Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility

“Whatdo air, breath, andbreathinghave todowith black performance, with Blackpentecostal aesthetics?” Ashon Crawley asks (33). Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, a lush meditation on black living, black precarity, and black aesthetics, provides an answer. Crawley focuses on Black Pentecostalism, a multiracial, multiclass, and multinational Christian sect, a strand of which congealed in Los Angeles, California, in 1906. However, as the author makes clear, this book is not a history of Pentecostalism. In making a distinction between belief and practice, Crawley traces a black aesthetic that crops up from this distinctly black pentecostal repertoire. Exaltations including shouting, noisemaking, whooping, and speaking in tongues are, he argues, collective, communal modes of black pneuma. They represent what Crawley calls “otherwise possibilities” that, by nature of their very constitution, challenge racialized knowledges and the violence inherent to such categorization. Crawley understands “otherwise” as copious and imaginative, as “a word that names plurality as its core operation, otherwise bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped” (24). Antiblackness depends on shortening, if not extinguishing, black breath, and Crawley pursues black lifeworlds that are insurgent precisely because they insist on black collective aliveness. “These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences” the author writes, “are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture” (4). He continues: “What I am arguing throughout is that the disruptive capacities found in the otherwise world of Blackpentecostalism is but one example of how to produce a break with the known, the normative, the violent world of western thought and material condition” (4). Breath, although individualized, is a group activity, one inherently involved in a practice of sharing. Thus, breath is at once indexical of the violent strictures that bridle black life, even while it (a Blackpentecostal aesthetic) exceeds the boundaries of that violence. Black flesh is treated, he writes, as “discardable, as inherently violent and antagonistic, as necessarily in need of removal, remediation,” and yet black folks have always enacted performative modes, reliant on breathing, that refuse the indignity of this fact (1). Very early in the book Crawley argues that black social life is an abolitionist politics; from there on he shows us just how alive, effusive, and fleshy abolition can be. In chapter 1, “Breath,” Crawley outlines his black breath framework, turning his attention to Blackpentecostal women preachers and their “whooping” practices. By extending what he calls “blackness pneumatology,” Crawley argues “that Blackpentecostal whooping during preaching and praying responds to the eclipsing of black breath through aesthetic breathing” (27). In the second chapter, “Shouting,” the author offers “choreographic itinerary and protocol” to detail the intimacy between sound and movement within Blackpentecostal traditions. Shouting refuses the distinction between sound and dance; it thus demands a different interpretive framework through which to make sense of its particular efficacy. Chapter 3, “Noise,” takes on testimony and tarrying to show “how Blackpentecostal choreosonics manifest resistance that exists before and against the power and force of aversion” (144). In the fourth and final chapter, “Tongues,” Crawley writes about the relationship between flesh, breath, and “speaking in tongues.” Regarding the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Crawley considers “how knowledge is produced and transformed in the setting of the university, how these institutional settings often require a reduction of black sound, of blackness, of Blackpentecostal aesthetic practice” (29). It is the second chapter, “Shouting,” on which I would like to linger, since its resonances with and implications for dance studies abound. Here, the author considers Calvinist theology and Enlightenment philosophy to approach the spatial movements that contribute


Ashon T. Crawley Blackpentecostal Breath:
The Aesthetics of Possibility New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.320 pp.
Ashon T. Crawley's path-breaking monograph troubles disciplinary boundaries, braiding together performance theory, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, and continental philosophy to make room for "Black Study."Like the aesthetic practices it examines, Blackpentecostal Breath rebels against the alleged coherence of theology's and philosophy's intellectual silos, freeing the "radical potentiality of the object[s] of study" (15).Each of the project's focitestifying, tarrying, shouting, whooping, and speaking in tongues-is a formative feature of "Blackpentecostalism," which the author defines as "a social, musical, intellectual form of otherwise life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing otherwise possibilities" (6).As this provocative definition suggests, there is much to be learned from the Crawley's portmanteau Blackpentecostal: its refusal to bifurcate mutually constitutive categories-in this case, "blackness" and "pentecostalism"-enunciates the book's fundamental critique.
Crawley's resistance to academic categorical distinctions flows from evidence that the effects of these distinctions have not only been "academic."Through their alliances with racial forms of categorization, many conventional modes of intellection have contorted their objects of inquiry and repressed various vulnerable groups of people.In contrast, Black Study disrupts "the epistemology, the theology-philosophy, that produces a world, a set of protocols, wherein black flesh cannot easily breathe" (3).This subversive hermeneutic is consonant with Crawley's view that "black social life has been the constant emergence of abolition as the grounding of its existence, the refusal of violence and violation as a way of life, as quotidian.Black social life, to be precise, is an abolitionist politic, it is the ongoing 'no,' a black disbelief in the conditions under which we are told we must endure" (6).Black Study, then, is an "otherwise" method, a "mode of intense, spiritual, communal intellectual practice and meditative performance" (8).
