Jump Up!

Author(s):  
Ray Allen

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending urban studies, oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York’s diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace, transformation, and hybridization of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music—specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband—evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its island homeland and its burgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring for the first time the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York’s diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

Jump Up! ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Ray Allen

The Introduction lays out the organization and the research methodology of the book Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City. It outlines the history of calypso, soca, and steelband music in the diaspora, including the globalization of Trinidad Carnival, which was transplanted to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s. The concept of diaspora looms large here, of course, given the historical circumstances of New York’s Afro-Caribbean migrants. The Introduction also looks at the concept of hybridity, including hybridization between African and European musical practices in the Caribbean, which is central to diasporic transnationalism in this context. Also discussed is the concept of “heritage music,” or music that is important and needs to be preserved and protected. In addition, relevant writings on Caribbean music are reviewed and the study is positioned within the broader field of transnational diasporic music scholarship. And finally, a chapter outline is offered.


AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 101-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.


AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 101-114
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Vince Schleitwiler ◽  
Abby Sun ◽  
Rea Tajiri

This roundtable grew out of conversations between filmmaker Rea Tajiri, programmer Abby Sun, and scholar Vince Schleitwiler about a misunderstood chapter in the history of Asian American film and media: New York City in the eighties, a vibrant capital of Asian American filmmaking with a distinctively experimental edge. To tell this story, Rea Tajiri contacted her artist contemporaries Shu Lea Cheang and Roddy Bogawa as well as writer and critic Daryl Chin. Daryl had been a fixture in New York City art circles since the sixties, his presence central to Asian American film from the beginning. The scope of this discussion extends loosely from the mid-seventies through the late nineties, with Tajiri, Abby Sun, and Vince Schleitwiler initiating topics, compiling responses, and finalizing its form as a collage-style conversation.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.


1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Olga Jimenez Wagenheim ◽  
Virginia Sanchez Korrol

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.


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