn and sleep deprivation would give evidence to attendance at the symbolic event. Moreover, the Real is without difference – it is neither signifier nor signified. The weather, drug abuse, or sleep deprivation would have no differential identity, no comparison to another event –it is a singularity. Desire, fear, and revulsion for the Other are located at the Real, at the in-between of the symbolic order.
2. Colonialism and representation
For Bhabha, colonialism is a “manifestation of the ‘in-between” (Waugh 2006: 355,6) of the symbolic order. What Bhabha means is that colonialism is falling apart of symbolic order, it lacks the Other. The colonised is presented as fixed identity, without difference; its singularity is based on nature and ethnocentricity, which is located at the Real. At the same time, the colonised is represented within the fantasy of historical origin and illusion of national identity, which is located at the Imaginary. For the colonialist, it is state of ambivalence towards the colonised subject –at once accepted and rejected. Bhabha (1994: 101) puts it like this:
The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. […] Therefore, despite the ‘play’ in the colonial system which is crucial to its exercise of power, colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative whereby the productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed and recognizable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism.
The ‘play’ in colonialism that Bhabha refers to is ambivalence to the colonised subject. On the one hand, the coloniser recognises the colonised as a fixed and homogenised identity. This desire for the biological Real –black skin –of the colonised is in order to construct colonial identity as cultural force against nature. Without invoking the negative copula as difference, the ‘is not,’ colonial authority would be meaningless. In other words, the colonised serves as object of difference for self image, for ‘white’ and superior identity. To put it differently, the colonised population is translated as stereotypical in order to craft the face of colonialism as iconic and substantial. The effect of colonial desire to recognise “difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/Culture” (Bhabha 1994: 66) is invisibleness of the colonised subject, the ‘missing person’ in the mirror.
On the other hand, depending on the day-to-day requirements to exercise power, colonialism is dependent on an ambivalent image of the colonised. When the oppressor is in need of an image of tolerance and understanding, the colonised would be represented as wild and masculine. At the same time, to justify the brutal dominance of oppression, the colonised would be represented as passive and feminine (Waugh 2006: 355). The implication of this play of ambivalence, of both acknowledging and rejecting self-reflection, “is the impossibility of claiming an origin for the Self (or Other) within a tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plenitudinous object of vision” (Bhabha 1994: 66). In other words, colonialism is situated between the Real and the Imaginary, and without symbolic function.
Colonialism views the colonised as objects of the Real, and its vantage point is the Imaginary. We can recall when Kurtz was asked, at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to give description of what it was like at the station where he served, he could not give a representation and simply repeated the word ‘horror’. What Kurtz means is that he saw living things as if they were raw nature –he saw the Real stretched by the “imagination to the very boundary of the unrepresentable”; he saw how the effects of colonialism “inhabits the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real: it stands for the Real at its most terrifying imaginary dimension, as the primordial abyss that swallows everything, dissolving all identities” (Zizek 2006: 64). This is what Bhabha (1994: 67) means with the ‘missing person’ and ‘invisibleness’ in colonialism. The colonised subject becomes de-substantialised, not in the sense that the subject “resists being caught in the symbolic network, but [becomes] the fissure within the symbolic network itself. The Real as the monstrous Thing behind the veil of appearance” (Zizek 2006: 72). In order for the spell of the netherworld of colonialism to endure, the colonised has to be represented without subjectivity, kept in a luminal state, and repressed by an illusionary screen. Moreover, Bhabha suggests that it is precisely this luminal state, ambivalence on the side of colonialism and double-consciousness on the side of the colonised, that provides the colonised with a space for reprisal, from where to exploit the colonial condition and give representation to its own subjectivity, in consciousness (Waugh 2006: 355; Bhabha 1994: 260). I shall illustrate this later in Black Atlantic cultural production and my reading of Voodoo Child.
To give justice to representation of the culture of the colonised, it is vital to avoid a homogenised Other (Bhabha 1994: 75) and (re-)establish symbolic function by opening narrative strategies for “the emergence and negotiation of those agencies of the marginal, minority, subaltern, or diasporic that incite us to think through –and beyond – theory” (Bhabha 1994: 260). Bhabha (1994: 105,6) contests singularities of difference and argues for the articulation of diverse subjects of differentiation –he asks us to take a critical look at the “myth of historical origination.”
