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Jazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000), author of the world’s best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era. German musicians began, in a highly productive way, to question their all-too-eager adoption of American culture and how they sought to make valid artistic statements reflecting their identity as Europeans. This book explores the significance of some of Berendt’s most important writings and record productions. Particular attention is given to the “Jazz Meets the World” encounters that he engineered with musicians from Japan, Tunisia, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. This proto-“world music” demonstrates how some West Germans went about creating a post-nationalist identity after the Third Reich. Berendt’s powerful role as the West German “Jazz Pope” is explored, as is the groundswell of criticism directed at him in the wake of 1968.
A fascinating cultural studies account of the "afterlife" of Leichhardt, revealing both German entanglement in British colonialism in Australia, and in a broader sense, what happens when we maintain an open stance to the ghosts of the past.
Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies. Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook’s voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th- century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds – ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationshi...
Investigates the appropriation of black popular culture as a symbol of rebellion in postwar Germany
A new and wide-ranging view of the confluence, since the 1990s, of the fields of contemporary literature and popular music in Germany.
The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys...
Volume 13 deals with the interaction of music and politics, considering a broad range of genres, authors, composers, and artists in Germany since the nineteenth century. A particularly iconic image of German Reunification is that of Mstislav Rostropovich playing from J. S. Bach's cello suites in front of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989. Thirty years on, it is timely to reconsider the cross-fertilization of music and politics within the German-speaking context. Frequently employed as a motivational force, a propaganda tool, or even a weapon, music can imbue a sense of identity and belonging, triggering both comforting and disturbing memories. Playing a key role in the formation of Heimat...
Italy has always been a land enamored of music, but in the early 20th century it was jazz that seduced many Italian music lovers. Loud, brash and syncopated, it was an imported passion that came from across the Atlantic; it was first performed by visiting American troupes and returning emigrants. Eventually Italians began creating their own jazz. From ragtime to big bands, Italy has foxtrotted and boogie-woogied through periods of war and peace, poverty and prosperity, Fascism and democracy. Italy often had a mixed opinion of jazz, and that suspicion and active hatred of foreign musical novelties reached its apex during Mussolini’s era – and yet jazz survived and even flourished despite political and social disapproval. This illustrated book records the story of Italian jazz from the early period of imitation to the time when the country’s own jazz geniuses made the genre uniquely Italian. Musicologists, historians and jazz lovers will find much to enjoy here.
The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design is a 21st century statement on the intersection of the future of African people with art, culture, technology, and politics. This collection enters the global debate on the emerging field of Afrofuturism studies with an international array of scholars and artists contributing to the discussion of Black futurity in the 21st century. The contributors analyze and respond to the invisibility or mischaracterization of Black people in the popular imagination, in science fiction, and in philosophies of history.
A new reading of Fassbinder's most popular film that highlights the roles of race and gender. The Marriage of Maria Braun is the most popular film by the enfant terrible director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the leading exponent of the "New German Cinema" of the early sixties to early eighties. It exemplifies his use and abuse of the genre of melodrama. Set in the immediate postwar period and centered around a strong female protagonist, Maria Braun (1978) was the first film in a trilogy that attempts to work through West Germany's fraught past and the legacy of Nazi Germany through the eyes of characters marginalized by their gender, race, sexuality, or (dis)ability. Maria attempts to navigate ...