To Be Poetic or White People Take Everything

deep breath.

i had to read the Sylvia Wynter article, "Ethno or Socio Poetics" more than twice to begin to understand. i had a hard time with the language and the vocabulary, but that made it all the more exhilarating when the same words began to transform from letters in a row to thoughts that made me franticly scribble barely-legible notes in the margins. reviewing my notes now, it seems that they are mostly just paraphrases of the author's ideas in more accessible words for myself. still, i'd like to spend some space reflecting on definitions as relations or "a relation between We and an Other."

part 1.
i was really able to follow the author's explanations of how identities are/have become/were forced to become relationships. but i do not fully follow her point that jazz allowed blacks to reinvent "themselves as a WE that needed no OTHER to constitute their Being." In some ways, I understand how art allows creation that is not confined to opposites. I find Wynter's point confusing though because it seems to me like there is still a white other. She states in the same paragraph that the popular oral culture created by the black was in response to white negation of black humaness. that makes me think that there is still a that helps define what black popular culture is. maybe i am not fully understanding the idea of definitions as relations. but maybe, despite the fact that there is no tangible other that serves to define jazz music, still the existence of jazz and how it is defined as a musical genre is somehow deeply related to being different than white culture. right? is that possible?

but, then again, it seems possible that something could be created in response to something else, but need not be dependent on that first thing to define its being...

i think that Wynter's use of music as the example of how this is possible is particularly poignant. trying to name and define music and music genres reminds me of an ethnomusicology class that i once took. on the first day of class, the professor played a song and then asked us to describe what it sounded like. it was nearly impossible. each person who tried, ended up saying things like "its was like a beep bop bo bop." part of the point of the exercise was to show that music was a not just another way to express oneself, it was not just a different adjective that could be simply substituted in a sentence, it was an alternate means for expressing experiences and feelings that we do not have the language to relate, to describe. so then, does using music as the example of a "concretely universal ethnos" work because music itself is so hard to describe and define? is that exactly the point? i mean, is that why Wynter suggests that art/poetics/creative processes the way to cease relying on exclusion? oh. did i just write myself into an insight?

part 2.
I want to stay in this same part of the article and continue to talk about definitions as relations and share a thought that i had while reading that isn't part of the posed questions. i first started really understanding and connecting with the piece during my first read-through when i got to the part on page 84 that talks about the "NORMATIVE MODEL OF MAN." Wynter describes European culture being "posited as a gold standard of value, its possession acting as a definition of...humanity" and then explains how written tradition, not oral tradition came to be identified with culture and humanity. She continues with, "The myth of the cultural void of the non-West--The Other--was to be central to the ideology which the West would use in its rise to world domination." When I first read this I stopped at the end of that sentence, looked up at my fellow subway riders, and began thinking about how the meaning of the word "culture" has changed and what is often implied now when folks speak about "having culture." i wondering who my co-rideers would identify as culturally void today.
(so, being white and having studied anthropology in undergrad, i spent a lot of time in the early years thinking about other people's cultures, mourning my "lack of culture," and wishing for "more culture" before even recognizing what it meant about white privilege, white supremacy, and white ethnocentricity to think in these ways).

still ruminating from this twist, i continued reading until i reached the NORMATIVE MODEL OF MAN phrase screaming at me in all caps. it clicked in my head then how european/white culture could easily transform/abstract from defining itself as the pinnacle of CULTURE to becoming the dominant, standard of culture and therefore the norm, or normal, plain, unexotic, un-noticeable culture (to the dominators). yet, becoming the normative model has created a sense of "lack of culture" for many white people. this can often lead to white people "going in search of real culture" i.e. cultures of the Others and then appropriating it for themselves. this cultural appropriation can then lead to fucked-up "white ally" behavior, increased stereotyping of the non-white cultures, and increased alienation in us/other definitions of self.

thinking through this chain of actions got me thinking more intensely about cultural appropriation and why its so bad. i immediately re-read the section about black popular culture constituting a universal ethnos and it struck me profoundly: cultural appropriation of the very art that black folks created to reinvent themselves as fully human (necessitated by white dehumanization of blacks) means white people taking everything. i immediately wrote in huge caps over the top of my print out

WE TAKE EVERYTHING

fuck. and then in this moment of revelation, i still can hear my own words in a conversation many years ago before i even knew what cultural appropriation was: "but if i want to have dreads, why shouldn't i be able to?"

and my friend's simple reply: "because they are not yours to have."

part 3.
i am going to have to leave off without finishing my last part, but i want to include my notes here so that i can return to it as i think about it more. i want to respond to prof gumbs question about whether its effective to define through exclusion. in my work at an LGBT center in Queens I have often struggled with questions of safe space and inclusion/exclusion particularly as it relates to perceived identities, infinite self-identities, and rubrical institutionalized identifiers. more on this soon...

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notes:
d) effective to define through exclusion? (think of LGBT and struggles to create safe, inclusive, but still (blank) spaces and the trouble with language/term/identity that ensues