Black Music

“Shout It Out :” Patrice Rushen as polyphonist and the sounding of black women's affectability and genius

“…This work eviscerates the affective and material elements of her labor that is used to create virtuosic work. The naturalization of her labor allows for her labor to be expropriated substantiating Baraka's feelings as a black man: “More than I have felt to say, she says always” (Jones, , p. 25). The voice of the black woman musician creates affections that cohere around the feelings and emotional capacity of others.…”

“…Featured in Black Music , Amiri Baraka's “The Dark Lady of the Sonnet,” epitomizes the ways that black women musicians become a repository for the production of external affects. Referring to Billie Holiday's voice as “a voice that grew from a singer's instrument to a woman's,” Baraka seemingly naturalizes the relationship between Holiday's production of material and affective labor via singing (Jones, , p. 25). The bifurcation of voice and instrument is of course a faulty one due to the legacies of black women musician's enacting and using voice as an instrument, but the erasure of voice in relation to instrumentation is important.…”

The Diversiform Character of Diasporas Today: Mapping and Monitoring the Polymorphous and/or the Protean

“…Table 1 lists some of Gilroy's main insights into the coterminous "stable power" and "creative authority" of diasporic worldviews. The table seeks to delineate Gilroy's thinking on what the African-American commentator Leroi Jones (1967) termed the changing same. It clarifies the view of Gilroy that while there are always bedrock or pillar outlooks, which initially help constitute diasporic worldviews, they should not be deemed to be absolute in the effects or unchanging in their reach (Gilroy, 1997).…”

Prayer Songs: Therapy That Aided a People' s Survival

“…N egro Spirituals attracted serious attention from the beginning of their sounding in the quarters of enslaved people in North American colonies around 1760 (Walker, 1979;Jones, 1967). Large numbers of enslaved people became acquainted with Biblical scriptures and were converted to Christianity between 1730 and 1770; this was one of several intense periods of evangelical activity in the colonies known as the first Great Awakening.…”

“…Those attributes have received studied attention that has been well articulated and disseminated (Cone, 1992;Dett, 1927;Frazier, 1974;Harris, 1992;Jones, 1967;Locke, 1969;Lovell, 1972;Southern, 1971;Thurman, 1969;Walker, 1979). However, neither the intricacy of the songs' therapeutic resources relative to the specific way that they helped resolve enslaved peoples' inner conflict, nor the song makers' intentional composing and use of the songs for therapy, has been given attention in the scholarly literature.…”