Dorothy Stringer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231478
- eISBN:
- 9780823241088
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231478.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William ...
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This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is not even past, narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century.Less
This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is not even past, narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century.
Kira Thurman
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781501759840
- eISBN:
- 9781501759864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501759840.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter discusses race and music in Central Europe. German nationalism and colonialism played a significant role in defining racial ideologies within German culture. However, Black musicians ...
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This chapter discusses race and music in Central Europe. German nationalism and colonialism played a significant role in defining racial ideologies within German culture. However, Black musicians traveling to Central Europe grew substantially in the 1870s as they achieved greater transatlantic markets of cultural exchanges. German music criticism, then, reveals the difficulties white Germans faced in coming to terms with the complexities of the Black diaspora in their performances. The caricature of the popular Black entertainer also functioned to reinforce white beliefs of Black primitivism, until the Fisk Jubilee Singers became the pattern for German music criticism of Black musicians for decades.Less
This chapter discusses race and music in Central Europe. German nationalism and colonialism played a significant role in defining racial ideologies within German culture. However, Black musicians traveling to Central Europe grew substantially in the 1870s as they achieved greater transatlantic markets of cultural exchanges. German music criticism, then, reveals the difficulties white Germans faced in coming to terms with the complexities of the Black diaspora in their performances. The caricature of the popular Black entertainer also functioned to reinforce white beliefs of Black primitivism, until the Fisk Jubilee Singers became the pattern for German music criticism of Black musicians for decades.
Barry Keith Grant
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623440
- eISBN:
- 9780748651115
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623440.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores the emergence of the jazz cartoon of the 1930s and 1940s. Although jazz has had a significant presence in the movies from the arrival of sound onwards (during ‘the jazz age’ ...
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This chapter explores the emergence of the jazz cartoon of the 1930s and 1940s. Although jazz has had a significant presence in the movies from the arrival of sound onwards (during ‘the jazz age’ itself in the late 1920s) its ideological connotations have been a source of struggle and considerable tensions, especially around race. Hollywood's casting of ‘sweet’ – that is mainstream – jazz as primarily a white musical form in feature films such as The King of Jazz (1930) is problematically paralleled by the use of ‘hot’ jazz in animated cartoons such as Jungle Jive (1944), in which racist stereotypes of black men as sexually predatory ‘zip coons’ preying on white women prevail. Rather than dismissing such films as ephemeral because of their status as programme fillers, this chapter argues that they were often the site of an aggressively asserted insistence on black primitivism in which jazz is the primary signifier.Less
This chapter explores the emergence of the jazz cartoon of the 1930s and 1940s. Although jazz has had a significant presence in the movies from the arrival of sound onwards (during ‘the jazz age’ itself in the late 1920s) its ideological connotations have been a source of struggle and considerable tensions, especially around race. Hollywood's casting of ‘sweet’ – that is mainstream – jazz as primarily a white musical form in feature films such as The King of Jazz (1930) is problematically paralleled by the use of ‘hot’ jazz in animated cartoons such as Jungle Jive (1944), in which racist stereotypes of black men as sexually predatory ‘zip coons’ preying on white women prevail. Rather than dismissing such films as ephemeral because of their status as programme fillers, this chapter argues that they were often the site of an aggressively asserted insistence on black primitivism in which jazz is the primary signifier.
David Gilbert
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469622699
- eISBN:
- 9781469622712
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469622699.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This concluding chapter discusses the diminishing influence of ragtime at the onset of the 1920s and the rise of jazz music. Although necessary to the development of jazz and subsequent genres, ...
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This concluding chapter discusses the diminishing influence of ragtime at the onset of the 1920s and the rise of jazz music. Although necessary to the development of jazz and subsequent genres, ragtime music and the struggles of ragtime musicians continue to elude historians of music. Such an omission is regrettable, as ragtime has, after all, come to express a rejection of black slavery and caricatures, even as it shaped black modernity within a white supremacist world wholly insistent on black primitivism. The efforts of the ragtime musicians in debunking stereotypes and relentlessly pursuing the dream of cultural pluralism in America ultimately constructed another kind of racial divide, yet these black ragtimers had left in their place room for future generations to establish themselves within a changing cultural milieu.Less
This concluding chapter discusses the diminishing influence of ragtime at the onset of the 1920s and the rise of jazz music. Although necessary to the development of jazz and subsequent genres, ragtime music and the struggles of ragtime musicians continue to elude historians of music. Such an omission is regrettable, as ragtime has, after all, come to express a rejection of black slavery and caricatures, even as it shaped black modernity within a white supremacist world wholly insistent on black primitivism. The efforts of the ragtime musicians in debunking stereotypes and relentlessly pursuing the dream of cultural pluralism in America ultimately constructed another kind of racial divide, yet these black ragtimers had left in their place room for future generations to establish themselves within a changing cultural milieu.
