Listening for Africa : freedom, modernity, and the logic of Black music's African origins
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Listening for Africa : freedom, modernity, and the logic of Black music's African origins
Duke University Press, 2017
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-344) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance's African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Damaso Perez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity's promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. In analyzing their work, Garcia traces how such attempts to link black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity's determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Analyzing the African Origins of Negro Music and Dance in a Time of Racism, Fascism, and War 21
2. Listening to Africa in the City, in the Laboratory, and on Record 74
3. Embodying Africa against Racial Oppression, Ignorance, and Colonialism 124
4. Disalienating Movement and Sound from the Pathologies of Freedom and Time 173
5. Desiring Africa, or Western Civilization's Discontents 221
Conclusion. Dance-Music as Rhizome 268
Notes 277
Bibliography 323
Index 345
by "Nielsen BookData"
