Deep River

Anderson Paul Allen Anderson

Description

"The American Negro," Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "must remake his past in order to make his future." Many Harlem Renaissance figures agreed that reframing the black folk inheritance could play a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and artistic freedom. In Deep River Paul Allen Anderson focuses on the role of African American folk music in the Renaissance aesthetic and in political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity.Deep River elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation during the Harlem Renaissance. Anderson traces the roots of this period's debates about music to the American and European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W. E. B. Du Bois's influential writings at the turn of the century about folk culture and its bearing on racial progress and national identity. He details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist cosmopolitanism in the works of Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to revisiting the place of music in the culture wars of the 1920s, Deep River provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary musicology.Deep River offers a sophisticated historical account of American racial ideologies and their function in music criticism and modernist thought. It will interest general readers as well as students of African American studies, American studies, intellectual history, musicology, and literature.

Sujets

• USA
• États-Unis
• Music
• Jazz

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383048
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DEEP RIVER

n e w a m e r i c a n i s t s

A Series Edited by Donald E. Pease

DEEP RIVER Music and Memory in

Harlem Renaissance Thought

p a u l a l l e n a n d e r s o n

Duke University Press Durham & London 2001

2001duke university press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Gilbert and Lucille Anderson

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

one‘‘Unvoiced Longings’’: Du Bois and the ‘‘Sorrow Songs’’ 13

twoSwan Songs and Art Songs: The Spirituals and the ‘‘New Negro’’ in the 1920s 59

three‘‘The Twilight of Aestheticism’’: Locke on Cosmopolitanism and Musical Evolution 113

four‘‘Beneath the Seeming Informality’’: Hughes, Hurston, and the Politics of Form 167

fiveSaving Jazz from Its Friends: The Predicament of Jazz Criticism in the Swing Era 219

Epilogue 257

Notes 271

Selected Bibliography 311

Index 325

Acknowledgments

It would be impossible to thank everyone who assisted this project through the gifts of inspiration, support, and dialogue. Larry Moore, Do minick LaCapra, and Joel Porte were generous with their expertise and time throughout my graduate education. They encouraged an unusual history dissertation that was always in danger of sliding through the disci plinary cracks. I must especially thank Larry Moore for being such an in tellectually stimulating and supportive teacher and adviser over the years. He oVered a critical and demanding reading of everything I gave him, and he patiently shepherded me through the long process. While at Cornell, I studied under a number of others who influenced the project early on, including Michael Kammen, Michael Steinberg, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kenneth McClane, and Hal Foster. I thank them all for the education they imparted and the encouragement they gave to the various pieces that made up the project. Extraspecial thanks go to the friends and colleagues who read and commented on parts of the manuscript or the whole of it. While a com plete list of their names is impossible, thanks go to Tony Nassar, Charles Reeve, Todd DePastino, Michael Slind, Blake Stimson, JeVStimmel, Mi chael Szalay, James Boyd White, Adam Smith, Laura Swartzbaugh, Rob ert Self, Oz Frankel, Eric Guthey, Richard CandidaSmith, Jonathan Freedman, Jim McIntosh, Tamar Barzel, Travis Jackson, and George Hutchinson. The two anonymous readers for Duke University Press ex tended detailed critiques of early versions and prodded me to write a better book. The diplomacy of Valerie Milholland and Miriam Angress of Duke Press ensured that the manuscript reached its destination. For permission to reprint photographs, special thanks to Bruce Kellner, Executor, Carl Van Vechten Estate. For photographic reproductions, thanks to the Li brary of Congress, Photoduplication Service, and the Yale Collection of