The Sound of Racial Feeling

Abstract

Critics continue to debate the value of U.S. black music according to a flawed distinction between racial authenticity and social construction. Both sides have it half-right. Black music's value arose historically as the result of a fundamental contradiction in the logic of race tracing back to the slave era. As “Negro” in form, the music was constituted as the collective property of another property, a property-in-slaves. The incongruity produced a perception of black music as an auditory form embodied with fleshly substance, and this sense of racial feeling would live on despite its inconsistencies with modern ideas about race.

Mapping a New Humanism in the 1940s: Thelma Johnson Streat between Dance and Painting

“…Further, the exoticizing of black expressivity had long been associated with dance, tied to what André Lepecki calls "the spectacle of mobility", or the physical effort, toil, and sweat so often depicted in racialized fantasies of black people as innate, "natural" performers (Lepecki 2006, p. 58). If there is a physicality or fleshliness to black expression, it is not essential or natural but rooted in the historical status of dance and music as material commodities inextricably connected to the commodification of the people who invented it; in other words, its fostering under the extreme and violent conditions of chattel slavery and its historical repercussions (Radano 2013). By the 1940s, however, it had become unfashionable to mobilize what Susan Manning memorably calls "metaphorical minstrelsy"-or the enactment of non-western or indigenous American cultural practice through white modernist appropriation.…”

Feeling to Learn: Ideologies of Race, Aurality, and Manouche Music Pedagogy in France

“…2016: 5) and that “interrogates the historical and contemporary co‐naturalization of language and race” (Rosa and Flores 2017: 622; see also Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa 2019). I attend to the multiple, intersecting semiotic modalities through which race emerges (Wirtz 2014: 14), including vocal and musical sound (Eidsheim 2011, 2019; Radano 2013; Roberts 2016; Stoever 2016). A focus on the metapragmatics of talk about musical skill development, especially where speakers privilege the aural and kinesic dimensions of musical communication, allows me to investigate how Manouche ethnoracial identities are produced along contrastive lines with French Whiteness.…”