Return to the Echo Chamber Race, Sound and the Future of Community (Excerpt)

An essay in which the author explores how the sounds of“Africa” became in the diaspora a metaphor of distance, a space populated and inscribed by the echoic longings of oppressed peoples who could only project their local struggles as universal desires. Though inspirational to many a continental movement, those “Africas” would also often lock actual Africans out of its secondary systems of racial and cultural meaning, privileging the listening of the diaspora, the echoes over the sound. For example, “Africa” in these Caribbean or diasporic soundings would ever be located in the past, and that past would either be noble racial romance or a colonialist ruin. The colonial and neo-colonial politics of, say, Jamaica or Cuba or the United States would take priority in these appeals to the motherland despite the actual historical attempts to create workable global resistance movements. The question as to what continental Africans may have wanted from sound was rarely ever asked, but always assumed, skin being here a faulty metaphor for ideological solidarity or cultural continuity.