'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects.

My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skil[l]ful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy; and being brought up under such influences, he early detested the name of master and mistress. One day, when his father and his mistress happened to call him at the same time, he hesitated between the two[,] being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience. He finally concluded to go to his mistress. When my father reproved him for it, he said, "You both called me, and I didn't know which I ought to go to first."

"You are my child," replied our father, "and when I call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire and water." (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 9)

Introduction

This excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's narrative is a striking depiction of dual interpellation under the slave system. Under North American and Caribbean slavery, slaves were being "called" by at least two competing systems: European American, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and the broken system of communal West African(1) cultural beliefs and practices. Slave traders and slave masters were attempting to re-interpellate as slaves the already interpellated subjects of West African social, political, and religious systems - in other words, to transform subjects into slaves. At the same time, they were attempting to interpellate from birth those of African descent born into slavery. In both cases, West African cultural mores and practices also operated, fostering a culture of resistance within the black community. By reading the conflict of interpellating systems in Toni Morrison's Beloved, I hope to show how the novel intervenes in current debates about black subjectivity, helping to define a position for the black subject between essentialism and postmodern fragmentation.

Because Morrison is explicitly concerned with the formation of black subjectivity, both individual and communal, it is appropriate to compare her representation of this process to contemporary theoretical writings about subject formation. If one examines Morrison's representation of subjectivity-in-process in this context, it is clear that her work bears a resemblance to Louis Althusser's influential theory of ideology and interpellation, but it also challenges two significant assumptions which underlie Althusser's theory: the assumption of cultural homogeneity and the belief in most subjects' tacit consent to ideology's demands. Morrison's representation of slave/black subjectivity-in-process shines a light through the cracks that appear in Althusser's theory as soon as it is applied to an actual social formation. Thus, after discussing Beloved, I close this essay with a critique of Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" and a discussion of improvisation as a model for human agency-in-resistance.(2)

In Beloved, the capitalist, racial-caste system of American slavery operates by dismembering, both figuratively and literally, the body and spirit of the slave. The subjugated system of West African beliefs and practices, in which family members who have died are kept alive in memory and through ritual observances and in which nature is an aspect of the Divine,(3) continues in its claim upon kidnaped Africans and also reaches out to their enslaved descendants. The sites at which these two systems come into conflict are the sites at which black identities are formed, maintained, and transformed.

It is through improvisation, a common element of West African verbal and musical styles infused into black New World culture by African captives and their descendants,(4) that the characters in Beloved integrate themselves as whole beings in the face of the white-supremacist, capitalist system which threatens to pull them apart. Morrison invokes the practices of verbal and musical improvisation as signs and expressions of African American selfhood and agency. Thus, after showing the forces that compete to create the African American subject in the antebellum and post-bellum years, Morrison goes beyond canonical theories of ideology and interpellation to show how these subjects invent themselves out of the conflict between ideologies, using improvisation as a form of self-fashioning. Artistic expression allows African Americans to re-create and maintain their identities in ways that their forced labor does not. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes,

. . . in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination. Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation. Poiesis and poetics begin to coexist in novel forms - autobiographical writing, special and uniquely creative ways of manipulating spoken language, and, above all, the music (40)

Gilroy clearly articulates the importance of artistic creation as self-creation in the African diaspora. In The Signifying Monkey, critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., comments on one of Frederick Douglass's descriptions of the slave songs and notes that the slave singers "were literally defining themselves in language, just as did Douglass and hundreds of other slave narrators" (Gates 647). Sethe, Paul D, Baby Suggs, and the black community of Cincinnati are the literary descendants of these self-defining slave singers (more than they are the descendants of Douglass and the literate slave narrators). Their creations, though rarely acknowledged as art (or even artful) by nineteenth-century white mainstream society, were nevertheless artistic. As Morrison herself has said, "Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art, above all in the music" ("Living Memory" 181). The active discipline and play of improvisation, in verbal and musical expression (and in household arts), is what "re-members" the ex-slaves and allows them to live as free people, though still oppressed by intolerable memories of bondage and consistently dehumanizing treatment. Morrison's representations of slave and ex-slave characters creating and performing African American music, from field hollers to early blues, registers the profound importance of improvisatory musical practices to the lives of those enslaved and those emerging from the trauma of bondage.

I. Divided Subjects

As Beloved begins, the former slaves Sethe and Paul D meet again after eighteen years of nominal freedom, time in which they have attempted to bury their memories of enslavement and its attendant violations. The "moments of being" by which the subjectivities of these once-enslaved characters have been formed are told in "rememory," the active process by which a memory "comes back whether we want it to or not" (Beloved 14). For Sethe and Paul D, trying to survive in the present, the past is a dangerous undertow which threatens to drown them. Yet they must incorporate their past experience into their present lives in order truly to claim their freedom. Theirs is the struggle of the nominally free slave to remake her/himself into an ontologically free subject. They have cut off the positive as well as the negative aspects of their histories; the knowledge that might sustain them spiritually is consigned to the same forbidden area as the knowledge that might destroy them. One of the major psychological imperatives for the free former slaves is to fill in the absences created by slavery - to reconnect with their ancestral pasts, their dead and living relatives and friends, and their own "conscious community of memory" (Patterson 5).

Schoolteacher's "Call"

In Beloved, Schoolteacher is clearly the primary representative and agent of the system of white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy in the era of slavery. His interpellations of Sethe, Paul D, Sixo, and Halle lead to rebellion, madness, and death. Schoolteacher's system operates by dismemberment, dividing the bodies and minds of the slaves into separate parts and evaluating them through the use of scientific techniques.(5) Dismemberment is both literal and metaphorical, and either way it produces an effect on the physical bodies of the slaves. Sethe first comes to understand her place in the slave system when she hears Schoolteacher ask one of the nephews, "'Which one are you doing?'" and the boy answers, "'Sethe,'" in response. She stops to listen to what is being said about her and finds that Schoolteacher is supervising his nephews as they catalog the "human" and "animal" characteristics of the slaves at Sweet Home. As Sethe recalls the event (mentally narrating it to Beloved), she describes her response:

I commenced to walk backward, didn't even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped against a tree my scalp was prickly. . . . My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. (193)

