Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought(New Americanists)

"The American Negro," Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "must remake his past in order to make his future." Many Harlem Renaissance figures agreed that reframing the black folk inheritance could play a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and artistic freedom. In" Deep River" Paul Allen Anderson focuses on the role of African American folk music in Renaissance aesthetic and political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. "Deep River" elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation in the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Anderson traces the roots of the period's musical debates to the American and European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W.E.B. DuBois's influential writings at the turn of the century about folk culture and its bearing upon racial progress and national identity. He details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist cosmopolitanism in the works of DuBois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to revisiting music's place in the culture wars of the 1920s, Deep River provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary musicology. "Deep River" offers an historical account of American racial ideologies and their function in music criticism and modernist thought. It should interest general readers as well as students of African American studies, American studies, intellectual history, musicology, and literature.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. “Unvoiced Longings”: Du Bois and the Sorrow Songs 2. Swan Songs and Art Songs: The Spirituals and the “New Negro” in the 1920s 3. “The Twilight of Aestheticism”: Locke on Cosmopolitanism and Musical Evolution 4. “Beneath the Seeming Informality”: Hughes, Hurston, and the Politics of Form 5. Saving Jazz From Its Friends: The Predicament of Jazz Criticism in the Swing Era Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Paul Allen Anderson is Assistant Professor of American Culture and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Review :
"While many scholars have attempted histories of the early years of jazz-and even more have examined Du Bois's appeals to the musical in his social and cultural criticism-few have attempted the kind of sustained examination of the critical debates about black music that Anderson does. Deep River places these long-standing debates in a crucial new context."- Aldon L. Nielsen, author of Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism