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SEMINAR SERIES: Screen Cultures – Special Session on Afrofuturism.

by Simon Crisp.

The Screen Cultures series of BCMCR research seminars kicked off with a special session which saw Juice Aleem and Erik Steinskog (University of Copenhagen) talking about the subject of Afrofuturism, its roots, what it is and can be, and why it is important.

I have to admit that going into this session my understanding of Afrofuturism was primarily based on having read a couple of post-Black Panther articles on the subject in the Sunday newspaper supplements. However, recognising these articles didn’t scratch the surface of the subject, let alone do it justice, I was keen to learn more about the concept beyond the idea of black people in space and superhero costumes, as the mainstream media often presents it. I was also eager to explore how Afrofuturism could be considered concerning cultural translation.

As such I was pleased when Juice set out to detail what Afrofuturism “is, isn’t, could be, should be, and used to be” as he put it, and began to talk about the roots of Afrofuturism, the history of its development and the practices of people including Sun Ra and Rammellzee. With this, it became clear the extent to which these key figures, and their Afrofuturism, drew on rich heritage and traditions to present potential futures which were not burdened by more recent histories.

In attempting to relate this to the theme of cultural translation, I initially considered the way in which Afrofuturism’s act of translation of culture was happening not across borders, but into these potential futures. However, Juice then showed us some of Sun Ra’s work, the graffiti of Rammellzee, and the way they lived the reality of their created myths, saying: “This was the reality, again, this is not simply a pop artist putting on a shiny silver hat, but people living it!”

With this, I realised there was also the added dimension of translation which saw these potential futures being lived, and resonating, in the present. Afrofuturism’s act of cultural translation could be seen as not merely taking something from the past and applying to now or to the future, but also be the act of applying that potential future into the now. In thinking about it in this way, it could be suggested that Afrofuturism becomes a multi-stage non-linear process of cultural translation.

In speaking about this practical and present Afrofuturism, Juice said while it was interesting that Black Panther was out and that this got people talking about Afrofuturism, this can be on a very surface level. He went on to talk about people like the ‘Ghetto Gardener’ who works in inner-city areas of LA to get young people planting and taking back their land, saying that this was again a case of myth becoming a reality, and an example of Afrofuturism.

Finally, something else which struck me was the seeming reluctance to adopt the term Afrofuturism. Juice spoke of how Rammellzee rejected the term, and then detailed his relationship with it saying: “The name isn’t important, as much as we are here for Afrofuturism, I’m personally not concerned with that name for a variety of reasons. But it’s something that’s been pointed at me for over a decade, so I’m eventually I’m like, Okay, I’ll do the job, I’ll put that cape on, I’ll put that mask on.”

Having formerly worked as a journalist, Simon Crisp is currently completing the MA in Media and Cultural Studies at BCU. He is interested in researching the role of media representations in creating modern yoga practices. He can be found on the web and on twitter. 

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GUEST POST: Andrew Bain on ‘Teaching – Playing – Researching’

by Andrew Bain

‘Playing and listening to music together provides a cultural space and a cognitive means through which individuals and social groups can coordinate their actions and behaviours’. (Borgo, 2006: 5)

As David Borgo (Sync or Swarm, 2006) alludes to above, the very act of ‘playing’ is a coordination of actions and behaviours, and I ask to what extent is the simple act of ‘playing’ in a group improvised context informed by a reservoir of improvisational knowledge alongside a keen awareness of intelligent transactions? My third and final PhD case study asked these very questions. Completed in December 2017, the project featured improvising musicians Peter Evans (trumpet), John O’Gallagher (saxophone) and Alex Bonney (electronics) in a freely improvised setting with no composed music, no rehearsal and no pre-conceived ideas. We simply played. But what does it mean to ‘simply play’? And is it even possible to have no boundaries within improvised group performance?

As a player, my greatest challenge is finding a way to develop group improvisation; as an educator, my greatest challenge is passing on the tools needed to do the same thing. In my roles as senior lecturer, jazz drummer/composer and emerging researcher, I have been dealing with this confluence for some time. At the heart of my playing and research is the cultivation of an active connection with my conservatoire jazz students aiming to maintain an open dialogue about my mode of working and its relevance to their personal evolutions. In my final thesis chapter, I ask, to what extent has this been successful, and how can my findings contribute to further good practice in higher education?

 

A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London and Manhattan School of Music, NYC, Andrew Bain has performed with many luminaries of the jazz world, and in many major festivals, on both sides of the Atlantic. Andrew is Senior Lecturer in Jazz at the Birmingham Conservatoire and Artistic Director of Jazz for the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland.