Young (2003: 139) puts is succinctly, “A colony begins as a translation, a copy of the original located elsewhere on the map…A far-away reproduction that will, inevitably, always turn out differently.” The myth of colonial identity is grounded by the false belief that each nation developed within its own geographic borders, without external influence, that “all social life everyplace in the world was lived and thought about in terms of bounded, autonomous social units” (Matory 2005: 105). The view that capitalism was the first to bring about transnationalism grossly overlooks the transnational religious, monarchical, and maritime aspects to the early formation of European culture and the “vastly translocal world knitted together by Islam, long before the 16th century” (Matory 2005: 105).
Creolisation forms new languages and new modes of cultural production, it involves displacement, the carrying over and transformation of the dominant culture into new identities that take on material elements from the culture of their new location. Both sides of the exchange get creolized, transformed, as a result. Caribbean creolization comes close to a foundational idea of postcolonialism: that the one-way process by which translation is customarily conceived can be rethought in terms of cultural interaction, and as a space of re-empowerment. How can such forms of empowering translation be activated?” (Young 2003: 142)
A brief genealogy of Black Atlantic culture provides us with reference for a strategy of reading symbolic function in cultural production in context to postcolonialism. I shall now illustrate by follow the thread of religion and music, from Africa to the Americas, back and forth, and around the Atlantic Ocean rim.
3. Black Atlantic cultural production
Voodoo films are popular around the Atlantic rim while, at the same time, white American references to ‘voodoo’ rarely rest on any factual information about the Other: instead, they invoke the a priori conviction that the subject position of the speaker is so positively distinctive that the Other merits no more than a stereotype or dismissal. Since the early 19th century, following the Haitian Revolution, the Haitian Vodou religion has served European and Euro-American political commentators as the perfect trope for the deficient rationality of the white politicians they wished to disparage. The American critique of ‘voodoo economics’ is but the latest example. (Matory 2005: 76)
Voodoo, known by its practitioners as vodun, and collectively labelled Voodoo nationhood (Matory 2005: 76-81) is today an established and official religion in the Benin Republic, Togo, Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana, and Brazil, in particular at Salvador. What is significant is that its contemporary form, its rites of music, dance, sacrifice, and spirit possession does not have a singular geographical origin. Slave traders identified and grouped various vodun-worshippers from diverse parts of West Africa collectively and a cluster of these peoples settled in Salvador, the Bahia capital in Brazil. While voodoo in West Africa, known at its many sources of origin as Djedji, almost disappeared entirely, it flourished in Brazil and became known as Jeje. In addition, the voodoo worshippers blended with Catholic and Protestant religious communities, within French, Portuguese, and German national identities, and under British and French imperial jurisdictions, from its capital Salvador and throughout the regions of Haiti, Cuba, and Louisiana. By the end of the slave trade, the transnational religious community outnumbered its primordial voodoo origin in Africa. Between the late 18th century and the early 20th century, up to eight thousand Afro-Brazilians returned to Africa. Most of these returnees were Jejes and they transplanted the voodoo culture back to Africa, along with place names of Portuguese settlements in Brazil. Some of the returnees were themselves now slaveholders, and “regularly travelled back and forth among the Gulf of Guinea, Bahia, and Cuba. It was apparently these sons and daughters of the diaspora who labelled all the West Africans they considered their kin with the name ‘Jeje’, even though it is unlikely that those ‘kin’ had ever previously thought of themselves in such terms” (Matory 2005: 80).
The Imaginary of Voodoo, its new rites named Jeje, no longer resembled the old rites of Djedji and the latter was amalgamated into the former. The subjects of Djedji transformed their image into the image of Jeje for symbolic function. The point here is that the copy, Jeje, transformed the ‘original’ and the primordial had to adapt to the ‘copy’. The Other has no original and permanent geographical site, instead, the Other lives in the unconscious of those who practice its evolving imaginary rites; the Other lives by the hegemonic declaration and recognition of its subjects. The relationship between the Imaginary and the Other is conventional and contingent to the Real. Let us now shift our perspective to music in general before I conclude with a specific example of cultural production in my reading of Voodoo Child.
