![]() | Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation Subjects: SPIRITUALS (SONGS) -- SOCIAL ASPECTS; AFRO-AMERICANS -- MUSIC -- SOCIAL ASPECTS; CULTURE -- RESEARCH -- UNITED STATES -- HISTORY; 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. Jon Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the coeditor of Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception . |
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