In Blackpentecostal Breath, Crawley enacts the aforementioned ethic, moving with aplomb across media-art, sound, text-and forms-fiction, autobiography, theology-philosophy, and analysis-to illuminate the possibilities to which Blackpentecostal aesthetic practice gives expression.In Chapter 1, he uses the homiletic practice of "whooping" to theorize "breath" as both the fundamental animating force in Blackpentecostalism and the unruly excess that is missing from conventional approaches to pneumatology.Chapter 2 turns to the genre of ecstatic movement known as "shouting," arguing that this performance of moving flesh resists distinctions between "choreosonic" elements, yielding a critique of spatiotemporal coherence and the "aversions to blackness" endemic to Calvinist theology and Enlightenment philosophy.Chapter 3, "Noise," hears in the joyful cacophony produced in moments of "testifying" and "tarrying" a critique of racial capitalism and teleological concepts of history.Chapter 4, "Tongues," uses debates about the ethics of ecstatic speech, glossolalia, and xenolalia to resist liberal concepts of subjectivity and canonical arrangements of knowledge in the university, reasserting the need for Black Study.In the coda, a Blackpentecostal instrument, the Hammond B-3 organ, becomes a site from which to explore the nature of being-in-the-collective, which produces a kind of "nothing music," an idiom that is no less productive than breath.
One of the book's central contributions is a nuanced approach to questions of authorship and history-a genealogical method that promises to illuminate the fraught politics of origins that animates many sacred traditions.While careful to note that the book is not a history of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century, Crawley argues against a canonical origin story for Blackpentecostalism, proposing that this "multiracial, multiclass, multinational Christian sect…finds one strand of its genesis in 1906 Los Angeles, California" (4, italics added).In so doing, he contends that figures including William Seymour, Charles Parham, and Lucy Farrow and places like Los Angeles's Azuza Street "lived into" the "energetic field" of practices that circulated well "before they were called Blackpentecostal, before a group cohered on Bonnie Brae Street for prayer in April 1906" (7).Instead of history, then, Blackpentecostal Breath pursues rhizomatic lineages in the conviction that "performance constitutes a tradition" (8).
By taking aesthetic practices seriously, this book invites music scholars to think, not just about what performances and idioms mirror or contradict, but also about what they produce, to consider the material of sound as the substance of faith.Crawley's engagement with musical sound is exemplary-both accessible and affective.Although he does not describe himself as a musicologist, Crawley's practical experience with the material is apparent in his descriptive vignettes, such as this brief discussion of the popular praise chorus Yes, Lord: This word, this "yes," chanted seven times, descending up and down the scale to the key's resolve only to begin again.Then a break, from "yes" to "yes, lord."Punctuating the chant are hand claps, are the sounds of the bass and snare drum, of the cymbals, of Saints praising noiselike together."Crawley's elevation of practice over canonical notions of belief offers a model for detailing the beauty found in traditions that do not consistently celebrate the beauty of all lives without ignoring that inconsistency.Against the injunctions that work to limit the openness of many Blackpentecostal communities, Crawley argues that "something is there, in the aesthetic practices, aesthetic practices that are collective intellectual performances, that serve as antagonistic to the very doctrines of sin and flesh that so proliferate within the world" (24).The critique might be said to imagine, not a new Pentecostalism, but an otherwise Pentecostalism, one generated from the materiality of the culture.
Blackpentecostal Breath also contributes a model for thinking about musical collectives.Pushing back against philosophical preoccupations with solitary subjectivities, theological fascinations with individual belief, and musicological fixations on singular voices, Crawley pursues an "extra-subjective" sociality that is defined by openness.This "egalitarian mode of spirit" constitutes a robustly choral kind of musicking, one shaped by the book's focus on breath, which is the condition of possibility for all Blackpentecostal aesthetic practices.Crawley's close reading of a sermon by minister and singer Dorinda Clark-Cole highlights both her virtuosic preaching and the kinds of community that sustained the performance.Clark-Cole's sermon produced the sonic space as discontinuous and open, open to the other voices that both proceeded her moment of being overcome with Spiritsuch that other women gathered around, held and hugged her-and extended the preacherly moment by sociality, through opening up and diffusing the very grounds for the concept of preaching, for listening, for breathing.They all in that space breathed the same air, the same irreducibly impure admixture: Clark-Cole gave it, they received it, they gave it, she received it.(45) The analysis uses the common source of breath to trouble the ascriptive logic of production, clarifying this paradigmatic performance's activation of Blackpentecostalism's potential energy.
If I were to ask more of this monograph, it would be to reflect at greater length on its own practice of Black Study.For example, what are other methodological analogues to concepts like choreosonicity?Addressing such questions would make Crawley's insights even more actionable in work with the commingled topics of race and place, gender and sexuality, music and movement, visuality and aurality that confront scholars of religious music.As it stands, however, the book's manifold strengths make it well worth the effort it requires of its readers.Blackpentecostal Breath is full of dense, artful phrases and rich with paragraphs that weave together a startling array of disciplines and modes of writing.Readers may well discover that it productively performs the disruptions it describes.