This is a peculiar scene of interpellation, a case of the subject being called, literally and figuratively, but also indirectly, by the voice of the master/state.(6) Sethe's response is one of complete negation. She immediately begins walking in the opposite direction from the "call," without even taking the time to turn around. Her body responds in the negative before her mind has completely grasped the implications of Schoolteacher's classifications.(7) Her scalp is still tingling when she asks Mrs. Garner about the meaning of "characteristics" and fully comprehends Schoolteacher s project.(8)

The inscription of the master produces a physical effect on the body of the slave, and, indeed, the "writing" of Sethe is a prelude to the violent milking of her breasts and the beating in which a "tree" is imprinted on her back. These violent acts of inscription are articulations of the "American grammar" that Hortense Spillers identifies in the article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" - "the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation" which form a palimpsest over which the history of African American life and cultural production is written (Spillers 68). The nephew "does" Sethe on paper before he "does" her in the barn, and she is undone, dismembered, by both of these acts. This dismemberment is difficult to counteract. At the end of the novel, when Sethe has been ground down by her memory's relentless re-enactments of her intolerable past and by the demands of the vengeful, needy presence of the daughter she killed, she is not sure that she can hold herself together. She wonders, "Will he [Paul D] do it [bathe her] in sections? First her face, then her hands, her thighs, her feet, her back? Ending with her exhausted breasts? And if he bathes her in Sections, will the parts hold?" (272).

At other points in Beloved, it is clear that Sethe lacks a sense of herself as a distinct, whole being. When she tells Denver the story of Denver's birth, she refers to herself in the third person, calling herself "her children's mother" (30). Later in the story of Denver, Sethe repeats her exact words to herself: "'I believe this baby's ma'am is gonna die in wild onions on the bloody side of the Ohio River'" (31). At these crucial moments - moments when she believes she is going to die - she consistently envisions herself only as her children's mother, eschewing any identification of herself for herself. She also identifies her children as "parts" of herself - the only parts she wants to claim, parts that have not been "dirtied" by the violations perpetrated by the slave system and its agents. Sethe's murder of her daughter is an abbreviated suicide; she has to kill her children before she kills herself to be sure that they will not live to be brutalized as she has been. This view of her children's lives as coterminous with her own demonstrates her lack of a bounded sense of her own identity. She is both shrunk down to nothing, finding it hard to say "I," and magnified, spread out across the lives of her four children.

Paul D is also dismembered by the new master's interpellations. After School- teacher and the patrollers have lynched Sixo, they lead Paul D back to Sweet Home, discussing the fact that he must be sold:

Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always known, or believed he did, his value - as a hand, a laborer who could make profit on a farm - but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future. (226; my emphasis)

Nine hundred dollars is the price Schoolteacher attaches to Paul D's parts; under this blatantly capitalist interpellation, Paul D cannot envision himself as whole. In order to keep himself sane through the events that follow his sale by Schoolteacher, Paul D maintains a compartmentalized self: "After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things - with a little work and a little sex thrown in - he asked for no more . . ." (41). He seals away the painful, significant events of his past in a metaphorical tobacco tin that takes the place of his heart. The tobacco-tin metaphor is a striking one, making it clear that Paul D sees his ruined heart as a product of slavery, as much as tobacco itself was. His life is circumscribed by commerce, and it invades his body as well; he cannot be whole with the symbol of his degradation lodged inside him.

Though it is certainly Schoolteacher's "corrections" which are the immediate catalyst for Paul D's psychic disintegration and loss of manhood, Paul D later comes to realize that Garner's form of slavery was not entirely different from that of his brother-in-law:

For years Paul D believed schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men. And it was that that made them run off. Now, plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much difference there was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them men - but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. (220; my emphasis)

At the distance created by eighteen years and a constant struggle to retain his manhood, Paul D can recognize the tenuous nature of the identity his master created for him and recognize that Garner, like Schoolteacher, was playing God, indulging in a form of social experimentation by "mak[ing] and call[ing] his own niggers men" (11). Paul D understands how the masculine identity conferred by Gamer falls apart upon Garner's death and reflects upon this in an economical, vernacular rendering of Orlando Patterson's concept of "social death": "Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?" (220).

In general, the Garners represent a milder - and in some ways more subtle and insidious - form of white-supremacist, capitalist domination of African Americans. Their abolitionist friends, Mr. and Miss Bodwin, share negative views of African Americans with slaveholders, despite their belief that "human life is holy, all of it" (260). The statue that Denver sees at the Bodwins' house is a representation of black dismemberment in the service of the needs of whites:

His head was thrown back farther than a head could go . . . . Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins needed to pay for a delivery or some other small service, but could just as well have held buttons, pins, or crab-apple jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words "At Yo Service." (255)

This American grotesque is missing a nose and has a head whose angle, in a real human being, could only be accounted for by a broken neck. Nails have been hammered into his head as a substitute for hair. His mouth is a receptacle for anything the owner wants to put into it. The statue embodies nineteenth-century white Americans' hatred of and fetishistic attachment to the black body, and this symbolic dismemberment is an analogue to the physical, mental, and spiritual onslaught perpetrated by white-supremacist ideology.(9)

In Beloved, black individuals and the African American community try to construct and maintain a sense of selfhood under the pressure of atomizing injunctions from those in power. They use many different strategies to heal and hold themselves together; some of these strategies are drawn from philosophies and rituals of the West African past, transformed through the Middle Passage and plantation life.(10)

"Called" by the Antelope

Subjugated by the patriarchal plantation system of American slavery, Africans and their African American descendants were, socially, nonpersons. As Orlando Patterson indicates in his foundational study of slave systems, Slavery and Social Death,

Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. That they reached back for the past, as they reached out for the related living, there can be no doubt. Unlike other persons, doing so meant struggling with and penetrating the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policemen or patrollers, and his heritage. (5)

For slaves then, the formation of normal human relations, both imaginative and material, with both ancestors and descendants, and with other members of an ethnic community, became by definition acts of resistance within the slave system. Social ties that the slaves formed "were never recognized as legitimate or binding" (Patterson 6), and this fact had deep and lasting consequences for slave families and communities. But what has often been overlooked in assessments of slavery's toll on the enslaved is the specificity of the world views of the African captives. The inability to "integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory" (Patterson 5) would have been a heavy burden for any group of human beings. For the West and Central Africans kidnaped and enslaved in the New World, this particular prohibition was a cultural catastrophe.

