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Our network is based in the fundamental difference of diasporic time. Our belief is that the imperial actions which first created the diaspora and then held it in isolation also compelled its scattered communities to create cultures against the odds and in the name of survival. These ordinary cultures of resistance, we believe, have revolutionized many European assumptions about art, privilege, and cultural expression.... 

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Among slaves and their descendants, W. E. B. Du Bois once declared, "no leisure class" could ever exist. Their lives were so "bare and cheerless" they could never "hand down the traditions of the past." Such a judgement was perhaps to be expected. Commonsense opinion of the period---and certainly that which Du Bois would have encountered during his studies at Harvard and Berlin--understood labour as a matter of deadening repetition and fatigue. Most Marxist and conservative observers alike distinguished it sharply from the leisure time that many felt essential to meaningful cultural expression. 

A little later in The Souls of Black Folk, however, Du Bois reconsiders his own part in this consensus. "The sorrow songs," he notes, were flourishing even among his “turbulent proletariat.” Field hollers and work chants were offering lines of protection  in the face of continuing penury. And in this “rhythmic cry of the slave,” not least because it guarded the soul, he could hear the “most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.”

The Souls of Black Folk thus dismantles its own political philosophy. Sorrow songs grow out of a hostile everyday, offering ontological defence against its insidious controls. Culture becomes at once more potent and more ordinary. But what is this cultural transformation that Du Bois describes? How did it emerge amid a dehumanising system? And what does that emergence tell us about our history or indeed the functions of cultures to come?

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