‘Sun Ra, Queer Afro-Fabulation, and Music Theory’
This is a brief talk I gave for the 2022 Society for Music Theory Queer Resource Group, in advance of the publication of Queer Ear (ed. Gavin Lee), which is coming out soon with Oxford University Press. My chapter in the book is titled “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson.” This talk is mostly a summary of the chapter, but the last third turns to a rumination on anti-anti-normativity following some recent scholarship that troubles one of queer theory’s central tenets.
I’m thrilled to be part of this session to have the opportunity to talk a little about my work on queer music theory. I’d boil my project down to three main themes. The first—which is slightly tacet in my chapter but conceptually omnipresent—is Marion Guck’s concept of ‘analytical fictions’, the notion that even well-worn technical music-theoretical terms and concepts are deployed in creative ways that reflect the subjective orientations of positioned analysts. I’m especially drawn to Guck’s efforts to defamiliarize music-theoretical concepts, which she refers to as “making them strange.” I would insist they were never un-strange to begin with; in doing so, I repeat in the context of music theory a point Sara Ahmed makes about phenomenology: that both inquiry practices have always been a little queer.
My second theme develops this further. Three analytic touchpoints that thread through a lot of my work—Afrofuturism as methodology, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and queer theory—find common ground in the term ‘fabulation’. I develop this concept in concrete terms in my chapter, examining Sun Ra’s practice of inventing genealogical space-time trajectories: new mythic pasts, polysemous present expressions, utopian future worlds. Fabulation is a hermeneutic method that insists that meaning is not simply there to be found but is creatively invented through transversal practices that imaginatively connect source to source, concept to concept. Sun Ra refers to this inventive practice as “equations” and to his role in creating them as “myth-science.” Cultural theorist Tavia Nyong’o refers to them “acts of afro-fabulation” that “operate as a queer hack of the codes of an anti-Black world.” Both frameworks have promiscuous implications for music theory.
My third theme extends specifically from queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, namely his conceptions of disidentification, temporality, and utopia. Disidentification—quoting now from my chapter—refers to “an ongoing series of performative acts that resist ideology, reconfigure the self, and subvert binary categories. [It] is not an eschewal of dominant power structures or discourses, but a series of actions that work within and dissemble or queer them.” In terms of temporality and utopia, Muñoz seeks to contest what he calls the “autonaturalizing temporality of straight time” via “a queer utopian hermeneutics.” Quoting again from my chapter, “In contrast to a normative metaphysics of presence, Muñoz orients us toward what could otherwise be”; now citing Muñoz, “the future is queerness’s domain.”
Beneath these three themes lies a conceit that music theory can be found anywhere, including and especially in undercommons or fugitive practices like jazz. Anyone can be a music theorist. And that performance is a form of music analysis, at least potentially so, so when a musician like Sun Ra signifies on the music that came before him, we can productively think of what they’re doing as a form of analytic exegesis. But here’s where fabulation comes back in: Sun Ra’s performance-as-analysis folds and unfolds space and time in order, for example, to make some music of the past quite literally signify on Afrodiasporic musical expressions from other times and places. In the larger context of queer afro-fabulation, Tavia Nyong’o refers to this in turn as “polytemporality” and as the product of a “fugitive present” that operates outside of representational capture and makes the latter impossible.
My chapter is titled ‘Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson’. There’s a proliferation of names and naming already evident in the title, which we can read as a fabulatory form of performativity theory. Sun Ra was born Herman Blount and effected multiple name changes through early adulthood. Fletcher Henderson was a swing-era bandleader and composer who was a key figure in the first integrated big band (Benny Goodman’s orchestra) in the 1930s and was a young Sun Ra’s employer in Chicago in the early 1950s. The second half of my chapter orbits around Sun Ra’s 1980s performance of a 1932 song titled ‘Queer notions’, composed by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, who at the time was a member of Henderson’s orchestra. Henderson wrote the arrangement, and it is impossible to separate Hawkins the composer from Henderson the arranger from orchestra’s recording. Likewise Sun Ra: his “Arkestra,” which according to Tim Stüttgen itself went through over forty name changes over its leader’s career, is in many ways irreducible from Sun Ra the individual. All of these historical facts, as well as a wealth of musical ones, figure into Sun Ra’s version of “Queer Notions,” which I describe as a drag performance.
The 1932 recording was already subverting the codes of its time via the song’s harmonic syntax, formal structure, use of repetition, and more. It was doing so, however, strictly within the functional boundaries of those codes, with recognizable dance rhythms, tight ensemble precision, and little moments of cadential closure that interrupt the music’s antiteleological unfolding.
Sun Ra’s reimagining repeats all of these but as camp exaggeration – faster, ragged, always on the verge of losing control but never quite doing so, adding depths of texture, not least through the extreme playfulness of individualized expression of every member of the Arkestra – what Fred Moten calls “the dense erotics of arrangement, the whole of the text working like the whole of the body working like the whole of the orchestra” — as I suggest in the chapter, “the Arkestra’s collective enunciation needs those individuated dynamic arcs, those bent notes and intonational proclivities. A clean, homogeneous ensemble expression would quite literally say something different—by erasing difference.” What’s important here is how Sun Ra and his Arkestra disidentify with the well known pervasive practice of “signifying” in jazz by slyly refiguring what it means to do so in the first place. The music in this way becomes an ensemble expression of Sun Ra’s own performative persona: as we see in many interviews, in his stage banter, in his films, we can never tell when he is being deadly serious or when he is having a go at us, and it seems quite likely that he’s doing both at the same time, all the time.
I’ll conclude with a brief postscript on anti-anti-normativity, a theme that has been emerging in queer studies recently. In a recent article, Annamarie Jagose summarizes how antinormativity came to be posed as perhaps the bedrock principle of queer theory, as a “placeholder for a potentially infinite coalition of political subjects,” drawing upon Teresa de Lauretis’s early work, and as a “strategically underdefined” form of resistant positionality, channeling David Halperin. As such, queer theory runs the risk of, on one hand, fixing itself as its own normalizing force, and on the other, losing its political and theoretical efficacy through its very diffusion.
The antinormative, in all this, becomes an ongoing strategy by queer theory “to authorize itself via a series of apparently self-effacing, nonterritorial gestures.” Jagose describes these gestures as “product differentiation,” a “durational strategy” that secures the future as the domain of the queer, and a politically valent “aspirational horizon.” While this to me sounds like a somewhat deflationary account of the terrain of what queer theory has accomplished as an interstitial non-discipline, her points are well taken. In fact, in a recent dust-up here in Australia over the way Jagose herself has deployed foundational concepts from queer theory to defend neoliberal austerity moves she has made in her role as executive dean of arts and sciences at the University of Sydney has underscored what can happen when critical concepts are fixed as tools for disciplinary power.
But back to Jagose’s article. Jagose performs some moving genealogical work on parallel 1990 publications by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. While she focuses on Gender Trouble, I’d like to close by attending to her brief engagement with Epistemology of the Closet. While Butler provides the richest theoretical ballast this side of Foucault for understanding the ways in which norms are formed through operations of power and discursive interpellation, Sedgwick’s text, then as well as now, seems to contain crucial seeds for properly understanding how an antinormativity can continue to resist its own reification as a counter-norm. As Jagose summarizes, Espistemology of the Closet “has come to represent a commitment to taxonomical proliferation and the rich haze of variation ... [giving weight] to the flexible—even the random, incoherent and unpredictable—character” of the normative system itself, “getting a feel for normativity’s ‘secrete reserves of elasticity’,” citing Sedgwick for that last wily point. In other words, rather than an always potentially politically subversive Other coded into antinormativity as one term of an antagonistic binary, Sedgwick illuminates the differentiating forces always already at work in the space of the normative itself. As a Deleuzian, I’m of course deeply attracted to this idea. As Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson write in the Introduction to the same volume that Jagose’s article appears in, antinormativity “is antinormative ... in a way that it presumably does not intend: it turns systemic play ([differentiations, attenuations, etc.]) into unforgiving rules and regulations and so converts the complexity of moving athwart into the much more anodyne notion of moving against.” Hence the (potential) trouble with “anti-” as a positional framework.
And here, again, is where Sun Ra’s own historiography becomes important. To a greater degree than any other jazz musician, Sun Ra plays with tradition, convention, syntax, time and place, fact and fantasy. Sun Ra’s music is deliberately, strategically, and always playfully capacious, and as such it invents, or perhaps reveals, the very capaciousness of jazz’s own norms. There’s nothing anti- in Sun Ra’s music*, only, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, pure affirmation.
*Sun Ra’s position on women in jazz and in jazz’s organizational structures is problematic, however: see Beal (2011).