Listening for Africa

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

David F. Garcia

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780822363705
  9780822363545
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822373117
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

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. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity's determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Analyzing the African Origins of Negro Music and Dance in a Time of Racism, Fascism, and War
• 2. Listening to Africa in the City, in the Laboratory, and on Record
• 3. Embodying Africa against Racial Oppression, Ignorance, and Colonialism
• 4. Disalienating Movement and Sound from the Pathologies of Freedom and Time
• 5. Desiring Africa, or Western Civilization’s Discontents
• Conclusion. Dance-Music as Rhizome
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index