This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American history and moral debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz history. The perspectives of Amiri Baraka, Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Dizzy Gillespie are used to develop the thesis that there is a problem with white presumptions about how hipness relates to African American cultural life and history. This problem requires addressing interrelationships between race and gender, as well as the legacy of primitivism embedded in common assumptions about how jazz since World War II relates to social consciousness, sexual liberation, and dignity.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk High in the tower where I sit beside the loud complaining of the human sea I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that puzzle me more than the Souls of White Folk. Not, mind you, the souls of them that are white, but souls of them that have become painfully conscious of their whiteness; those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with tremendous and eternal significance.-W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk" These words of W. E. B. Du Bois resonate forcefully in the context of current discussions on culture and identity in ethnomusicology and an-This essay is dedicated to the late Howard Mayer Brown, a generous mentor and friend. My thinking on this topic began while I held an American Fellowship from the Association of American University Women in 1990-1991. For critical readings and discussions I thank
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