Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins

In Listening for Africa David F. In analyzing their work, Garcia traces how such attempts to link black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity’s determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity’s promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black mu

It made a world.”. Garcia’s deftly argued study brings to light how black music and dance became a defining factor during the high years of Afro-modernism, 1930s to 1950s. “David F. Because it emerged from conscious artistic intent, black dance ‘made’ many things: myths of origins, race’s content, and even modernism itself. Black dance, Garcia teaches us, was more than just a lot of shaking and jumping. Garcia treats black dance as a community theater that staged the scramble for an African Diaspora, a movement that was internatio