Culture on the Margins

The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation

Author: Jon Cruz
ISBN: 9780691004747

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism. In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publish Date: 1999-07-01

Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / General

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Black/African American (BLCK))