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Listening for Africa
Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins
By (author)
David F. Garcia
Genres:
Theory of music & musicology, Music reviews & criticism, Black & Asian studies, Social & cultural anthropology, Hispanic & Latino studies, Dance & other performing arts, Non-Western music: traditional & classical, Cultural studies
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Synopsis
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. New & Used
| Seller | Information | Condition | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | - | New | £21.65 + FREE UK P & P |
What Reviewers Are Saying
"Listening for Africa is a book that deserves to be read carefully and slowly. It is a work of sensitive and rigorous archival research combined with a sophisticated theoretical framework." -- Ryan T. Skinner * American Anthropologist * "Scholars of Africanisms and race relations will appreciate Garcia's message. Recommended." -- K. W. Mukuna * Choice * "An interesting and insightful read. . . . With an extensive bibliography at the end, this book will be of much interest to a wide variety of scholars interested in sound studies: anthropologists, musicologists, cultural studies scholars, and critical race theorists, to name a few. Garcia's work gives scholars new tools to examine racial motivations behind music studies and discussions of music and sound, and new ways to discuss how that affects our writing, scholarly discussions and consensus, and the cultural influences of that information." -- Chelsea Adams * Journal of Anthropological Research * "Listening for Africa ambitiously and provocatively weaves together multiple strands of a rich, complex, and decidedly important tale: how academics and artists of diverse backgrounds engaged and promoted the African origins of diasporic black music and dance. . . . The best parts of the book were so ear-opening that I wished I was reading the first volume of a historical trilogy on the locus of artistic and intellectual biography at formative moments in the disciplinary organization of anthropology and ethnomusicology." -- Steven Feld * Journal of Anthropological Research * "Theoretically ambitious and meticulously researched. . . sure to become a classic account of the discursive construction of blackness through music."
-- Michael Birenbaum Quintero * Journal of Popular Music Studies * "This impressive monograph is an archaeology of knowledge via several intersecting fields-anthropology, comparative musicology, folklore, African American, and dance studies-and interrogates the performances of an African past as manifested in Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and African American contexts." -- Joel Dinerstein * African American Review * "Listening for Africa is an immensely useful study, documenting as it does the roles of numerous actants who otherwise do not appear in the established histories of jazz." -- Bruce Johnson * Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research *
-- Michael Birenbaum Quintero * Journal of Popular Music Studies * "This impressive monograph is an archaeology of knowledge via several intersecting