As I read Arjun Appadurai’s treatment of affect in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, I thought of a film entitled The Language You Cry In (1998).  Its narrative celebrates the preservation of a short burial song from Sierra Leonean Mende persons in a South Carolinian Gullah family, five generations after the Middle Passage.  Filmed in both Sierra Leone and the United States’ Sea Islands, the film tells the story of a transatlantic encounter of African persons.  In theorizing the song’s ongoing relevance, a Mende elder suggests that “[y]ou can speak another language.  You can live in another culture.  But, to cry over your dead, you always go back to your mother tongue…You know who a person is by the language they cry in.”

 

Upon first glance, perhaps Appadurai would trouble this assertion.  Chapter Nine, “Life After Primordialism,” pushes back against the primordialist argument that suggests “group sentiments” or “[i]deas of collective identity based on shared claims to blood, soil, or language [that] draw their affective force from the sentiments that bind small groups” (140).  After all, Appadurai argues, “why do only some explode into explicit primordialist fury” (141)?  Or, by extension, primordialist affect?  Appadurai argues that the “work of the imagination,” rather than primordial sentiment, fuels the constructed universality of emotion.

 

In some ways, The Language You Cry In is symptomatic of how “[l]arge-scale identities forcibly enter the local imagination and become dominant voice-overs in the traffic of everyday life” (154-155).  Having conducted some research in African Atlantic Studies, I can tentatively assert that The Language You Cry In, coupled with the scholarship of historian Margaret Washington, has shifted contemporary Gullah narratives of origin.  In other words, many Gullah persons now readily suggest their direct lineage to Sierra Leone: a relatively new script.  As opposed to the primordialist fantasy, I see the work of “real” imagination.  In this case, the imaginative is a prelude to an embodied songscape: Mende and Gullah lives after the film.

 

I think that there is more to mine, however, in this crying diaspora.  Indeed, The Language You Cry In invokes Appadurai’s two central categories: media and migration.  Media becomes a way to craft locality and reproduce Gullah through the lens of Mende. The accessibility of coast-to-coast travel creates a new diaspora between two localities; shared mourning ritual creates an evocative “homecoming.”  While the plea for the authentic here — “who a person is” — may be passé, Appadurai’s diagnoses of media’s capacity to craft lives is certainly well-made.  I cannot shake, though, the idea that trauma (read the Middle Passage) means significantly in how these localities are now constructed in light of the other.  Appadurai’s “imagination,” paired with critical theorist Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, could help deconstruct the multiple ways that The Language You Cry In explicates “modernity at large.”