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.

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.

The American Reception of Hegel (1830–1930)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kaag ◽  
Kipton E. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Human Effects ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the reception of Hegel in the United States in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Hegel dramatically influenced the formation of American transcendentalism and American pragmatism, despite often being described as simply antithetical to these American philosophies. While pragmatists such as Peirce and James often criticized a certain interoperation of Hegel, their readings of the Phenomenology and Logic helped them articulate a philosophy, inherited from Emerson, that was geared toward experience and to exploring the practical, deeply human, effects of philosophy. Care is taken to describe the impact that the study of Hegel had on American institutions of culture and politics in the nineteenth century.

The Politics of Intimate Care

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nurse Training ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Military Nursing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter traces the early evolution of nursing from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on how nursing care became both gendered and racialized in civilian society. Focusing on the history of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), it explores the relationship between the military and civilian populace to illuminate trends in nursing practices, debates about work, and concerns about war taking place in the larger civil society. It also examines how war and military nursing needs shaped the evolution of the modern nursing profession and how nursing became embroiled in the politics of intimate care, along with the implications for gender roles and race relations that permeated social relationships and interactions in civilian society. The chapter points to the Civil War as the transformative moment in the history of nursing in the United States, moving nursing from an unpaid obligation to a paid occupation. Finally, it discusses the impact of the introduction of formal nurse training during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on African American nurses.

Antislavery Orthodoxy: Isaac Nelson and the Free Church of Scotland, c. 1843–65

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
High Esteem

The ‘Send back the money’ controversy between the Free Church of Scotland and zealous abolitionists was one of the most important events in nineteenth century Scottish religious history. The Revd Isaac Nelson of Belfast is best remembered for his anti-revivalism and his advocacy of Irish nationalism. What has often been forgotten is the centrality of antislavery to the making of Nelson's controversial reputation, even though he was held in high esteem by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, this article examines his opposition to the Free Church's receipt of monies from and extension of christian fellowship to the slaveholding churches in the United States. It highlights his critique of leading ecclesiastical statesmen, including Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham and Robert S. Candlish. The essay also considers the sophisticated intellectual critique of chattel slavery that under-girded Nelson's opposition to the policy of the Free Kirk, as well as his evaluation of the nature of proslavery religion in America. By means of a biographical case study of an interesting outsider, this article seeks to provide a lens through which one of the most tragic incidents in Scotland's ecclesiastical past can be freshly examined.

New Religious Movements in the Long Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Lydia Willsky-Ciollo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Impact

This introduction provides a brief overview of the period known as the “long nineteenth century,” which played host to and helped to shape numerous new religious movements. Highlighting the impact and occasional convergence of various political, social, and religious movements and events in both the United States and globally, this essay seeks to show that the examination of new religious movements in the nineteenth century offers a means of applying scholarship in new religious movements to religions that may be defined as “old,” while simultaneously opening new ways of understanding new religions more broadly. In the process, this overview provides background for the articles included in this special issue of Nova Religio, which explore subjects including religious utopianism; gender, politics, and Pentecostalism; Mormonism and foreign missions; and the relationships of new religious movements to visual art.

Firm Size and Industrial Structure in the United States During the Nineteenth Century

1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Atack
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Size Distribution ◽  
Firm Size ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Clear Trend ◽  
Economic Concentration ◽  
The Impact

This paper investigates the impact of the emergence of large-scale enterprises on industrial structure in America in the mid-nineteenth century and concludes that their impact was ambiguous. In cottons and irons, average scale increased dramatically, but inequality in the size distribution of plants declined and economic concentration showed no clear trend. In other industries, changes in average scale were much smaller and inequality increased, but again there was no clear trend in concentration.

Ask the Lyrics: John Fante in Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Chiara Mazzucchelli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Italian American ◽  
John Fante ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The crosspollination of literature and lyrics is not a new phenomenon in popular music, and classics of world literature continue to inspire songwriters who incorporate them in their art in different ways and forms. Although perhaps not yet quite recognized as a classic author, the Italian-American novelist John Fante has had an impact on popular culture and music both in Italy and in the United States. Reviewing a range of Italian and American songs that draw inspiration from Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Fante’s saga, this essay explores the relationship among literature, music, and society through a reflection on the impact that a non-canonical American writer has on popular culture and how his ethnic experience reverberates in the singer/reader/listener’s life before earning approval from mainstream critics.

scholarly journals Immigration, wealth and the ‘mortality plateau’ in emergent industrial cities of nineteenth-century Massachusetts

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN HAUTANIEMI LEONARD ◽  
JEFFREY K. BEEMER ◽  
DOUGLAS L. ANDERTON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
The Impact

The mortality transition in Western Europe and the United States encompassed a much more complex set of conditions and experiences than earlier thought. Our research addresses the complex set of relationships among growing urban communities, family wealth, immigration and mortality in New England by examining individual-level, sociodemographic mortality correlates during the nineteenth-century mortality plateau and its early twentieth-century decline. In contrast to earlier theories that proposed a more uniform mortality transition, we offer an alternative hypothesis that focuses on the impact of family wealth and immigration on individual-level mortality during the early stages of the mortality transition in Northampton and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

scholarly journals Liberia and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century: Convergence and Effects

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 7-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Allen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The People ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Vast Network

William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861: This must be the severest affliction that have visited the people of the United States and must be a sorce [sic] of great inconvenience and suffering and although we are separated from the seane [sic] by the Atlantic yet we feel sadly the effects of it in this country. The Steavens not coming out as usual was a great disappointment and loss to many in this country.Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.

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