As critic Barbara Christian argues in "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved," "In not being able to remember, name, and feed those who passed on in the Middle Passage, those who survived had to abandon their living dead to the worst possible fate that could befall a West African: complete annihilation" (13). Citing John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy, Christian writes,

. . . Mbiti warns us that, in traditional West African societies, Africans do not worship their ancestors. Rather, they believe that when a person passes (and this phrase is important, as it is still consistently used by African Americans), that is, "dies," in the Western sense, they do not disappear as long as someone remembers them, their name, their character . . . . The acts of feeding the dead and pouring libations are meant as symbols, active symbols of communion, fellowship, and renewal. Thus continuity, not only of genes but also of active remembering, is critical to a West African's sense of her or his own personal being and, beyond that, of the beingness of the group.

Mbiti also points out that the ancestors are associated with their land, the piece of Nature they inhabit. The people are the land, the land is the people. He tells us: ". . . to remove Africans by force from their land is an act of such great injustice that no foreigner can fathom it." (11-12)

By calling our attention to the African belief systems that were violently disrupted by the slave trade and the North American and Caribbean system of forced labor, Christian illuminates the cultural conflict at work in slavery and represented by Morrison in Beloved. The African cultural referents in Beloved have indeed been ignored by most critics, probably because of the dearth of knowledge in the West about the actual religious practices and philosophical traditions of African peoples. Despite a growing body of literary, historical, anthropological, and theological work produced in the past thirty to forty years, Africa still remains a "dark continent" to many, if not most, Western readers; few expect to find respectful evocations of African philosophy and spirituality in a book that is being touted as a new classic in American literature. Too often, slaves are still seen as Western subjects manque, whose sense of themselves was constructed primarily in terms of Eurocentric or Anglocentric concepts of self.(11) Morrison's inclusion of African characters, belief systems, and practices in Beloved illuminates the hidden lives of the slaves, the mental attitudes and rituals that allowed some slaves to survive and to resist their bondage.(12)

Despite the power of the master's interpellations, Sethe and Paul D are also being claimed by this broken but not entirely erased world of West African cultural and spiritual practices. This alternative world view is represented in the novel by Nan (the woman who took care of the young Sethe), Sethe's mother, and Sixo. These three are African by birth, survivors of the Middle Passage. They continue in the observance of cultural and spiritual practices from their homelands, as far as their enslaved condition allows. Nan and Sethe's mother are among the slaves on the plantation where Sethe was born who dance "the antelope" and other dances of African origin, as well as speaking to one another in their native tongue. Sixo dances among the trees at night "to keep his bloodlines open," (25) and maintains his connection to his native language (though he seems to have no one with whom to speak it - it's not clear if the Thirty-Mile Woman is from his ethnic group, or even African by birth). For Nan, Sethe's mother, and Sixo, observances that were once part of a hegemonic interpellating system in their native countries have become, in the land of their exile and enslavement, subversive. These African characters are engaged in resistance to the dismembering logic of the white-capitalist, patriarchal system of domination. Their resistance is produced not as a mere effect of the relation of domination, but as a result of the subjugation of one ideology by another incompatible ideology.

The Africans teach the New World children both by example and through direct instruction, and both Sethe and Paul D reach for the meaning of their own lives in connection with the lives of their ancestors. The first-generation, New World children seek, in Patterson's words, "to anchor the living present in [a] conscious community of memory" (5); and the Africans they encounter, whether actual relatives or fictive kin, transmit to them elements of a West African world view and call them into the community of their ancestors.

For Sethe, the remnants of African cultural practices are an ambivalent legacy, because they are tied up with her own motherlessness. Sethe has rarely ever seen her mother; she learns to recognize her by her cloth hat amid a sea of straw hats and by the circled cross branded under her breast, which her mother goes out of her way to show her. Nan, her surrogate mother,(13) tells Sethe more of her mother's story:

What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message - that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she [Sethe] was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime. Nan holding her with her good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. "Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe." (62)

As this memory returns to Sethe, she must translate Nan's words from the African language in which they were spoken into English. She has forgotten both the language and the story told in that language; as she remembers the "message," she feels unfocused anger. On the one hand, she is able to recover the knowledge that she was chosen by her mother. On the other hand, she recognizes that she has been robbed of mothering and her first language - in short, her birthright. This knowledge has not just drifted away, it has been taken from her by the slave system. As she remembers a moment of her interpellation as the chosen child of an African mother, she yearns for Baby Suggs, the only,true mother she has known.(14) Sethe's birth mother was clearly rebellious; she was probably caught running away and hanged for this attempt. Sethe does not want to believe that her mother attempted to escape, because it would mean that she left her daughter behind. Her mother's abandonment of her and the fact that Sethe never got enough milk when she was being nursed are the tragedies at the very base of Sethe's life, and she tries to compensate for her own motherlessness by being a supermother to her children.

Other faint memories also connect Sethe to African culture. As she is escaping Sweet Home, she thinks of her unborn child as "the little antelope." She wonders why "antelope" occurs to her, since she's never seen one; then she remembers the African songs and dances on the plantation before Sweet Home:

Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma'ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach. (31)

For its practitioners, the dance is a moment of plenitude, of genuine beingness, and Sethe remembers it as such. Somehow her own being is registered in the dance and, later, in the life of her unborn daughter The dance and Sethe's memory of it are fragments of a system in which those who are now slaves were valued as human beings The dancers imitate the antelope, the principal qualities of which are speed and free movement, and in so doing they reverse, at least temporarily, their conditions of physical constraint. The freedom of the dance, the way the dancers "shifted shapes and became . . . some unchained, demanding other" contrasts sharply with the day's numbing, coerced work routine Through this movement, they are able to reconnect body and spirit; in the remembering and re-enactment of this African practice, they are able to "re-member" themselves to some degree.(15)

