Refraining, Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference in Amiri Baraka's Blues People

Repetition and those poststructuralist buzzwords are certainly no strangers to African-American cultural and political traditions. From the slave narrative to the postmodernism of Toni Morrison and Clarence Major; from Souls of Black Folk to Signifying Monkey; from what Amiri Baraka calls the willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of bebop (1963, 181-82) to rap; from Prince Hall to Malcom X, African-American traditions have deployed with a difference as a key concept in maintaining a vibrant culture on the margins of the American mainstream. Certainly there is a kind of repetition of standard Western forms in, for example, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or in the scholarly anthropological prose of W.E.B. DuBois, but it is precisely the the displacement, the question posed from within that renders a singularity or irreducibility to African-American traditions.1 Such repetitions cannot simply be conflated with received notions of imitation or representation. As Gilles Deleuze notes in Difference and Repetition , there are perhaps two kinds of repetition: the static, reterritorializing of repetition-as-representation; and the dynamic, deterritorializing of repetition with a difference. As Deleuze writes, The first repetition is repetition of the Same, explained by identity of the concept or representation; the second includes difference, and