Abstract

How do we hear feeling in music? How do we hear 'soul' in soul music? How do we hear 'heat' in a singer's voice or see 'heat' in her image? How do we feel 'love' in a singer's rendering of a song? And since black American musical performance has its roots in the blues, how do we hear 'blueness?' This present study analyzes how to read the illuminated content of the contemporary black soul music star in performance, as it also considers how issues in black representation, stardom and soul music might inform the concept of illumination. The surplus, essential elements in sentimental soul music performance, including energy, feelings, love and heat, have to be accounted for, but there does not exist a physical language with which to describe these phenomenal elements. Drawing on theory by Marx, Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Randy Martin, James Baldwin and many others, this study considers how to perform an intuitive reading of the auratic and/or surplus elements of a given commodified performance that is based in objective representation. How can one "see" and account for or represent what is "not there" in a given performance? The hypothesis is that we see what is not there in a given performance by understanding the relationship of the non-objective and non-representational elements to the objective representational elements . To do so is to envision the interpenetration rather than the distantiation of dialectical concepts such as the spectacular and the mundane, distraction and contemplation, subject and object, and the one and the many. Through extensive case studies that overread the star images of Maxwell and Toni Braxton, this dissertation demonstrates that what is illuminated in black celebrity performance is the dissident possibility of a social totality that exceeds the conditions of dualism, individualism and hierarchism produced in modern commodity capitalism. As demonstrated in the case studies, the political power of black soul singers, suggested in terms of non-representational performance content, is to counteract the various demands corporate capitalism places on the pursuit of a transcendental oneness, collective intimacy and wholeness in social relations