From Sixo's example, Paul D understands what it means to be a man by African standards, though he is not at all sure that he measures up to Sixo's definition: "When he looks at himself through Garner's eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo's, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed" (267). He more than meets the criteria established for manhood by the standards of the slaveholding patriarchy; however, by Sixo's standards his behavior (especially in leaving Sethe) is disappointing. Here again, as in the case of Sethe, the African legacy produces ambivalence. Sixo's thirty-mile trips to see his woman fill Paul D and the other Sweet Home men with deep admiration, but they are mostly amused by and somewhat fearful of Sixo's dancing amidst the trees at night. Although Paul D loves Sixo "better than his brothers" (126), and although Sixo embodies the integrity of African manhood, Paul D cannot simply adopt this model, just as he cannot simply adopt Garner's. Paul D is, must be, a different kind of man from either Sixo or Garner, as Sethe must be a different woman from her African and Euro-American models - her mother, Nan, and Mrs. Gamer (who is childless). The challenge for those coming out of slavery was how to exercise their choices in becoming new people, African Americans; how to create themselves from the conflict of two cultures, one of them dedicated to denying the existence of the other.

Healing Song for the Inner Ear(16): Improvisation and Community

It is improvisation, the creative rearrangement of traditional verbal and musical structures to suit the expressive needs of the present moment, that allows the African American characters to survive and to re-create themselves. The African practices in themselves are not enough; they must be transformed and incorporated into new circumstances in such a way that they make sense to both the individual and the community. When Sixo stops speaking English "because there [is] no future in it" (25), it is clear that he is not and will not become an African American. Painful as the knowledge may seem in the context of slavery, the future for African Americans is in English (whether Black English or standard English). The songs that Sethe and Paul D create and sing are hybrids, with both African and Anglo/European elements. These songs are on the cusp between work song and blues, sung in a nineteenth-century version of Black English. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes in Blues People,

. . . I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene. (xii)

Sethe and Paul D are not only at the point of beginning their free lives as individuals; they are also at the beginning of the African American community's experience of free life, at the beginning of blues, at what Jones calls "one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene." Verbal and musical improvisation, both individual and communal, is one means through which the ex-slaves, both singly and as a group, reaffirm their humanity and create themselves as a new cultural entity.

The life of Baby Suggs most clearly represents the transition from dismemberment to "re-memberment" through improvisatory self-creation. Before she is freed she answers to the "bill-of-sale name" Jenny Whirlow and doesn't call herself anything. In the narrator's/Baby Suggs's description of the effects of slavery upon her, we see again the metaphor of dismemberment: She decides to preach "because slave life had 'busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue'" (87). Freed by her son's labor, she discovers her heart (initially in the physical, and then in the metaphorical, sense) and renames herself, coining and claiming the name Baby Suggs to register the love and desire her slave husband felt for her and to help him find her if he should be in a position to look. Manumission is a resurrection from a living death in which she knows little about the children she has borne (all but one of whom have been sold away from her) and even less about herself. Baby Suggs claims her freedom by claiming her body and her own unique qualities. Denver's name for her, "Grandma Baby," embodies the contradictory miracle of an old woman reborn in freedom.

Though not African by birth, Baby Suggs creates her own syncretic folk religious practice, based on both West African and Christian spiritual traditions. The ceremony in the Clearing reveals the power of individual and communal improvisation to reassemble broken bodies and broken psyches. Baby Suggs issues her "Call" to men, women, and children; their response is laughter, dancing, tears, and "long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh (89).(17) In structure, the ceremony resembles a jazz performance; it begins with three basic elements - children's laughter, men's dancing, and women's weeping - and the congregation plays these elements out in every possible combination, in the jazz ideal of group improvisation. Then Baby Suggs comes in with her solo, her improvised sermon about the need to love the body and the soul. Her spoken-word solo segues into a dance, and the community provides the music to accompany her. This ritual has the same effect as the antelope dance; it provides a moment of plenitude in which the people can experience themselves, re-member themselves, as whole and free, in an individual and communal way. However, Baby Suggs's creation is a New World ritual, a proto-jazz Black English blues spiritual healing song for the inner ear. Jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet's comments on the spirituals and the blues shed light on Baby Suggs's ritual performance. Bechet states that the spiritual "was praying to God" and the blues "was praying to what's human. It's like one was saying, 'Oh, God, let me go,' and the other was saying, 'Oh, Mister, let me be.' And they were both the same thing in a way; they were both my people's way of praying to be themselves, praying to be let alone so they could be human" (212-13). With Baby Suggs leading, the community prays with voices, hearts, and bodies to be allowed to be human.

Improvisation works for Sethe and Paul D as well. It allows them to express and reflect upon their experience and serves as a sign of their unique selves. Sethe composes and sings her own song to her children; when Beloved hums this song, Sethe knows for certain that the girl is the daughter she killed. While the only sure sign by which Sethe knew her own mother was the circled cross branded under her breast, a physical mark of her oppression, Sethe has been able to pass on something different to her children, a verbal and musical mark of the self that is undeniably and irrevocably her own. At the end of the novel, we know that there is hope for her return from madness because she is singing her song to herself when Paul D visits her in the keeping room.

Musical improvisation is a practice that saves Paul D from madness and death. In Alfred, Georgia, while he is forced to work and live like an animal, he and the other slaves with whom he works help each other through the ordeal by singing:

They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods, meal in the pan; cane, rain and rocking chairs . . . . Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. (108-09)

In Alfred, Georgia, the shout and the work song are called upon daily to get the men through. They not only sing songs they know; they transform those songs and create new ones. They are able to preserve their manhood and their humanity through communal improvisation.

