Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins

David F. Garcia

Open Access Published by Duke University Press 2017

Listening for Africa

Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins

David F. Garcia

Overview

About this book

David F. Garcia examines the work of a wide range of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists between the 1930s and the 1950s to show how their belief in black music's African roots would provide the means to debunk racist ideologies, aid decolonization of Africa, and ease racial violence.

Author / Editor information

David F. Garcia is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music.

Reviews

“Listening for Africa is a book that deserves to be read carefully and slowly. It is a work of sensitive and rigorous archival research combined with a sophisticated theoretical framework.”

-- Ryan T. Skinner American Anthropologist

“Scholars of Africanisms and race relations will appreciate Garcia's message. Recommended.”

-- K. W. Mukuna Choice

"An interesting and insightful read. . . . With an extensive bibliography at the end, this book will be of much interest to a wide variety of scholars interested in sound studies: anthropologists, musicologists, cultural studies scholars, and critical race theorists, to name a few. Garcia’s work gives scholars new tools to examine racial motivations behind music studies and discussions of music and sound, and new ways to discuss how that affects our writing, scholarly discussions and consensus, and the cultural influences of that information."

-- Chelsea Adams Journal of Anthropological Research

"Listening for Africa ambitiously and provocatively weaves together multiple strands of a rich, complex, and decidedly important tale: how academics and artists of diverse backgrounds engaged and promoted the African origins of diasporic black music and dance. . . . The best parts of the book were so ear-opening that I wished I was reading the first volume of a historical trilogy on the locus of artistic and intellectual biography at formative moments in the disciplinary organization of anthropology and ethnomusicology."

-- Steven Feld Journal of Anthropological Research

"Theoretically ambitious and meticulously researched. . . sure to become a classic account of the discursive construction of blackness through music."

-- Michael Birenbaum Quintero Journal of Popular Music Studies

"This impressive monograph is an archaeology of knowledge via several intersecting fields—anthropology, comparative musicology, folklore, African American, and dance studies—and interrogates the performances of an African past as manifested in Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and African American contexts."

-- Joel Dinerstein African American Review

"Listening for Africa is an immensely useful study, documenting as it does the roles of numerous actants who otherwise do not appear in the established histories of jazz."

-- Bruce Johnson Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research

Topics

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 373
Illustrations
- Other: 23 illustrations

eBook

Planned Publication: August 16, 2017
ISBN: 9781478093251