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The Transformation of Black Music includes a full spectrum of black musics from four continents as it argues for a re-codification of black musics and performers. Framed by a call and response argument, the authors present not only a more holistic and historically accurate understanding of musics in the African Diaspora, but also an intellectually robust future for the field of black music research.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey’s search to understand America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.
Enslaved African Americans longed for freedom, and that longing took many forms—including music. Drawing on biblical imagery, slave songs both expressed the sorrow of life in bondage and offered a rallying cry for the spirit. Like a Bird brings together text, music, and illustrations by Coretta Scott King Award–winning illustrator Michele Wood to convey the rich meaning behind thirteen of these powerful songs.
Vibrant worship music is part of the Charismatic liturgy all around the world, and has become in many ways the hallmark of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Despite its centrality, scholarly interest in the theological and ritual significance of worship for pentecostal spirituality has been sparse, not least in Africa. Combining rich theoretical and theological insight with an in-depth case study of worship practices in Nairobi, Kenya, this interdisciplinary study offers a significant contribution to knowledge and is bound to influence scholarly discussions for years to come. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in Pentecostal worship, ritual, and spirituality.
An exploration of the history of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-20th century
Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument abou...
Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a framework to fully contextualize and understand this process of music curation.
Utilizing written sources as well as nationally representative survey data, Daniel H. Krymkowski analyzes the extent and causes of African American underrepresentation in the cultural realms of golf, hiking, hunting and fishing, water sports, winter sports, classical music, painting and sculpture, ballet, and the theater. African American participation significantly lags behind that of non-Hispanic whites in all of these areas, and it is not due to an aversion to these types of activities. Rather, as Krymkowski shows, its primary sources are racial-ethnic socioeconomic differences, as well as historic and contemporary discrimination, both overt and subtle. These causes are rooted in the systemic racism that continues to plague the United States. The lack of opportunity to participate in such cultural forms deprives African Americans of aesthetic experiences that are central to the human condition, and it has implications for both health and the accumulation of cultural and social capital. Krymkowski also explores current efforts to increase African American representation in these areas of culture and discusses the benefits of doing so.
Music is powerful and transformational, but can it spur actual social change? A strong collection of essays, At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice studies the meaning of music within a community to investigate the intersections of sound and race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and differing abilities. Ethnographic work from a range of theoretical frameworks uncovers and analyzes the successes and limitations of music's efficacies in resolving conflicts, easing tensions, reconciling groups, promoting unity, and healing communities. This volume is rooted in the Crossroads Section for Difference and Representation of the Society for Ethnomusicology, whose mandate is to address issues of diversity, difference, and underrepresentation in the society and its members' professional spheres. Activist scholars who contribute to this volume illuminate possible pathways and directions to support musical diversity and representation. At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice is an excellent resource for readers interested in real-world examples of how folklore, ethnomusicology, and activism can, together, create a more just and inclusive world.
Teaching Difficult Topics provides a series of on-the-ground reflections from college music instructors working in a wide variety of institutional settings about their approaches to inclusive, supportive pedagogy in the music classroom. Although some imagine the music classroom to be an apolitical space, instructors find themselves increasingly in need of resources for incorporating issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and historical trauma into their classrooms in ways that support student learning and safeguard their classroom communities. The teaching reflections in Teaching Difficult Topics examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that ins...