Because slaves cannot speak freely to one another, the shout and the song must carry all of the expressive needs of the moment. The song changes when the expressive needs change. At 124, "the songs [Paul D] knew from Georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding and pounding and pounding. . . . They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in" (40). Instead, Paul D takes a melody he knows and improvises lyrics about himself and Sethe; his composing and singing allow him to meditate on and express his experience, without being overwhelmed by it. The songs he creates are also signs of his individual self. Here again it is useful to refer to Jones's Blues People, where, in discussing the movement from field holier to work song to blues in African American culture, the author notes the identification of particular "shouts" with individuals:

Each man had his own voice and his own way of shouting - his own life to sing about. The tenders of those thousands of small farms became almost identified by their individual shouts. "That's George Jones, down in Hartsville, shoutin' like that." (61)

Hi Man, the leader of the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, is named for his shout; through details like these, Morrison traces not only the trajectory of the characters' lives, but also the evolution of the music, in which the importance of vocal style as individual signature persisted. Paul D's "Bare feet and chamomile sap, / Took off my shoes; took off my hat" are a sign of the individual, reflective self in relation both to the tradition out of which he is singing and to Sethe and his own history. The full text of Paul D's improvised song begins the penultimate chapter of the novel, and by that point in the narrative, the song has become a factual and emotional record of the recent history of his relationship with Sethe and his encounters with Beloved, told through a combination of original lines and standard.work song/blues lines. The rhymed resolution of this piece - "Love that woman till you go stone blind. / Stone blind; stone blind. / Sweet Home gal make you lose your mind" (263) - reflects both Paul D's deep feelings for Sethe and his regret at having been unable, for a time, to see her and her dilemma clearly.

Thus for Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D, improvisation functions as an integrative device, a form of self-fashioning. It is also clear from their stories that part of the importance of improvisation, whether in ritual or in song, is relational. Baby Suggs and the black community of Cincinnati, Sethe and her children, Paul D and Sethe - the song sung in the presence of others helps to heal and integrate the individual and the community.

The importance of the collective is also illustrated by the disaster that occurs when community falls apart - when the neighbors become envious of Baby Suggs and her family and fail to warn them of Schoolteacher's approach. After Schoolteacher and his henchmen come into Baby Suggs's yard, her big heart begins to give out, and she takes to her bed to study color. Her ability to respond to "the Misery" by meditating on something harmless is a testament to the strength of her life-force; it takes three years of thinking about colors to wear out Baby Suggs's heart completely. This slow death is also an improvisation of a kind. Meditating on color(18) is a response that says a great deal about Baby Suggs's life philosophy; though she has been harmed over and over again, she doesn't think about revenge, even in her most bitter moments, when she concludes that there is "no bad luck in the world but whitepeople" (104).(19) Instead, she "declare[s] peace" (177). Baby Suggs's final improvisation is a solitary one, however, and while it has the power to soothe her mind, it doesn't reach beyond her to the community in the way that her Call in the Clearing did. Schoolteacher's actions have, to her mind, invalidated her Call, and the community has stepped back as a rebuke to what they see as her hubris.(20) Thus the failure of community, the fact that no one warns them of Schoolteacher's approach, is a significant element in Baby Suggs's slow demise; she is left to improvise with only her daughter-in-law and her remaining grandchildren for company. For Sethe, isolation from the community is almost fatal, but finally she is rescued from Beloved by the improvised song of thirty neighborhood women, in a ceremony reminiscent of Baby Suggs's in the Clearing.

Many critics have noted the emphasis on community throughout Morrison's work. Valerie Smith, in Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative, states that ". . . Morrison does not provide her people with the option of living underground, in isolation, beyond community. Her characters achieve autonomy and a sense of identity only to the extent that they can understand and name themselves in relation to a social unit . . ." (123). Thus, Paul D's mental and emotional compartmentalization can only be undone through his connection to Sethe and, ironically, Beloved.(21) When Paul D returns to Sethe, he remembers Sixo's comments about the Thirty-Mile Woman, and they signify to him the healing, re-membering possibilities of loving, human connection:" 'She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind'" (272-73). Improvisation and communal values are linked; sometimes separately and sometimes in tandem they help to re-member the ex-slaves in the novel's Reconstruction era Cincinnati community.

If we accept improvisation as a sign of human agency, we can begin to see how theories of domination fall short in their accounts of the creation of subaltern selves. African American culture is one arena that indicates that the oppressed individual does not simply accept the dominant ideology; other ideologies provide conflicting interpretations of experience and conflicting expectations. The self, with the help of the community, responds in a unique way, accepting some aspects of ideology as given and choosing among other available elements in the construction of an individual subjectivity. Morrison's representations of black subjectivity-in-process thus enable us to assess the ways in which Althusser's influential account of ideology and interpellation might be refashioned to apply to African American lives during and after slavery and, more generally, to the lives of the dominated in societies marked by profound racial and ethnic stratification.

II. Ideologies in Conflict

In order to analyze ideology, inter pellation, and resistance under a bicultural system, the theories of Althusser and his followers must take into account the processes of ideological conflict - conflict between world views - within a single socioeconomic formation. American slavery was just such a system, involving a conflict between ideologies: Eurocentric, capitalist patriarchy, and African communal systems of subsistence agriculture. In Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," certain assumptions about social formations undergird the theoretical framework and render it problematic in a bicultural or multicultural context like American slavery. First among these is the assumption that the culture under study is homogeneous and that the repressive state apparatuses and the ideological state apparatuses generally produce docile, conforming citizens. Resistance under social formations such as these is created as an effect of ideology, in a dialectical manner. Althusser writes, "This concert [of the ideological state apparatuses acting in tandem] is dominated by a single score, occasionally disturbed by contradictions (those of the remnants of former ruling classes, those of the proletarians and their organizations): the score of the Ideology of the current ruling class . . ." (154)(22) In Althusser's analysis, the homogeneity of society is disrupted only by those who were formerly in power and those whose resistance is produced by the repressiveness of the system. Other commentators on Althusser's work have revised this aspect of his theory. For example, Paul Smith, in Discerning the Subject, summarizes ideology's production of dissent thus:

. . . the interpellation of the "subject" into oppressed positions is not complete and monolithic; rather, interpellation also produces contradiction and negativity. The necessary existence of various and different subject-positions in the interpellated "subject" produces resistance to the logic of domination while still being in a sense part of, or a by-product of, that logic. (152)

While this statement includes refinements of Althusser's theory (subject-positions within the "subject"), both Althusser's original articulation and most subsequent refinements have failed to account for resistance that is produced differently, through the conflict between profoundly divergent ideologies, one subjected to the other.

