Dissonant Dissent: Du Bois and the Terrible Beauty of Rap Music

Abstract

This paper argues for the necessity of a certain dissonant dissent as a condition of public responsibility (Du Bois) and public intelligence (Dewey). This can take the form today of rap music. There is no pure public sphere, there are no ideal conditions for communicative discourse; the nation state of America is not equitable in its provision of the conditions of what Du Bois calls “social uplift”. The music of rap both discloses these claims and affirms them, and this is part-constitutive of its strength as an expression of creative dissent. I am sympathetic to Gooding-Williams' proposal of an affective turn, when he says that for Du Bois racial inequality must be attacked with weapons of sudden and immediate assault, and that principal among these is beauty. But rather than confront racism with another picture, another representation, I argue that we would do better to disturb the picture by creating and exploiting spaces and surfaces within it. After all, theories of aesthetics and taste are racially loaded from the start. Better, I say, to introduce dissonance into the picture. Not so much by offering another content of dissent, but by performing an irresponsibility towards the material of its medium.