Chapter 11 SOCIAL AESTHETICS AND TRANSCULTURAL IMPROVISATION Wayde Compton and the Performance of Black Time

Abstract

The presence and coexistence of deconstructive and antiessentialist impulses, exemplified by postmodern artistic practices, within contestatory strategies of reconstructed identity formation is a recurrent issue in postcolonial and critical race theory.I am interested here in the improvisational crossroads where different transcultural and migrant resources meet.Transposed into new contexts and often fragmented, how can sounds and signs fitted to the original circumstances of their making yield a new, socially mediated and historically rooted aesthetics elsewhere?After a brief introductory consideration of the contingencies that come with the displacement of diasporic sounds facilitated by recording technologies, I look at the work of Wayde Compton, a black British Columbian artist who makes contextspecific use of musical improvisation and hip hop as a model for textual production and turntablism-mediated performance.In works such as 49th Parallel Psalm (1999) and Performance Bond (2004), Compton relies on hip hop turning into transformative textual "lit hop" to articulate historical conditions, border crossings, and possible futures of black British Columbian diasporic subjectivity and performance.1But how does he achieve this effect by means of compositional techniques that in many cases seem to disperse cultural specificity?The very processes of sampling and postmodern citation that drive Compton's artistic practice, after all, have also been accused of betraying historical depth and the social relatedness of signs that