Lisa Lowe is one critic who has analyzed Althusserian interpellation in relation to literary representations of a hybrid cultural situation. In an essay on Korean American writer Theresa Cha's experimental novel Dictee, entitled "Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee," Lowe writes,

A closer investigation of the instances of subject formation discussed in Dictee reveals that Cha episodically focuses on sites of interpellation which are not only multiple, but are also hybrid, unclosed, and uneven. The focus on these instances suggests that resistances to the hegemony reproduced by interpellating structures are not located simply or exclusively in the antagonisms produced by their demands for identity, but that it also may be the non-identity of the irregularly multiple sites to those demands for uniformity which founds the condition of both inadequate interpellation and the subject's resistance to totalization. (56)

That is, resistance is not only produced as a "by-product" of interpellation, but the conflict between interpellating systems may also be responsible for what Althusser calls "bad subjects," subjects who do not accede to the demands of the dominant culture. Lowe goes on to argue that "Dictee is more specific [than Althusser's essay] about multiple hailings, particularly about the conflicts and noncorrespondences between hailing apparatuses," and that, "within this multiplicity, one site of interpellation may provide the means or instruments with which to disrupt another apparatus" (56). This reading of Dictee is extremely instructive for my own reading of Beloved, because similar claims can be made for Morrison's novel.

My argument differs from Lowe's in two significant particulars. First, Lowe is primarily concerned with the ways in which the overlapping contradictions produced by various systems of domination - capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy - can be played against one another, how the "bad subject" of all three systems can mobilize her contradictory identity in one to confound her interpellation by another. My chief concern is with how subjects choose among the conflicting interpellations of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, on the one hand, and African belief systems and practices, on the other, and from this cacophony create and maintain some sense of harmony and wholeness. Second, Lowe affirms the value of the textual strategies of "discontinuity" and "fragmentation" (62) in her discussion of Cha's work. Though Morrison deploys some similar textual strategies in representing the discontinuity and fragmentation of slaves' and ex-slaves' lives, her concern with the pain these conditions wrought in African American life and history leads me into a different emphasis in my analysis, an emphasis on the creation of relatively whole selves and relatively whole communities. Because physical pain is "world-destroying" (29), in Elaine Scarry's words, and because pain certainly destroyed the worlds of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the world had to be made anew by those coming out of slavery. Improvisation remakes the world. Like other acts of creation, it reverses the "structure of unmaking" (Scarry 20) that is torture and helps to re-member the body in relation to the social whole.

I am not attempting here to recuperate an essential African American subject; I am, however, noting that all fragmented subjects may not feel the same way about their fragmentation. Enslaved African Americans experienced the process of "all that is solid melt[ing] into air" (Marx 338) under particularly intolerable conditions; there is no reason that they would have celebrated a shattered body or a shattered consciousness, even when they were able to create something sustaining from it.(23)

Even with the ever-present threat of violence, the ideology of American slavery was never able to produce, on a large scale, docile, conforming subjects who, in Althusser's terms, "workled] by themselves" (181); that is, wholly internalized the values and carried out the commands of the dominant culture. Morrison's Beloved represents the fact that competing West African ideologies, though operating only partially or significantly transformed in their New World setting, allowed many African/African American subjects to interrupt or turn aside from the hegemonic call, not only through overt resistance but also through improvisation in everyday cultural activities.

III. Improvisation as a Model for Human Agency-in-Resistance

In its transformation from African to African American cultural practice, improvisation has undergone a seachange. Under oppressive conditions, it has become a sign of resistance to interpellation by the dominant culture, a refusal of that culture's norms, not by outright rejection but by re-interpretation and integration with African and other cultural influences. In the words of critic Houston Baker, "The song is a sign of an Afro-American discourse that strikingly refigures life on American shores" (16). Especially in the context of early (and continuing) Eurocentric views of blacks, improvisation is particularly significant because of its distance from mimicry.(24) Poets from the time of Phillis Wheatley on have been dubbed "mockingbirds" (whether explicitly or implicitly); Black English is often seen as English poorly spoken; and black culture in general is seen as helplessly deviating from the American norm, which it supposedly seeks to reproduce. An understanding of improvisation as a cultural mode in African American life undercuts these hostile and patronizing mainstream readings of black culture. Instead, one is forced to recognize the intentionality behind transformations of European and Euro-American cultural forms in African American culture, the will and intelligence behind black style.

Improvisation is a three-stage process, and in order to name these stages, I borrow terms from the critics Houston Baker and VeVe Clark. In an essay entitled "Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness," Clark briefly describes two major concepts from Baker's work, and transforms them by adding her own third term:

Representations of African diaspora history and culture have assumed a binary formation - us and the Others - a residual construction from the master/slave heritage. Houston Baker in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) re-examines the binary oppositions existing between the ideologies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. From that encounter two intriguing discursive strategies have been identified-mastery of form/deformation of mastery. As I read Baker's work, I was aware that a third principle might well exist beyond the oppositional framework within which we have interpreted new letters. I have termed that third principle the reformation of form, a reduplicative narrative posture which assumes and revises Du Bois's double consciousness. In the wider field of contemporary literary criticism, this reformative strategy approximates the deconstruction of mastery. (Clark 42)

Clark goes on to note how black music, jazz in particular, "has provided examples of contextual and formal re-presentations by mastering form/deforming mastery and reforming form" (42), and she cites John Coltrane's arrangement and performance of "My Favorite Things" as an exemplary "text." These three terms - mastery of form, deformation of mastery, and reformation of form - can be used to designate the three formal stages of improvisation, whether in verbal, musical, literary, visual, or household arts.

