Abstract
In the prefatory section of her interview with writer Wanda Coleman, the critic Priscilla Ann Brown recalls a conversation among friends about an avant-garde poet whose work, despite receiving “several accolades,” had yet to garner critical attention commensurate with her artistry. Brown writes, “One of my friends and I were talking about writers who were ‘funky’ and ‘pushing the edges’ of several genres.”1 Implicit in Brown’s usage of the word “funky” are several important points: (1) a community of speakers agree on at least one common meaning of the word “funk”; (2) “funk” pertains to aesthetics in various forms of cultural expression; (3) “funky” writing is innovative insofar as it “push[es] the edges”; and (4) many creative and critical expressions of “funk[ativity]” remain largely unexamined by critics. Although Brown’s questions don’t refer specifically to funk, her comments provide a point of departure for my introduction. Recall Brown’s reference to the paucity of critical attention devoted to Coleman’s “funky” writing. This invisibility isn’t anomalous. The same could be said about Jayne Cortez, Sterling Plummp, and Talib Kweli. They too are funky poets. At issue is the process in which American cultural institutions respond to black vernacular concepts and practices.
It may be defined as a repository of meanings that comprise the subjective knowledge of a people, its immanent thoughts, its structures, and its practices; these thoughts, structures, and practices are transferred and understood unconsciously but become conscious and culturally objective in practice and perception.
Samuel Floyd
Quite understandably [the “scientists”] have had problems with funk and soul.
Stephen Henderson
Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies.
Toni Morrison
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Notes
Priscilla Ann Brown, “What Saves Us: An Interview with Wanda Coleman,” Callaloo. 26, no. 3 (2003): 635–661.
Norman Kelley, “Notes on the Political Economy of Black Music.” In Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music. Ed. Norman Kelley, (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 7.
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983), 104–105.
Dizzy Gillespie, qtd. in Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (New York: Continuum, 2001), 671.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47.
George Clinton, qtd. in Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1996), 31.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 332.
Yusef Lateef, qtd. in Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 243.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, qtd. in Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6.
Amiri Baraka, Black Music (R&B and the New Black Music) (New York: De Capo Press, 1998 [1968]), 181.
Federico Garcia Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” in Search of Duende (New York: New Directions, 1998), 49.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 37.
Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 91.
Grand Master Caz, qtd. in Robin D.G. Kelley, “Looking for the ‘Real’ Nigga,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 131.
Kool Keith, qtd. in Street Conscious Rap, ed. James G. Spady, Charles G. Lee, and H. Samy Alim (Philadelphia: Black History Museum Umum/ Loh Publishers, 1999), 109.
Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 37.
Andrew Bartlett, “Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the HipHop Sample: Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 394–406.
I’m borrowing Antonio Gramsci’s term. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals aren’t distinguished less by their professions than their actual work in creating ideas and/or organizing efforts and talents of their particular class. Although he believed that the peasantry—and, presumably, its progeny, the lumpen proletariat—didn’t “elaborate” its own intellectuals to engage the contradictions that are peculiar to its class, I prefer to emphasize Gramsci’s statement that all social groups create within the dynamics of their specific historical experiences thinkers who express the ideals, perspectives, values, concerns, and contradictions of the group in question. Hence, the phrase organic intellectual, as opposed to traditional intellectuals, for example, professors, scientists, doctors, and so on. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Katrina Hazzard-Donald, “Dance in Hip-Hop Culture,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 505–516.
Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its Music from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140.
Arthur Marshall, qtd. in Michael Holman, “Breaking: The History,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 33.
Verta Mae Grosvenor, qtd. in John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 251.
Dude Bottley, quoted in Danny Barker, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville, ed. Alyn Shipton (New York: Cassell, 1998), 31.
Stephen Henderson describes a comical example of this phenomenon. Writing in 1973 when blacks had substituted “funk” for “soul” as a signifier of cultural distinctiveness, Stephen Henderson points out that Time magazine ran a story on “soul” that included a “do-it-yourself-kit” for readers who may have been curious to determine their own levels of soul. In all seriousness, however, the essay was written to ascertain “what that quality [of soul] was and even determined the people and literary characters who possessed it. Among them were Jackie Kennedy, Caliban (but not Ariel), and other personages, white and black” (Henderson 97–98). Of course, it’s hardly surprising that Time’s reading of “soul” contrasts sharply with the meanings that black speakers ascribed to it. Commenting on an essay published in Newsweek wherein the author quotes African Americans, Henderson writes, “What the people said was that’ soul’ was the Black lifestyle …” (98). This definition is similar to one given to Henderson himself. See Stephen Henderson, “Inside the Funk Shop: A Word on Black Words,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 97–101.
See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
Cornel West, qtd. in Anne Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 24.
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© 2008 Tony Bolden
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Bolden, T. (2008). Theorizing the Funk: An Introduction. In: Bolden, T. (eds) The Funk Era and Beyond. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61453-6_2
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