Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by John Lowe

Johnson's prescient pronouncement was both an assertion and a challenge. Cognizant, as few were at the time, of the amplitude and excellence of African American culture, he was troubled that it would constantly remain a light hid under a bushel basket.

Subsequently, other writers and intellectuals took it upon themselves to pick up the challenge - to add to the heritage, yes, but also to bring it to the attention of the rest of the nation. No one did more in this regard, perhaps, than the late Ralph Ellison, whose remarkable achievements in fiction, as well as literary and cultural criticism, were based both in a thorough knowledge of classic monuments of Western and, especially, modernist literature as well as in a comprehensive and loving appreciation of the Afrocentric tradition in American social and cultural life. His chief avenue of approach to this lode was the rich vein of African American music, particularly jazz, which contributed many metaphors and coinages to Ellison's critical lexicon.

Ellison's lead has found many echoes in critical discourse, and one of the most impressive has now appeared in the form of Craig Werner's learned, witty, and altogether refreshing analysis of the complex relationship between Eurocentric postmodernism and African American cultural formations, Playing the Changes. Without sounding a note of condemnation, Werner helps correct the recurring error of many postmodernist scholars who have ignored the important contributions African American culture has made to modernism and, now, postmodernism. Rediscovering these connections, Werner argues, helps recoup a "moral center," one that resituates scholarly discourse around values that support individual development and democracy. Conversely, however, he lingers over the intriguing differences as well, while delving deeper than virtually any preceding critic into the overlapping dialogues of jazz and letters. In this way, the book in some ways extends an argument developing recently in books such as Eric Lott's Love and Theft and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, which interrogate the contributions of African Americans to the construction of "whiteness" and "white" culture.

One problem does emerge early on, however. Werner quite rightly praises Robert Stepto's paradigm of ascent/immersion in African American letters (articulated in the landmark book From Behind the Veil) and selects it as a corollary to his own pairing of terms, linking ascent with modernism and immersion with Afrocentrism. While this formula, used throughout Playing the Changes, serves Werner well in many cases, it simplifies the cultural production done within each realm. Zora Neale Hurston would certainly have objected to this divorce of modernism from folk culture, as even a cursory reading of her "Characteristics of Negro Expression" and "Art and Such" reveals.

Werner groups the essays in the book around some intriguing concepts. The first, "Afro-Modernist Dialogues," moves us through the case for linking the two crucial paradigms of the title via four essays on, respectively, Charles Chesnutt, African American responses to Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Melvin Tolson. Each set of ruminations usefully employs a postmodern set of critical instruments in tandem with Afrocentric modes of reading. In the second part, "Studies in African-American Poetics," Werner moves to a consideration of the tensions between Eurocentric written and Afrocentric oral forms, the Black Arts Movement, and African American drama. The final section, "Playing the Changes: Gospel, Blues, Jazz," presents four concluding essays exploring the relation that exists between African American musical and literary aesthetics, especially as both fields generate/interact with a modernist mode. Major writers find new interpretations here, alongside readings of more recent artists and extended readings of unjustly ignored writers; Werner provides a fine take, for instance, on Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, reminding us of her dazzling avant-garde daring.

The book begins, however, with a look at the "ancestors" of Afrocentric modernism. Like Sundquist (whose book apparently appeared after the completion of Werner's manuscript), Werner finds Charles Chesnutt to be a key figure in ur-formations of modernism, particularly in his complex literary use of masking strategies, which Werner rightly connects to devices in "Uncle Remus" tales that Joel Chandler Harris may not have fully understood. Werner's musings on Chesnutt are altogether too brief, however, and this proves true of many of the other writers Werner must necessarily scant in carrying out his encyclopedic agenda.

For Werner, the cultural production and criticism of writers and musicians who had "synthetic multicultural sensibilities" - such as Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Brooks, Armstrong, and Ellison - have led, directly or indirectly, to many contemporary art forms such as rap and contemporary jazz, African American women's thought, Afrocentrism in its many guises, and the overriding question, which also preoccupies postmodernists, of how to "communicate visions of new possibilities - psychological, aesthetic, or political - to an increasing resistant audience." Werner concentrates his analysis on three varying strands of the musical tradition, which he calls the gospel, blues, and jazz impulses. All of these, Werner argues, are profoundly based in the overriding and African-inspired tradition of call and response, which he maps in some detail. Utilizing this self-fashioned "instrument," Werner is able to "play" a considerable number of changes himself, because he has read so widely, not just in African American "texts" of all sorts, but also in American and continental literatures that have profoundly influenced African American writing. His thoughtful and provocative chapter "Afro-American Responses to Faulkner," for example, displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the Mississippian's work, but also of the complex uses Faulkner makes of Afro-American culture, which in turn had their effect on subsequent writers within that tradition. Although some of Werner's arguments seem presentist, in the main they prove persuasive, especially as they culminate in a tribute to Ernest Gaines's acceptance and transcendence of Faulknerian concepts of race.