The Baker-Clark formulation lends itself particularly well to my analysis, because Baker's work is grounded in the binary opposition of American slavery, as Beloved is, and Clark's work moves beyond the binary to a third term, which is the direction in which Beloved points. The improviser understands what is expected of her/him and may begin by performing it according to traditional rules (mastery of form). The improviser then deliberately disrupts the traditional form by introducing other elements into it, elements drawn from other contexts, or by using the instrument in a significantly different manner from the way it has been used in the past (deformation of mastery). Finally, the piece composed from both traditional elements(25) and non-traditional, improvised elements is a new whole, with internal integrity (reformation of form). Writer Ralph Ellison, in the essay "The Charlie Christian Story," describes improvisation in jazz in a way that illuminates the points I have made and connects improvisation to the creation of identity:

. . . true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which the artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it. . . . (234)

The refigurative properties and collage techniques of improvisation in African American culture make it an apt metaphor for human agency-in-resistance in general. The stages of improvisation can serve as a model of how a resistant human subject comes into being: first by learning what the dominant ideology expects of her/him and performing it "properly," then by disrupting the expected performance with non-traditional elements (which may come from another culture/interpellating system), and finally by integrating the hegemonic and the non-traditional elements into a new entity with the structure and fluidity of a free jazz composition. This subject is neither seamlessly whole nor completely dispersed into separate subject-positions. Being resistant to ideology does not place this subject outside ideology; she/he must improvise continually to challenge the ideological injunctions of the dominant culture. This is a subject consistently in process, recognizable as a distinct entity both to her/himself and to others, caught up in compliance and resistance, obedience and contradiction. For this subject and for communities of resistant subjects, artistic creation - "endless improvisation upon traditional materials" - can facilitate greater and greater resistance to hegemonic ideology.

Notes

1. Because most slaves in the Americas came from West Africa, and because many Africanisms in North American and Caribbean culture appear to be derived from West African ethnic groups, I will be using the adjective West African to describe the cultural practices and beliefs the slaves brought with them to the Americas. I will also use African as a more general designation for those who survived the Middle Passage. While I am aware of the problems of homogenizing Africa into a single entity, the similarities between West African/African ethnic cultures and the extent to which these cultures merged in the Americas make West African culture as legitimate a term as Western civilization for the present purposes.

2. Some critics may question my use of Althusser's theory in the context of slavery. I recognize that applying Althusser's concepts of ideology and interpellation to a system more coercive and less consensual than modern, Western, industrial capitalism is controversial. However, it is my intention to highlight the capitalist nature of the U.S. slave system and to note the operation of ideological state apparatuses in the context of consistent physical violence. It is also important for me to emphasize the fact that I am applying Althusser's theory to Morrison's representation of slavery, not directly to the institution itself.

3. See John S. Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy for an extended discussion of these aspects of traditional African societies.

4. See Blassingame 22 and Levine 6.

5. A number of critics have noted the theme of dismemberment in Beloved. In "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text," critic Mae Henderson eloquently makes this argument in the context of a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. Her assertion that "the act of remembering, for the unlettered slave, constitutes the act of constructing a private self" (73) serves as a foundation for my assertion that the ex-slave's self is constructed and expressed through musical improvisation.

6. Film scholar Mary Ann Doane notes this type of indirect interpellation in a discussion of Frantz Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" (Chapter Five in Black Skin, White Masks). She writes, "Fanon persistently returns to the imperative call - 'Look, a Negro!' - uttered by a little white boy in a state of fascination and terror. The call is a somewhat perverse version of the Althusserian process of interpellation or hailing. Although it addresses and refuses to address the black directly (the second-person pronoun is not used), the exclamation fixes the black person, producing a subjectivity which is fully aligned with a process of reification" (224). Though I agree with Doane's argument about the intended effect of the call, one of my primary arguments in this essay is that such sideways hailings, and the direct, classic version of interpellation, do not inevitably produce "a subjectivity which is fully aligned with a process of reification." Sethe's resistance makes this clear.

7. See, for example, Sander Gilman's essay "Black Bodies, White Bodies."

8. Months later, when Sethe kills her daughter, the physical sensation of needles in her scalp recurs; she thinks of the needles as the beaks of hummingbirds, and she herself flies to put her children beyond reach of the whip, the bit, and the measuring tape. Finally, Sethe's "mistaken" attack on Mr. Bodwin is also attended by needles in the scalp and the sound of hummingbird wings. Though technically Sethe is mistaken as to the identity of the white man coming into her yard, there is a great deal of symbolic meaning in Mr. Bodwin's coming for one of her daughters. He's not coming to enslave Denver, but he is going to put her to work in domestic service. Her experience of labor may not differ significantly from that of many slaves.

9. See Marlon Riggs's film Ethnic Notions for an extended critique of objects such as these. As any number of recent controversies demonstrate, hatred of and fetishistic attachment to the black body have persisted into the 1990s.

10. Robert Farris Thompson's groundbreaking study Flash of the Spirit illuminates the artistic and philosophical connections between West Africa and Afro-America. He records the transformation of cultural philosophies from one context to the other.

11. This is one of the negative consequences of the primacy of the slave narratives; in them, personhood is constructed primarily in Western terms.

12. In a remarkable article entitled "Keys to the Ancestors' Chambers: An Approach to Teaching Beloved," Valorie Thomas shows how Morrison has drawn upon Yoruba and Kongo spiritual traditions throughout the novel. She argues, convincingly, that the main characters have characteristics of West African orisha, and that the graphics which introduce the novel's sections are related to ritual drawings from Kongolese tradition. This essay is the most extensive discussion of African influences in Beloved that I am aware of.

13. Nan and Sethe's mother are "shipmate" relatives, fictive kin whose source of connection is their experience of the Middle Passage. In a number of New World, African-descended cultures, these relationships were a very important source of identification and resistance for slaves (Price 27-28; Mullin 37-38).

14. Of African beliefs regarding death and remembrance, theologian John Mbiti writes, ". . . while the departed person is remembered by name, he is not really dead: he is alive, and such a person I would call the living-dead" (32). After death, Baby Suggs is among the "living-dead," remembered and called upon for emotional sustenance by both Sethe and Denver.

15. Beloved's return in the flesh is in itself an extended evocation of certain African belief systems. Beloved is a complex, contradictory character; she is both the daughter Sethe killed and the embodiment of the individual and communal dismemberment of African Americans. She is a catalyst of positive events, helping Sethe and Paul D to reconnect with their pasts, yet she also forces Paul D into an anguished re-assessment of his manhood and almost destroys Sethe. It is important to look at Beloved in the context of African spirituality because many enslaved Africans and their descendants retained concepts of reincarnation and the afterlife that account for the girl's return. It is striking how easily the African American community around 124 Bluestone accepts the fact that Beloved is the reincarnation of Sethe's dead child. Janey, the Bodwins' domestic servant, even knows what signs to ask for (lines in the palm of the hand) to determine if the girl is in fact a re-embodied spirit. As Morrison herself says, ". . . it was clear to me that it [Beloved's incarnation] was not at all a violation of African religion and philosophy; it's very easy for a son or a parent or a neighbor to appear in a child or in another person" ("In the Realm" 249).

