Inada And Jazz Essay Research Paper Juliana

Inada And Jazz Essay, Research Paper

Juliana Chang

While jazz and blues rhythms and aesthetics have been

used by a number of Asian American poets, Inada’s poetry stands out in its consistency and

depth of engagement with jazz. Inada himself cites jazz as the strongest influence on his

writing. His collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) begins with a

whimsical portrait of a Japanese American figure playing "air bass"; it includes

tributes to jazz musicians and singers such as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Billie

Holiday; and it ends with poems written for Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. His more

recent Legends from Camp (1992) has a whole section of poems titled

"Jazz." In addition to the Haiku-like sequence "Listening Images," it

includes poems written as tributes to Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, and

others.

Inada’s recognition of the cultural authority of the African American jazz musician

participates in an African American cultural practice of counter-legitimation, a practice

that implicitly critiques and refuses the authority of dominant institutions and

knowledges. Thus his jazz poetics works to redress the pain of racial trauma by enacting

an alternative to the dominant time of the nation. His jazz poetics of repetition and

improvisation enable re-stagings and re-workings of a troubled past, while his poetics of

syncopation enact the rhythm and status of the racially marginalized subject as one

outside standard national historic time.

Yet several questions are raised when we frame Inada’s poetics as cross-racial

practice. How might we think through Asian American subject formation as mediated through

African American culture in Legends from Camp. What are the implications of the

Asian American subject being enabled by an African American cultural form to redress

racial trauma and rearticulate power. What are the ethics and economics of this

cross-racial practice. Inada’s jazz poetics is a site of cross-racial identification that

enables us to think beyond the centering of whiteness that the binary of "colored v.

white" produces. In its engagement with a predominantly African American music, his

writing provides an alternative to thinking of the "American" in "Asian

American" as white American culture. However, I am not proposing Inada’s poetics as a

model of cross-racial cultural hybridity that conflates and flattens out the differences

between two very distinctive modes of racialization. Cross-racial cultural identification

in Inada’s writing is not simply assumed because of one’s analogous status as a racially

subordinated subject, but rather is earned through practice as the labor of learning how

to read and produce codes of alternative knowledges.

Given the history of the commodification and consumption of African American culture,

and the ascription of a symbolic value to African American culture that does not translate

into political power, the use of African American cultural practices by a non-African

American writer provokes an interrogation of the economics of cross-racial cultural

appropriation. In its more pernicious forms, culturally appropriative acts use the culture

of a subordinated group to compensate for some perceived lack in one’s own subject

position and culture, while disavowing and reproducing the power inequalities that

constitute such "cultural differences." Inada’s jazz writings acknowledge the

centrality of African American culture to the formation of U.S. national subjects that are

not necessarily African American. However, Inada is very explicit about the specific

racial history that has engendered the Japanese American subject. He does not disavow or

abdicate his own subject position. His identification with African American culture is not

so much compensatory or substitutive as affiliative. For the subject of Legends,

jazz provides a sense of belonging that is not provided by other forms of U.S. culture or

politics. The introduction to the section "Jazz" describes the institutional

forces and material contexts that produce and are experienced by racially subordinated

young people. Although they are excluded in racially specific and distinctive ways from

dominant U.S. culture and politics, they respond to this disenfranchisement by building

alternative codes of legitimation, codes that they use to signal networks of affiliation

with each other. Cross-racial identification is not a given, but is articulated through

practices of knowledge formation and code-reading. The introduction to "Two

Variations on a Theme by Thelonious Monk" begins with a quote: "I can’t do that

right. I have to practice that." This quote is ascribed to "Thelonious Monk,

composer, to his pianist (himself)…" The introduction then takes us through three

deca

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать