Music, Africa, and Race in the Mid-20th Century

FAIN: FA-57676-14

David Fernando Garcia
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

My project uncovers a crucial moment (1930s-1950s) in the history of the African diaspora when a group of Africans, Americans, and Cubans promulgated a revaluation of black music's African origins in order to sway entrenched attitudes in American and Cuban society towards race and the so-called Dark Continent. Not only anthropologists but musicians, dancers, and activists as well insisted that objectively understanding black music's trajectory from its origins in Africa to the New World would help solve the problem of racism and raise support for Africa's decolonization. The book argues that their work marked a significant shift in, but not a complete break from, the legacy of nineteenth-century evolutionism. When black music "sounded" its African origins, some perceived those performing it as embodying modern man's primitive and barbaric past, whereas for others it signaled an emergent black cultural nationalism that would anticipate black music's politicization in the 1960s.

Associated Products

Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins (Book)
Title: Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins
Author: David F. Garcia
Abstract: 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, Dámaso Pérez 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.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://www.dukeupress.edu/listening-for-africa
Primary URL Description: Duke University Press website
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780822363705
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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