African-American Entertainers in Jahrhundertwende: Vienna Austrian Identity, Viennese Modernism and Black Success

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Market Force ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
African American Music ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of

According to jazz scholar Howard Rye, when considering public representations of African-American music and those who made it at the turn of the last century, ‘the average jazz aficionado, and not a few others, conjures up images of white folks in black face capering about’. We could extend this to include white minstrels singing so-called ‘coon songs’, which feature reprehensible racist lyrics set to syncopated rhythms. Traditional representations assign the blacks no role in the public performance of these scurrilous ‘identities’, which essentially banished them from the literature as participating in careers in the performing arts. As a result of the problems with the representation of blacks in texted music from the turn of the century, historians have tended to write vocal performance out of the pre-history of jazz, in favour of the purely instrumental ragtime. However, recent research reveals that African-American vocal entertainers did take agency over representations of themselves and over their careers, in a space unencumbered by the problematic history of race relationships in the USA. That space was Europe: beginning in the 1870s, and in increasing numbers until the ‘Great War’, troupes of African-American singers, dancers and comedians travelled to Europe, where they entertained large audiences to great acclaim and gained valuable experience as entrepreneurs, emerging as an important market force in the variety-theatre circuit. Above all, they performed the cakewalk, the late-nineteenth-century dance whose syncopated rhythms and simple form accompanied unnatural, exaggerated dance steps. By introducing Europe to the cakewalk, they prepared audiences for the jazz craze that would sweep through the continent after the war and enabled Europeans to experience the syncopated rhythms and irregular movements whether as dancers or as spectators.

Emotions in performance: Poetry and preaching

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Carla Petievich ◽  
Max Stille
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Nation State

Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as ‘mushāʿira’ in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as ‘waʿz mahfil’ in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners’ experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers’ narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across ‘religious’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ realms—and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.

scholarly journals Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

Black Music USA: From African to African American Music

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Robert Sacré
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Deep South ◽  
African American Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Work Songs

This chapter discusses the history of African American Music. Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. As such, every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree. Work songs and the related prison songs are precursors of the blues. One can assume that primitive forms of pre-blues appeared around 1885, mostly in the Deep South and predominantly in the state of Mississippi. However, it was several more years before the famous AAB twelve-bar structure appeared, and when it did, one of its leading practitioners was Charley Patton.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

Municipal Activism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Prague: The House Numbered 207-V and Ghetto Clearance

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 247-278
Author(s):  
Cathleen M. Giustino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Projects ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Common Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

There was always much that was ordinary about the house numbered 207-V up to the time of its disappearance from Prague's built landscape in 1905. Like many other buildings sheltering some of the city's most underprivileged residents, this place had no artistic worth; no one had contemplated hanging a plaque on its exterior to commemorate a well-known person having slept inside its walls; no published material pointed out any history-altering event that took place behind or in front of its doors. The ordinariness of house 207-V becomes even greater when its final years are situated within the history of a common process taking place, with some exceptions, throughout nineteenth-century Central Europe. Many of the structure's last experiences were part of the growth of what German historians of Germany have called the “Leistungsverwaltung,” and what Austrian historians of Austria- Hungary have called “die aktive Stadt.”1 These two different lab ls are used to describe the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, a great many Central European cities expanded tremendously, not only in terms of their territoriesś populations, but also in terms of the number and extent of public projects that their municipal governments managed. The public projects included, among others, gas and electric works, transportation lines, sewers, baths, parks, libraries, museums, market halls, slaughterhouses,

The Columbian Exposition—The Chicago World’s Fair

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Music ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
African American Music ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Chicago World's Fair

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's participation in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, as representative of African American music. The exposition was designed to celebrate four centuries of progress toward building a lively industrial nation, which Chicago seemed to symbolize. It drew Americans from across the country, in company with Europeans, royals as well as commoners, to see whether the Americans might very literally be able to outshine the Paris Exposition of 1889. Despite resistance by the fair commission, there was some official representation of African Americans. This chapter examines how the World's Fair gave Burleigh, together with Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, the opportunity to address issues of representation and the ambiguous role that music and public performance could play in confronting discrimination and racist stereotyping.

Defying Boundaries and Escaping Stereotypes

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-220
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Riis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Original Creative Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Riis takes up the complicated conventions and troubled history of late-nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy as it was blended and interwoven into the activities among a largely unknown contingent of thousands of African American (and mostly midwestern) musicians and entertainers. He explores how nineteenth-century entertainers understood their business, including the moniker “minstrel” itself, and what for them constituted original, creative work. In this essay, the questions of identity have less to do with personal stories than the importance of the group and how its activities have been lost to history. Knowledge of these forgotten show people, and the sources where more information about them might be found, can help us combat the persistence of degrading stereotypes used to provide oversimplified explanations of black musical and theatrical activity.

Boom's Blues

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim Verbei
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
North American ◽  
World War ◽  
English Version ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
The 1960S

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. The book tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. The book ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of 13 blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then 23-year-old Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

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