The diasporas of West Africans in America, Cuba, and the Caribbean provide us with a significant perspective to the transformation of modes of black cultural production, through music. While, for surveillance against coded communication, the rhythms of African drums were silent during the colonial era of slavery, the imaginary realm of musical performances remained vital for symbolic function to West African cultures. After the abolition of slavery and colonialism, the musical performance reintegrated with the rhythm of drums and became an integral mode of cultural production to black experience. The success of this mode of production can be traced back to its transnational structures of circulation and intercultural exchange (Gilroy 1993: 87). Let us take a genealogical view as to how this mode of production entered the public arena and thereafter transformed itself. While minstrelsy, as comical black experience, was common during the colonial era, it was the Fisk University Jubilee Singers who undertook an international tour in the 1870’s. Their music recalled the memory of slavery in a serious light and had “a profound historical importance because they were the first group to perform spirituals on a public platform, offering this form of black music as popular culture” (Gilroy 1993: 88). The success of the Fisk choir caused other black musical companies to copy the tour image. London, the historical centre of cultural trade on the Atlantic, was always the most important stop for public recognition. London became the first place to recognise black people singing slave songs to white audiences as mass entertainment (Gilroy 1993: 89 – 93). Urbanisation of black people in America in the early 20th century empowered circulation of different slave memories from different communities, and amalgamate. The combination of spirituals, black choir songs about slave history, and Afro-Cuban rhythmic drumming created the production and recording of the label ‘Rhythm and Blues’ (R&B). Urbanisation brought about secularisation, resulting in the transformation of R&B into Soul music. In London, where a large population of Caribbean migrants gathered, Caribbean musicians concealed the R&B trace and combined with Jamaican musicians, gave rise to the music genres Reggae and Dub. By the end of the 20th century, and by amalgamation of these early beginnings, Hip Hop music became the contemporary black image to circulate the Atlantic basin. Rap, a derivative of Hip Hop, can best be seen as trace to the African griot storyteller (Gilroy 1993: 108). The transformation and rearticulating of the West African musical performance, under European conditions, succeeds in providing an imaginary mirror to contemporary black experience. It succeeds by improvisation and disregard for ‘authenticity’. In other words, the imaginary is the mode of creative production, and it has an arbitrary relationship to symbolic function.
4. Voodoo Child
Let us first briefly return to Lacan and sketch his portrayal of the Other. The infant, at the age of acquiring speech and socialisation, stands in front of a mirror and sees a reflection of his/her parent (we will not enter gender here). It is important to note that what the infant does not see is the reflection of his natural body, which is what Lacan names as the living organism –the Real. Instead, the infant looks at, or, perhaps, constructs, a fantasy object in the mirror reflection –the Imaginary –signifier. The Imaginary has no meaning; it only offers an endless possibility of functions. The infant, unwittingly, selects a desirable function from the storage of possibilities in its subconscious. At the moment of unwitting selection, the infant ‘sees’ its own function to the Imaginary. It sees its ‘self’ function as child in society. The infant announces: ‘I am your child’. At that moment, the infant assumes the image of ‘child’ and undertakes to pretend according to all the rules that constitute the image of a child, including being naughty. Identification of self is a “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Rivkin 2004: 442). The image is constituted by the rules of the Other, the Other precedes the child, and the child follows the Other. What the child sees in the mirror is a sign of metonymy. It sees the lacking part of self, the part ‘parent’ that precedes ‘child’. In other words, the infant becomes ‘child’ by condition to the role difference between child and parent. To put it differently, without the possibility of the Imaginary to stand in for the Real, the infant would be exposed to the contingencies of nature, would be a shadow to nothing, and would not be able to transform into the symbolic function of being a socialised human child.
By the time when Jimi Hendrix performed at the 1968 Woodstock music festival, he was already famous for being the inventor of the electric rock guitar and being the highest paid performer in rock music, a genre dominated by white musicians. He had received recognition in both Europe and North America. His biography shows that he had already in his teens selected the guitar as his object of fantasy. At Elementary school, he drew the concern of a social worker for his habit of carrying a broom with him to emulate a guitar.
The Imaginary, for Jimi Hendrix, is the guitar instrument. It both freed and shielded him against the Real, his traumatic youth and the contingency of his ancestry. His grandfather was the illegitimate child of a slave woman and her master; his parental home was dysfunctional. He recognised his image as an instrumentalist in the symbolic order of R& B music –the Other. With the vocabulary of the electric guitar and Blues, he improvised the percussion by scratching and biting the strings in conjunction to exploiting the Wah effects pedal and amp howl effect. But there was ambivalence to this performance, Minstrelsy. His audience was white, and their image of him was essentialist. In his striking Negro features and pronounced Afro hair-do, his European spectators saw what they “felt a black American performer should be: wild, sexual, hedonistic, and dangerous” (Gilroy 1993: 93). Black reception in America denounced him as a ‘white nigger’, or as Fanon would have it, black skin and white mask.
The unwritten constitution of both Woodstock and rock music is white, has a white aura – it is the white Other, for Jimi Hendrix. It is the impenetrable mountain –the symbolic order under which we are like puppets –next to which Jimi Hendrix stands up to in his song Voodoo Child.
