Kind of Blue and the economy of modal jazz

Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots in the blues of the best-selling jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice. The case that the blues underpins the modal language of the album is made through reconsideration of the claims made for compositional features of individual tracks. Recognition of the transformed blues language that lies at the heart of the album places questions of its significance on a new footing, opening up the mix of musical languages on the album to interpretation within the context of integrationist ideals of the late 1950s. A critical reading of the album against this backdrop leads to the suggestion that the ongoing commercial success of the album can be partly attributed to a retention of integrationist ideals that masks the reality of persistent inequalities in race relations.

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Interracial Dialogues in Dixie: Expressing Emotions to Promote Racial Reconciliation

Peace and Conflict Studies ◽

10.46743/1082-7307/2021.1590 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jeneve Brooks ◽

Sharon Everhardt ◽

Samantha Earnest ◽

Imren Dinc

Keyword(s):

Race Relations ◽

Residential Segregation ◽

Racial Profiling ◽

Educational Inequality ◽

The United States ◽

Interracial Relationships ◽

Racial Reconciliation ◽

Institutionalized Racism ◽

Racial Injustice ◽

Qualitative Exploration

Given the legacy of racial injustice and mistrust that continues to plague race relations in the United States, it is important that citizens of different racial backgrounds come together to share their feelings and thoughts about race issues in order to advance racial reconciliation in their own communities. Saunders (1999) asserts that such dialogues can transform interracial relationships that could inspire the larger community to change itself. This study presents the results of nine interracial focus groups from two dialogues on race relations events held in Dothan, Alabama in 2015 and 2016. Our findings illustrate that many Black respondents displayed both anger and sadness as they provided stories of the institutionalized racism (e.g., racial profiling, educational inequality, residential segregation, etc.) as well as the more personalized racism that they had experienced. White respondents too demonstrated anger and sadness when relating their own experiences of strained race relations. This mixed-methods study also employed API analysis to further strengthen our original qualitative exploration of emotions. We argue that interracial dialogues can hold the potential for racial reconciliation as participants’ stories elucidate our most intransient race problems while also highlighting the emotions that connect discussants through the dialogic process.

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Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's Production of Langston Hughes's Mulatto

Theatre Survey ◽

10.1017/s0040557400006451 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 5-19 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jay Plum

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Race Relations ◽

Langston Hughes ◽

Deep South ◽

The Sun ◽

Historical Reconstruction ◽

Moral Issues ◽

Mimetic Theory ◽

Commercial Success ◽

Dramatic Text

Although Langston Hughes's Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

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Seeking to uncover biology's chemical roots

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20190012 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (5) ◽

pp. 435-443 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Addy Pross

Keyword(s):

Environmental Changes ◽

Biological Systems ◽

Significant Development ◽

The Road ◽

Physical Chemical ◽

Systems Chemistry ◽

Biological World ◽

Inanimate Matter ◽

The Origin Of Life ◽

Opening Up

Despite the considerable advances in molecular biology over the past several decades, the nature of the physical–chemical process by which inanimate matter become transformed into simplest life remains elusive. In this review, we describe recent advances in a relatively new area of chemistry, systems chemistry, which attempts to uncover the physical–chemical principles underlying that remarkable transformation. A significant development has been the discovery that within the space of chemical potentiality there exists a largely unexplored kinetic domain which could be termed dynamic kinetic chemistry. Our analysis suggests that all biological systems and associated sub-systems belong to this distinct domain, thereby facilitating the placement of biological systems within a coherent physical/chemical framework. That discovery offers new insights into the origin of life process, as well as opening the door toward the preparation of active materials able to self-heal, adapt to environmental changes, even communicate, mimicking what transpires routinely in the biological world. The road to simplest proto-life appears to be opening up.

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