Blacksound

2020 ◽  
pp. 553-577
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Performance Of Race

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy, music, and race through a theory of Blacksound. Blacksound is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. As a hermeneutic tool, Blacksound is an epistemology designed to historicize and redress how we conceive the formation of race and property laws throughout the nineteenth century via aesthetics. In particular, this tool analyses the construction, consumption, and erasure of black people and blackness out of blackface minstrelsy—the first original form of popular entertainment in North America. Blacksound is an open concept that challenges fixed notions of intellectual property by pointing to the role that the performance of race and the making of racism in popular music plays in copyright laws that have developed throughout the nineteenth century.

Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 781-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Performance Of Race

This article highlights practices of exclusion embedded in musicology—especially in relation to race, racialized people, and race relations—in order to rupture its constructed borders and decentralize the normative systems that have come to shape the discipline, its membership, and its discourses. To this end, I define and apply the concept of Blacksound—the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of all popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. Blackface emerged as the first original form of US popular music during chattel slavery, and it helped to establish the modern music industry during the time in which Guido Adler began to define Musikwissenschaft (1885). Blacksound, as the performative and aesthetic complement to blackface, demonstrates how performance, (racial) identity, and (intellectual) property relations have been tethered to the making of popular music and its commercialization since the early nineteenth century. Blacksound also reveals how practices of exclusion that are germane to musicological discourse are connected to the racist practices and supremacist systems that defined society and popular culture throughout the nineteenth century. To redress the impact of these customs, this article defines and employs Blacksound as a means of placing (the performance of) race, ethnicity, and their relationship with other forms of identity at the center of the way we approach and select our subject matter and create musicological epistemologies within the development of music studies.

“Hale Diabolo”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Revell Carr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy

This chapter examines the popularity of American minstrelsy in Hawaii during the nineteenth century. It looks at professional touring minstrel troupes from the mainland, amateur troupes consisting of the crews of various visiting ships, and local indigenous troupes of Hawaiian minstrels. An examination of Hawaiian newspapers, personal diaries, and theatrical playbills indicates that blackface minstrelsy was one of the most popular entertainments in Honolulu in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were professional minstrel troupes imported from the mainland, but amateur troupes consisting of Euro-American sailors and local troupes of Hawaiian minstrels were also common fixtures of the Honolulu stage. The chapter examines the Hawaiian minstrel show as representative of the emergence of modern Hawaiian popular music, influencing all levels of Honolulu society, showcasing the mimetic and syncretic nature of Hawaiian popular music. It also tells the story of the man who managed the Royal HawaiianTheatre for twenty years, Charles Derby.

Visualizing Equality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Social Reform Movements ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
Visual Technologies

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists’ networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-238
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Expanded Access ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Technologies

The epilogue shows how the democratization of photography allowed black people to produce images of themselves and their communities when a massive wave of racial caricatures flooded homes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Visual technologies of the nineteenth century vastly expanded access to cameras which enabled more people to record African American communities and challenge racist ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited hundreds of photographs taken by Thomas Askew, the African photographer, at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These scenes of black life in Georgia conveyed the power of the ordinary and Du Bois himself wrote that they challenged “conventional American ideas” of black people.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Having Their Say, Leaving Their Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Independent Organization

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE AUDITOR'S ROLE: THE EARLY EXPERlENCE OF THE AMERICAN RAILROADS

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Boockholdt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Internal Control ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The United States ◽  
Advisory Services ◽  
Audit Independence ◽  
Inherent Part

The paper explores the origins of the auditing profession in the United States. It is suggested that the development of the audit function in this country can be traced to reporting by internal and shareholder auditors in the American railroads during the middle of the nineteenth century. Evidence is presented that a recognition of the need for audit independence existed, and that the provision of advisory services and reports on internal control by American auditors have been an inherent part of the auditor's role from that time.

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