Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920sThis study examines how early writers of jazz criticism (such as Gilbert Seldes and Carl Van Vechten) and literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes)--as well as jazz performers and composers (such as Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and George Gershwin)--associated the music directly with questions about identity (racial, ethnic, national, gendered, and sexual) and with historical developments like industrialization. Going beyond the study of melody, harmony, and rhythm, this book's interdisciplinary approach takes seriously the cultural beliefs about jazz that inspired interracial contact, moralistic panic, bohemian slumming, visions of American democracy, and much more. Detailed textual analysis of fiction, nonfiction, film, and musical performance illustrates the complexity of these cultural beliefs in the 1920s and also shows their survival to the present day. In part, jazz absorbed the U.S. cultural imagination due to the nineteenth-century artistic search for music that would define the national character. To the chagrin of Anglo-Saxon nativists, jazz ascended as an exemplar of cultural hybridity and pluralism. The writers and entertainers studied in this volume--most of whom were minorities of Jewish Irish or African heritage--hailed the new social possibilities that they heard and felt in jazz. Yet most of them also qualified their enthusiasm by remaining wary of both the seductions of jazz's commercialization and the loss of ethnic identity in the melting pot. |
Other editions - View all
Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s Nicholas M. Evans Limited preview - 2015 |
Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s Nicholas M. Evans Limited preview - 2015 |
Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s Nicholas M Evans No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African Americans Amanthis ambivalent Amory Anglo-Saxon anxiety appears Ardita argues Arnold Arnoldian articulate artistic associated Bederman binary black culture black music blackface Bois Bois's bourgeois cabaret Camel's Back Chapter civilization composers cross-dressing Dalyrimple desire discourse dominant dynamic emphasizes ethnic European ex-colored expression Fitzgerald George Gershwin Gershwin Gilroy Harlem Harlem Night Harlem Renaissance Herderian hierarchies homosexual Hughes Hughes's Hutchinson hybrid identity Jakie Jakie's jazz criticism Jazz Singer jazz's Jazzonia Jewish Jews Johnson Langston Lincoln Center Looking for Langston male manliness Marsalis Mason miscegenation modern modernist Moore musicians narrator national culture Negro neurasthenia novel paradoxically Paul Whiteman performance Perry poems political popular primitive primitivism promoted race racial cross-dressing racial/cultural ragtime Rampersad Raphaelson represents Scott Fitzgerald Seldes Seldes's sense sexual social songs spirituals status story suggests supposedly tion tradition trope urban Vechten Weary Blues writing Yankee Young Zangwill