Why Public Culture Fails at Diversity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bau Graves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Music ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Distinct Component ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
Historical Circumstance ◽  
Cultural Democracy ◽  
Cultural Sector

Public culture in the United States fails at diversity. Due to historical circumstance, disparities in the accumulation and use of wealth, long-standing tradition, and a hundred years of governmental policies, the cultural preferences of a small and powerful minority is promoted to the virtual exclusion of all others. ‘Culture’ in the United States has been defined and represented to all Americans to exclusively mean the red-carpet ‘classical’ arts. The cultures of Blacks, Latinos, Asians—and most Whites—are not included or welcomed. So pervasive is this system of elitism, that it calls into question the legitimacy of public art practice in the United States. Is the American public cultural sector, taken as a whole—with community music a distinct component—an intrinsically racist enterprise? This chapter examines our exclusionary history and its trajectory in community arts, and offers the concept and practice of cultural democracy as an alternative.

Impact of the 2020 crises on the arts and culture in the United States: The effect of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Organizations ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Sector ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.

Creating the Latino City

Latino City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Llana Barber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latino Population ◽  
Transnational Activities ◽  
The City

Chapter Seven traces Lawrence's transition to a Latino-majority city with the 2000 census, including the tremendous increase in immigration during the 1980s that led Lawrence to become home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States outside of New York City. The city's Latino population came to define Lawrence's public culture in this period, and the long push for Latino political power in the city was ultimately successful in many ways. This chapter discusses the transnational activities that brought new vitality to Lawrence's economy and its public spaces, yet larger structural forces continued to create obstacles to Latinos finding in Lawrence the better life they pursued.

Community Music Practice with Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don D. Coffman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Iowa City ◽  
Community Music ◽  
Approaches To Teaching ◽  
Self Directed Learning ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
Directed Learning

This chapter examines three approaches to teaching and learning that resonate with community music principles and that can help inform the theoretical bases for community music practice, because there are similarities between the facilitating behaviours of community musicians and the teaching behaviours of educators. Specifically, this chapter portrays a continuum of viewpoints about guiding others—pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy—and illustrates how aspects of each approach can be applied to community music practice. These approaches range from authoritarian ideas that are teacher-centred and learner-dependent to more autonomous ideas that embrace learner-centred and self-directed learning. The New Horizons Band of Iowa City, Iowa, in the United States, is presented as an illustration.

scholarly journals Dr. Billy Taylor, “America's Classical Music,” and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Artistic Value ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of

The idea of jazz as “America's classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study. The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. Billy Taylor. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but that these contexts diverged as his public profile was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. The idea's disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals.

Cultural Imagery and Racial Conflict in the United States: The Case of African-Americans

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Merelman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Group ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Racial Conflict

This paper utilizes recent Marxist cultural theory to theorize about the cultural dynamics of racial group conflict in the United States. After laying out a typology of cultural relations between dominant and subordinate groups, the article examines data on African-American cultural penetration of American public culture. The data indicate that since the late 1960s ‘imagerial hegemony’ has yielded to ‘imagerial projection’ for African-Americans. The article concludes by speculating about some interpretations and consequences of this phenomenon.

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