In" Culture on the Margins, "Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery"
of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly
revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying
racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song
making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute
social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were,
by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as
testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive
shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a
mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In
tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black
music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is
constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from
easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to
furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism.
In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music,
abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious
singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and
politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and
other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains,
modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The
result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the
racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of
divorcing black culture from politics.
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