| DR-272617-20 | Digital Humanities: Fellowships Open Book Program | Duke University | Open Access Edition of Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins. | 9/1/2020 - 2/28/2022 | $5,500.00 | Dean | J. | Smith | | | | Duke University | Durham | NC | 27705-4677 | USA | 2020 | Music History and Criticism | Fellowships Open Book Program | Digital Humanities | 5500 | 0 | 5500 | 0 |
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. |