|
Books > History > American history
|
Buy Now
Blackface Nation - Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R886
Discovery Miles 8 860
|
|
|
Blackface Nation - Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925 (Paperback)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an
urbanized, industrial giant between the War of 1812 and the early
twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the question of
what it meant to be American. As Brian Roberts shows in Blackface
Nation, this struggle is especially evident in popular culture and
the interplay between two specific strains of music: middle-class
folk and blackface minstrelsy. The Hutchinson Family Singers, the
Northeast's most popular middle-class singing group during the
mid-nineteenth century, are perhaps the best example of the first
strain of music. The group's songs expressed an American identity
rooted in communal values, with lyrics focusing on abolition,
women's rights, and socialism. Blackface minstrelsy, on the other
hand, emerged out of an audience-based coalition of Northern
business elites, Southern slaveholders, and young, white,
working-class men, for whom blackface expressed an identity rooted
in individual self-expression, anti-intellectualism, and white
superiority. Its performers embodied the love-crime version of
racism, in which vast swaths of the white public adored African
Americans who fit blackface stereotypes even as they used those
stereotypes to rationalize white supremacy. By the early twentieth
century, the blackface version of the American identity had become
a part of America's consumer culture while the Hutchinsons' songs
were increasingly regarded as old-fashioned. Blackface Nation
elucidates the central irony in America's musical history: much of
the music that has been interpreted as black, authentic, and
expressive was invented, performed, and enjoyed by people who
believed strongly in white superiority. At the same time, the music
often depicted as white, repressed, and boringly bourgeois was
often socially and racially inclusive, committed to reform, and
devoted to challenging the immoralities at the heart of America's
capitalist order.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
