Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
American Thought

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-244
Author(s):  
Richard A. Courage
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
University Students ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
History Of

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
EMILY WEISSBOURD
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black America ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
History Of

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

scholarly journals THE 1860 JAPANESE EMBASSY AND THE ANTEBELLUM AFRICAN AMERICAN PRESS

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1020
Author(s):  
NATALIA DOAN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
American Press ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Transnational Solidarity

AbstractThe 1860 Japanese embassy inspired within the antebellum African American press an imagined solidarity that subverted American state hierarchies of ‘civilization’ and race. The bodies of the Japanese ambassadors, physically incongruous with American understandings of non-white masculinity, became a centre of cultural contention upon their presence as sophisticated and powerful men on American soil. The African American and abolitionist press, reimagining Japan and the Japanese, reframed racial prejudice as an experience in solidarity, to prove further the equality of all men, and assert African American membership to the worlds of civility and ‘civilization’. The acceptance of the Japanese gave African Americans a new lens through which to present their quest for racial equality and recognition as citizens of American ‘civilization’. This imagined transnational solidarity reveals Japan's influence in the United States as African American publications developed an imagined racial solidarity with Japanese agents of ‘civilization’ long before initiatives of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ appeared on Japan's diplomatic agenda. Examining the writings of non-state actors traditionally excluded from early historical narratives of US–Japan diplomacy reveals an imagined transnational solidarity occurring within and because of an oppressive racial hierarchy, as well as a Japanese influence on antebellum African American intellectual history.

Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 287-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Vast Area

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

THE CLASSICAL TURN IN ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAN EDELSTEIN
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Course Syllabi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
National Difference

Antiquity is back. In some respects, it is surprising it ever went away: for the last forty years, Peter Gay's magisterial survey, which connected the “little flock” ofphilosopheswith “pagan” authors, has loomed large over the field of Enlightenment studies. But shortly after its publication, a methodological sea change pulled the field in an opposite direction. Robert Darnton hailed this rising tide of social and cultural history in a 1971 largely critical review of Gay's two volumes. The hyper-longue duréeof Gay's historical panorama, which extended from the age of Virgil to that of Voltaire, was soon to be displaced by more focused inquiries into the history of the book, forms of enlightened sociability, and national difference. Intellectual history, particularly of Gay's epic brand, soon became scarce, despite the lasting presence of Gay's two volumes on bibliographies and course syllabi.

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