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The Caribbean Oral Tradition pp 129–165Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Utterance, Against Orality, Beyond Textuality

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Abstract

The notion of orality seems always to be haunted by the textuality that it is not (or worse still, is plaintively hoped to be equal to). By extension, the linkage of orality and Blackness is constituted by Euromodernity in two senses. Firstly, by being conceived as “alterity,” it is limited by being defined negatively by the whiteness it is not, just as orality is constructed in reference to the textuality it is not. Secondly, Blackness-cum-orality is constructed along classically Eurological models of peoplehood by dint of a transcendent historicity, erecting an edifice of transcendent identity over a more immanent and locally salient practice of community. This essay proposes a means of engaging aspects of Black ways of being in the world that constitute themselves in their own terms, by examining a non-canonical Black cultural complex: the traditional musical practices of the Black populations of southwestern Colombia. The essay comprises an invitation to observe Black aesthetics less through a hermeneutics of depth—that is, for its underlying syntagmatic structures and hidden historical meanings—than by attending to its surfaces, its gestures, the effects it has as bodily, social and spiritual practice—that is, as a social activity with the concrete political ramifications of building communities and articulating their values out of disparate individuals. If the hermeneutics of depth treat orality as text to be plumbed, I hope to offer instead a means to understand utterance, as a gesture to be traced.

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  1. Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Michael Birenbaum Quintero

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  1. Bowdoin College, Brunwick, USA

    Hanétha Vété-Congolo

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Quintero, M.B. (2016). Utterance, Against Orality, Beyond Textuality. In: Vété-Congolo, H. (eds) The Caribbean Oral Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32088-5_5

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