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KEY READINGS: Talal Asad on ‘Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’

Cultural Translation and academic appropriation

Talal Asad’s essay, ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’ is one of the key reference points for contemporary thinking around cultural translation.

In the briefest of terms, Talal’s piece responds to a tendency within social anthropology to explain other cultures in terms the researcher already understands. For example, rather than attending to the very specific nuances in the attitudes an indigenous tribe might hold towards holy days or religious festivals, social anthropologists tended  to spot a ‘hidden pattern’ that told him or her about the tribe’s wider religious attitudes, their belief in a system of gods/God, etc. This might not be a problem if the tribe has an understanding of God that matches the anthropologists’ ideas, or indeed if there is a hidden and connected system of meaning that links an idea of God to a holy day to a festival together, or if there is a religion underlies their activities and cements it together conceived in the way an anthropologist conceives it. But this, in Asad’s view, is often not the case.  By ‘detecting’ a pattern of meaning or correspondence between otherwise discreet elements the anthropologist has imposed  their own frame of reference.

For those familiar with poststructuralist/postmodernist theory, this type of cultural translation, which might also be called cultural appropriation, should be immediately recognisable. Asad was after all writing in the 80s, when French thinkers like Foucault and Derrida started to have an impact on a wide range of disciplines. But interestingly Asad extends the argument I set out above to suggest that, in fact, this essentially reductive practice of cultural translation is institutional.  Scholars, he says, habitually take materials gained in the field and, consciously or unconsciously, translate them into a language they understand – that of their own society and culture, yes, but sometimes even into terms of the academy, academic discourse, the norms and terms of the discipline. In our fictional example, this would be the assumption of a network of meaning that can be unpacked and presented to scholars in the West. In doing so, in finding neat objects of study in other cultures that are ready to be exported in academic papers, monographs, etc, the anthropologists also erase the specificities they encounter. He calls this ‘cultural translation’. Asad holds up a significant paper by Ernest Gellner as emblematic of cultural translation:

‘Although it is now many years since Gellner’s paper was first published, it represents a doctrinal position that is still popular today. I have in mind the sociologism according to which religious ideologies are said to get their real meaning from the political or economic structure, and the self-confirming methodology according to which this reductive semantic principle is evident to the (authoritative) anthropologist and not to the people being written about. This position therefore assumes that it is not only possible but necessary for the anthropologist to act as translator and critic at one and the same time. I regard this position as untenable, and think that it is relations and practices of power that give it a measure of viability.’ (p. 164)

What’s perhaps more damning is the use amongst anthropologists of a certain academic rhetoric intended on giving objectivity and uniformity to the field.

‘What we have here is a style easy to teach, to learn, and to reproduce (in examination answers, assessment essays, and dissertations). It is a style that facilitates the textualization of other cultures, that encourages the construction of diagrammatic answers to complex cultural questions, and that is well suited to arranging foreign cultural concepts in clearly marked heaps of “sense” or “nonsense.” Apart from being easy to teach and to imitate, this style promises visible results that can readily be graded. Such a style must surely be at a premium in an established university discipline that aspires to standards of scientific objectivity. Is the popularity of this style, then not a reflection of the kind of pedagogic institution we inhabit?’ (p. 164)

Asad’s point isn’t simply that some anthropologists code other cultures in terms they understand. It’s that the entire discipline, its conventions, institutional practices, and discursive tendencies, is complicit in the practice.

How is it useful for us?

Cultural translation is handy because it very quickly and clearly describes a wide-spread phenomenon, something that takes place at an institutional level, affects the style and mode by which we as scholars communicate, and is tuned in to power relations. It is easy therefore to see how cultural translation is a manifestation of a more general imperialist tendency in Western culture. Scholars who are interested in culture that travels to and from the West will want to take note.

Asad’s critique also forces us to attend to our own writing. Are there assumptions within the way we write that promote or conceal power relations in some way? What are the assumptions we make as media and culture scholars? Are there ways in which we ‘translate’ the culture we examine back into terms (only) academics understand, and, if we do this, if this is part and parcel of scholarship itself, what are the consequences for those more intimately involved in this culture than us?

The idea of cultural translation as an institutional phenomenon is particularly useful for studies that wish to relate individual practices up to broader structural frameworks (see, for example, work in the Creative Industries). Cultural translation, at least in one of its first formulations, is not something that takes place on the intersubjective level alone. Asad’s approach forces us to consider how institutions, organizations, groups, might practice cultural translation.

 

Asad, Talal. “The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology.” Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography 1 (1986): 141-164.

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GUEST POST: Esperança Bielsa on ‘Linguistic Hospitality’

by Dr Esperança Bielsa

(this is an extract from E Bielsa and A Aguilera, ‘Politics of Translation: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4:1, 7-24.)

The fundamental ethnocentrism of translation, the reductive tendency that is present in any culture, makes it necessary to formulate a politics of translation in any cosmopolitan project. A politics of translation based on the ethical purpose of translating, which according to Berman is to open up in writing a certain relation with the other, to fertilize what is one’s own through the mediation of what is foreign. Invoking Derrida’s notion of hospitality, Ricoeur has stated that translators can find happiness in what he calls linguistic hospitality, appealing to a regime of correspondence without adequacy that does not erase the irreducibility of the pair of what is one’s own and what is foreign. Only linguistic hospitality understood as an absolute or unconditional hospitality that lets the strangeness of the foreign tongue arrive and does not hide it under a pretended equivalence or false familiarity will make it possible to fertilize what is one’s own through the mediation of what is foreign. Absolute hospitality, as Derrida points out, breaks with the law of hospitality as a right or as a duty. Beyond the obvious reason that an ethical translation of the other, that is, a translation that does justice to the difference of the other, is not contemplated in any regime of rights, one would need to approach a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality as a responsibility and not as a right. In many instances, this responsibility not only anticipates the law, or is even positioned in certain cases against the norm so that justice can be done, but refers to the circumstances and conditions in which genuine communication can be established. This cannot be articulated from a rights based approach, which approves of any type of communication as long as nobody’s rights are infringed.

An identity that reveals a glimpse of linguistic hospitality could avoid an identity that autoimmunizes itself in processes of closure, of a repetition that is assumed to be eternal but is still ephemeral and fragile, only less flexible and often less resistant and capable of survival. What at the philogenetical level distinguishes intelligence from instinct is not much more than this flexibility, which is impossible to sustain through the preservation of a dogmatic core of origins and essence that the old identitarian identity serves as an idol. There is no lasting tradition that is not renewed by the foreign. Linguistic hospitality allows for this innovation without parting blindly with what deserves to be preserved. Thus, linguistic hospitality could be the core of a politics of translation that is open to the foreign, neither closed nor absolutely open. Where Derridean hospitality would invoke a negative theology without any remaining borders, and where Habermasian tolerance would demand equality across borders, a politics of translation centred on linguistic hospitality draws a porous border in a cosmopolitan space. It really follows a perspective that has led the last Derrida to preserve a minimal nation-state in an international context, and Habermas to insist on a cosmopolitan constitution with few remaining borders. In its short distance from real hospitality, such politics of translation could give social shape to welcoming foreignness, conform it in language, that material of our wakefulness and dreams, of collective longing, that has modified and stirs our flesh, sending it beyond a spirit conceived as mere ideality, beyond culture as a mere symbolic game.

About the contributors:

Antonio Aguilera is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona. He is the author of Hombre y cultura (Trotta 1996) and of introductions to Adorno’s Actualidad de la filosofía (Paidós 1991) and Gehlen’s Antropología filosófica (Paidós 1993). He has published articles on Benjamin and Adorno, and book chapters on aesthetics, ethics and violence, time and history, memory and forgetting, etc.
 
 Esperança Bielsa is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation (Routledge 2016) and The Latin American Urban Crónica (Lexington Books 2006), co-author, with Susan Bassnett, of Translation in Global News(Routledge 2009), and co-editor, with Christopher Hughes, of Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2009).
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CLUSTER STATEMENT: Cultural Translation in Jazz Studies

Each of the six research clusters at BCMCR have produced a statement on what cultural translation means for researchers in their area. The statement for the Jazz Studies cluster is as follows:

“Jazz is a global music whose complex and contested history is inseparable from many of the most important social and political movements of the twentieth-century. It speaks to diverse communities throughout the world on themes of freedom, spontaneity, virtuosity, improvisation, individuality and collectivity, as well as mediating major transformations in the relationship between high art and popular culture. Questions of cultural translation are central to Jazz Studies at BCMCR, and our research frequently looks at the connections between local contexts and the global processes and practices that frame them.  This can include, for example, understanding jazz in specific social and historical contexts, but also how different media such as television and film shapes our experience of jazz. Our work examines how processes of cultural translation take place in and through time, and what is lost in translation, while touching on issues from cultural memory to the politics of improvisation.”

You can find specific examples of research from Jazz Studies scholars at BCU  here.