In representing Beloved as an actual human being, Morrison has registered the continued existence of two African traditional religious beliefs, one from the Yoruba and Igbo, and one from the Akamba people of Kenya. In discussing the character Beloved, Carole Boyce Davies writes of "the legendary abiku children of Yoruba cosmology or the ogbanje in Igbo culture, who die and are reborn repeatedly to plague their mothers and are marked so that they can be identified when they return" (139). And according to John Mbiti, among the Akamba people of Kenya, a child who dies before she is named is still an "object" belonging to the spirits; she has not been ritually separated from the world of the spirits and the ancestors (the living-dead) (Mbiti 156). Like Beloved, a child like this has a foot in both the human and the spirit worlds.

16. This is the title of a book of poems by Michael S. Harper.

17. The antiphonal structure of Baby Suggs's ceremony is another element that connects it to West African musical traditions. Many scholars of African and African American music have commented on the use of antiphony and the tendency to incorporate body movements into musical performance in both traditions. See, for example, Oily Wilson's articles on these topics.

18. Baby Suggs's choice of color as the object of meditation deserves far greater elaboration than I am able to give it here.

19. A remarkable reversal of American social norms is subtly enacted throughout Beloved. Whiteness is consistently marked while blackness is represented as the standard human condition. To be black is to be among the people; to be white is to be set apart, marked. The word white, attached to man, woman, boy, or girl, designates a range of subject positions, all determined to a significant extent by their participation, direct or indirect, literal or psychological, in the subjugation of black people. Whites use blacks as a mirror in which they see themselves magnified; this magnification creates other distortions, visible and palpable to blacks but largely invisible to whites themselves. Morrison has spoken explicitly about the transformation of Europeans and Euro-Americans wrought by slavery: "Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy" ("Living Memory" 178).

20. Baby Suggs is reduced to/chooses the world of the seen over the unseen; she says to Stamp Paid, "'What I know is what I see: a nigger woman hauling shoes'" (179). This is a direct rejection of her faith (" 'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' ") and her call to preach.

21. See Thomas 93.

22.The metaphor of the concert is a particularly felicitous one in terms of my analysis. The European symphonic music to which Althusser alludes is typically performed as written; improvisation has little or no place in the concert's formal setting. One can see how improvisation, a fundamental aspect of jazz, might serve as a useful model for resistance to the repressive, capitalist system for which the concert is Althusser's trope.

23. These references to the pain and torture enforced upon black bodies under slavery lead me to another critique of "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Althusser's theory assumes that capitalist social formations operate primarily by consent, with the threat of coercion. North American and Caribbean slavery, though capitalist, operated primarily by physical and psychological coercion; to the slaves, the system only rarely disguised its nature with benevolence (to the outside world, of course, the system presented itself as a benevolent patriarchy). In Marx's view, slavery was "direct forced labor," whereas wage labor was "indirect forced labour" (Marx, qtd. in Patterson 2). Much has been made of the distinction between these two forms; in this context, it is important to emphasize the similarities between them. Accepting that direct coercion was fundamental to American slavery, one must then consider how constant physical violence changes the operation of the ideological state apparatuses, and how the oppressed group responds. While it is not possible here to discuss direct coercion and ideology at length, it is important to note that capitalism and consistent physical coercion are not mutually exclusive or even particularly incompatible. It is too easy to think of slavery or conditions similar to slavery as anomalies in the modern or postmodern world. If one accepts the idea that North American and Caribbean slavery was, in certain important respects, a capitalist socioeconomic formation, it is then necessary to refigure theories about subject formation under capitalism to include the effects of consistent physical abuse as a factor in interpellation. (Feminist theory has made clear the importance of physical coercion in the formation of female subjects under patriarchy. Catherine MacKinnon's work, in particular, addresses this point.) Theorizing physical coercion under capitalism will not only illuminate the past; it will also illuminate the present working conditions of many factory and prison workers in the developing and the overdeveloped worlds.

24. Homi Bhabha's acclaimed essay "Of Mimicry and Man" shows how the inevitable difference produced through mimicry deconstructs colonial discourse; however, he does not address the ways in which colonial or white-supremacist discourse is deliberately deconstructed through "signifying" and improvisatory revision.

25. African American music contains elements of both European and African music, combined into a new whole. At least two traditional forms are being improvised upon. Scholar Charles Keil writes, "The Afro-American tradition represents not only a variety of mixtures between European and African elements but a series of blendings within itself" (33).

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. 127-86.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

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Bhabha, Homi K. "Of Mimicry and Man. The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." October 28 (1984): 125-33.

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Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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-----. "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994. 246-54.

-----. "Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison." Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. By Paul Gilroy. London: Serpent's Tail, 1993. 175-82.

Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992.

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Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

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Spillers, Hortense J., ed. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. New York: Routledge, 1991.

-----. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81.

Thomas, Valorie. "Keys to the Ancestors' Chambers: An Approach to Teaching Beloved." Reading Between the Black and White Keys: Deep Crossings in African Diaspora Studies. Ed. Veve Clark. Berkeley: U of California Department of African American Studies, 1994.81-102.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random, 1983.

Wilson, Oily W. "The Association of Movement and Music as a Manifestation of a Black Conceptual Approach to Music Making." More Than Dancing. Ed. Irene V. Jackson. Westport: Greenwood, 1985.

-----. "The Significance of the Relationship Between Afro-American and West African Music." Black Perspectives in Music 2.1 (1974): 3-22.

Arlene R. Keizer is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She would like to express her gratitude to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for providing fellowship support which facilitated the completion of this article. She would also like to thank Barbara Christian and M. Giulia Fabi for their critical commentary on successive versions of this piece.