It Is Now Time for Music

Abstract

It Is Now Time for Music Joseph Roach (bio) What an extraordinary honor it is to be remembered so generously for a book about the persistence of forgetting. My gratitude wells up proportionately. Each of the distinguished contributors remembers something of horizon-expanding importance that I forgot to know: Lisa Freeman, that the neologism glocal would have more clearly expressed the geohistorical relationships I had in mind, had I thought to use it; Kathleen Wilson, that performance—transportable, adaptable, irresistible—both proselytized for the British Empire and fomented resistance to it across all the oceans of the world, "from the Caribbean to the bay of Bengal, and the South Atlantic to the China Sea"; Elizabeth Dillon, that a walk in Ralph Waldo Emerson's footsteps along the "Freedom Trail" across America's oldest park traverses a regional palimpsest of hemispheric racial violence; Amy Huang, that our mapping of the transoceanic flows of cultural substitutions must include Asian peoples; and Daniel O'Quinn, that Jessye Norman's Dido verifies Afro-diasporic surrogation. Perspicaciously, O'Quinn queries my omission of the haunting curse that Virgil's Dido puts on the departing Aeneas and his descendants, calling on her avenger to rise from her bones. My excuse is as abject as it is pertinent to the occasion: I forgot. Indeed, none of these or other similarly recovered memories should ever be taken for granted. "What Americans mean by 'history,''' James Baldwin wrote, "is something that they can forget."1 Today, when the latest instant newsfeeds reenact scenarios of the Enlightenment's greatest failure, scholars of performance, past and present, have it in their power to challenge such refractory postponements of racial reckoning. In the Prologue to her transformative Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (2022), for instance, Kathleen Wilson remembers what generations of theater historians forgot: the "good ship Charming Sally," which famously [End Page 41] delivered the first professional acting company to American shores in 1752, was a slaver. Daniel O'Quinn navigates another quadrant of the same sea of tears when he evokes the cries of the drowning jetsam in NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Did their avengers arise from their bones? Do they still? Will they always? And Amy Huang maps an oceanic Asian current that runs so far and so deep, reminding her senior colleagues not to forget that the next wave of scholarly research in the field is already building even as ours crests. Anyone's memory can fail, but forgetting to remember differs from remembering to forget. Forgetting to remember might arise from unconscious repression, inattention, infirmity, or, as is so often the case, intractable cluelessness. Remembering to forget, by contrast, requires volition. I remembered to forget the Puritans, for instance, as Elizabeth Dillon points out. But the best antidote to forgetting, as Lisa Freeman emphasizes in her introduction, quoting Cities of the Dead, resides in the "aesthetic tangibility" of performance, whether it is experienced live or vividly reconstructed. Appositely, the cover art for both Dillon's New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World (2014) and Wilson's Strolling Players comes from festive scenes of Jamaican Jonkonnu captured in eye-popping prints by Isaac Mendes Belisario, ca. 1833–37. "Koo Koo, or Actor Boy" struts his stuff for Dillon: flowing plumes, periwig, and whip set off his black face, which peeks out from under his white mask, bowing ironically to Jamaica's seventeenth-century founding English overlords, contemporaries of the great Shakespearean Thomas Betterton, whose soul-shaking performance of Othello Amy Huang invokes. "The Red Set Girls" pirouette for Wilson: twirling pink parasols and raising their white petticoats to pay homage to a haystack-like "Jack-in-the-Green." Nominally a character associated with English May Day celebrations, Jamaican Jack, also known as Pitchy Patchy, bears a closer resemblance to West African-derived Egungun masqueraders.2 These mysteriously ambulant, hut-shaped effigies mediate relationships between the living and the ancestral dead to affirm their spiritual cohesion in defiance of diaspora and genocide. As counter-performing strollers of empire staging a New World drama that is still playing, Koo Koo, Pitchy Patchy, and the Red Set...