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"The American Negro," Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "must remake
his past in order to make his future." Many Harlem Renaissance
figures agreed that reframing the black folk inheritance could play
a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and
artistic freedom. In "Deep River "Paul Allen Anderson focuses on
the role of African American folk music in the Renaissance
aesthetic and in political debates about racial performance, social
memory, and national identity.
"Deep River" elucidates how spirituals, African American concert
music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory
and anticipation during the Harlem Renaissance. Anderson traces the
roots of this period's debates about music to the American and
European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W.
E. B. Du Bois's influential writings at the turn of the century
about folk culture and its bearing on racial progress and national
identity. He details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting
visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist
cosmopolitanism in the works of Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale
Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland
Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to
revisiting the place of music in the culture wars of the 1920s,
"Deep River "provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race
and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music
criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary
musicology.
"Deep River "offers a sophisticated historical account of American
racial ideologies and their function in music criticism and
modernist thought. It will interest general readers as well as
students of African American studies, American studies,
intellectual history, musicology, and literature.
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