Spencer's discussion encompasses the music and writings of a wide range of important figures, including James Weldon Johnson, Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Alain Locke, William Grant Still, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Dorothy Maynor. He argues that the singular accomplishment of the Harlem Renaissance composers and musicians was to achieve a "two-tiered mastery" promoted by Johnson, Locke, the Harmon award, and Crisis and Opportunity magazines.
As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.
The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
This second volume of Music in Black American Life offers research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and Black Music Research Journal, and in two book series published by the University of Illinois Press: Music in American Life, and African American Music in Global Perspective. In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music. These extracts and articles examine the World War II jazz scene; look at female artists like gospel star Shirley Caesar and jazz musician-arranger Melba Liston; illuminate the South Bronx milieu that folded many forms of black expressive culture into rap; and explain Hamilton's massive success as part of the "tanning" of American culture that began when Black music entered the mainstream. Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945–2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history. Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker
Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment. Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turning an evening's entertainment into a struggle between rival claimants for the New South's soul. Opera, spirituals, and fiddling became popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because audiences found them flexible enough to accommodate a variety of competing responses to the challenges of making a New South. Campbell shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.
This book examines the historiography of the African American freedom struggle from the 1890s to the present. It considers how, and why, the study of African American history developed from being a marginalized subject in American universities and colleges at the start of the twentieth century to become one of the most extensively researched fields in American history today. There is analysis of the changing scholarly interpretations of African American leaders from Booker T. Washington through to Barack Obama. The impact and significance of the leading civil rights organizations are assessed, as well as the white segregationists who opposed them and the civil rights policies of presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. The civil rights struggle is also discussed in the context of wider, political, social and economic changes in the United States and developments in popular culture.
This book focuses on the location of the religious heritage of Africa within the academic study of religion - including indigenous African religions, African Christianities, African/American forms of Islam, the religions of African Americans, Afro-Caribbean religions, and Afro-Brazilian religions.
