Listening For Africa: Freedom, Modernity, And The Logic Of Black Music'S African Origins

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 danceÆs 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, Dßmaso P?rez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernityÆs 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, modernityÆs determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.

• | Author: David F. Garc?a
• | Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• | Publication Date: Aug 16, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 376 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Music
• | ISBN-10: 0822363704
• | ISBN-13: 9780822363705