Well, I stand up next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
Well, I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand
Yeah
Cause I’m a voodoo child
Lord knows I’m a voodoo child baby
The all pervasive cultural agency of Woodstock acted like an invisible wall of no-entry, inaccessible to black Americans. As with all other public performances Hendrix gave in Europe, Woodstock was essentially a white liberal celebration attended by nearly half a million of carefree hippies, talking about peace and freedom. Besides Hendrix, there was only one other black musician on the list of thirty-two acts in the three-day event. This is the Other in which Hendrix sees his function, to transgress the grammar of white rock music; to chop it down, with the edge of his black hand on his guitar. On the ‘how’, the black writer Toni Morrison puts it like this:
[I]n terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror that gives me the necessary clarity…The major things black art has to have are these: it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things, and it must look effortless. It must look cool and easy. If it makes you sweat, you haven’t done the work. (Gilroy 1993: 78)
In the video recording of Voodoo Child, we see the improvisational fluidity and control by which Hendrix runs, scratches, and chops his fingers’ edge along the strings of his guitar. The lyrics blend effortlessly with the distortion effect he creates with the amplified feedback from his guitar. But the rendition of lyrics is brief, as if almost a backdrop, against the enduring temporality of the instrumental stretch. It is here where his double consciousness comes to play; where he mimics his subjectivity to the black Other. His facial expression takes on the appearance of a voodoo priest in trance, as he steps with his foot on the Wah pedal for the tonal spectrum of the guitar to a mimic human voice, in an altered state of sublimation. His facial expression, with eyes closed, takes on a spiritual calmness as if he is meditating on memories of his black ancestry. Zombie-like, he holds his mouth open, rounded lips, and mimics the expulsion of the extraordinary sweet guitar tone from his breath, endlessly, inhaling the music in and breathing it out. His image becomes signifier, and by difference to the rock signifier. A widely published photograph of his public performances of voodoo child shows him, in exotic dress, arms in the air, kneeling in front of his burning guitar. Towards the end of the performance he ignites the liquid lighter fuel in the cavity of the guitar, sacrificing his guitar, or perhaps his self, to the Other. But to which Other, the cause of rock music or the cause of his ancestry? It is an imaginary gesture, and it has an arbitrary relation to the symbolic order. It is a symbolic gesture of both consonance and dissonance, of ambivalence. While Voodoo Child takes place at an intermediate space, in-between, as a liminal experience, it is also an historic moment for both the history of rock music and for “the dialogic, performative ‘community’ of black music –rap, dub, scratching –as a way of constituting an open sense of black collectivity in the shifting, changing beat of the present” (Bhabha 1994: 256).
The performance of Voodoo Child is significant when its mode of reception is that of Lacan’s Other as reading strategy. This strategy shows Voodoo Child as an arbitrary signifier to the wider transnational intercultural production in circulation at the Atlantic Ocean. At the core of this strategy is an arbitrary and conventional relationship between the Imaginary and the Other. This relationship has two significant consequences to mode of production in postcolonialism.
First, it dismantles the assumption of authenticity in origin. We saw how the religious practice of voodoo evolved in its journey from West Africa to the Americas and back again. It is the negation of authentic origin that transformed it into a form of resistance or triumph against the effects of marginalisation. We saw that a devastating effect of these invasive and oppressive cultures is its strategy to turn subjects into objects of use; and we saw through the work of Bhabha the weakness, or gap in this strategy is ambivalence.
Second, the arbitrary relationship between Imaginary and Other allows for a re-entry for the colonised –from object to subject. The arbitrary relationship invites the marginalised subject to exploit ambivalence for a comeback through a double consciousness. We saw how the ambivalence of improvisation benefited the production of music. In particular, we saw in a Lacanian reading of Jimmi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child the benefit of a double reading for the marginalised subject and its reception.
Lacan’s theory of Other is a reading strategy that has the power to transform the representation of the relationship between cultural production and its use in postcolonialism.
Bibliography:
Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge
Carusi, A. 1988. Post-structuralism. Pretoria: Unisa.
Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Macey, D. 2000. Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin.
Matory, J.L. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rivkin, J. and Ryan, M. (eds). 2004. Literary Theory, an anthology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Waugh, P. (ed). 2006. Literary Theory and Criticism, an Oxford guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, R. 2003. Postcolonialism: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zizek, S. 2006. How to Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Internet sources:
Video: Jimi Hendrix –Live at Woodstock, 1969 –Voodoo Child
http://vimeo.com/12762009