CiNii Books - Crossovers : essays on race, music, and American culture

Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside and outside the academy. With reviews written for the Village Voice and articles from academic journals, this volume includes essays, commentary, and meditations on James Agee and Walker Evans, Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera, Lafcadio Hearn, Melville Herskovits, Josef Skorvecky, Patrick Chamoiseau, pop song writer Ellie Greenwich, and jazz musicians Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman. Also included are pieces on the prehistory of hip hop, the blues, popular dance instruction songs, tap dance, and African American set dancing; creole writing and creolization; race and culture; and authenticity, representation, nostalgia, and obscenity in American popular culture, with excursions into jazz in Africa, Russia, and Argentina. Written about a country with cultural crossroads everywhere, where the question of race is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society, these essays cross boundaries and shed light on the complexities of American life.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Musical style and racial conflict 3. Musical adaptation among Afro-Americans 4. An American anthropological dilemma: the politics of Afro-American culture 5. Reconsideration: the myth of the Negro past 6. Reconsideration: Lafcadio Hearn in Cincinnati 7. The forest as moral document: the achievement of Lydia Cabrera 8. Race and the embodiment of culture 9. After the myth: studying Afro-American cultural patterns in the plantation literature 10. Speaking people, in their own terms 11. The lizards fake the fake 12. As it is prophesied, so it used to be 13. Greenwich's good gnosis 14. Free samples: Roy Nathanson and Anthony Coleman 15. Milling at the mall 16. Childhood's ends 17. Sweet feet 18. From "Messin' around" to "Funky western civilization": the rise and fall of dance instruction songs 19. The Afro-American transformation of European set dances and dance suites 20. All that beef, and symbolic action, too! : notes on the occasion of the banning of 2 Live Crew's As nasty as they wanna be 21. The real old school 22. Josef Skvorecky and the tradition of jazz literature 23. World views collide: the history of jazz and hot dance 24. Way down yonder in Buenos Aires 25. Improvising under apartheid: Afro blue 26. Sonny Rollins in the age of mechanical reproduction 27. Sun Ra, 1914-1993 28. Ornette Coleman: ?civilization 29. The local and the express: Anthony Braxton's title-drawings 30. Magnificent declension: Solibo magnificent 31. Metaphors of incommensurability

Volume: : cloth ISBN 9780812238822

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Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside and outside the academy. With reviews written for the "Village Voice" and articles from academic journals, this volume includes essays, commentary, and meditations on James Agee and Walker Evans, Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera, Lafcadio Hearn, Melville Herskovits, Josef Skorvecky, Patrick Chamoiseau, pop song writer Ellie Greenwich, and jazz musicians Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman. Also included are pieces on the prehistory of hip hop, the blues, popular dance instruction songs, tap dance, and African American set dancing; creole writing and creolization; race and culture; and authenticity, representation, nostalgia, and obscenity in American popular culture, with excursions into jazz in Africa, Russia, and Argentina. Written about a country with cultural crossroads everywhere, where the question of race is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society, these essays cross boundaries and shed light on the complexities of American life.

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Crossovers : essays on race, music, and American culture

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