Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins, by David F. Garcia

Abstract

Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins , by David F. Garcia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. xii, 360 pp. Listening for Africa explores Afro-modernism between the 1930s and the 1950s, critically assessing why the African origins of black music and dance mattered during this period of rising racism and fascism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the onset of the Cold War. Garcia focuses upon key individuals who investigated the African origins of New World Negro music and dance in order to refute erasure of Africa as an obsolete past within the context of a modern world. He asks, “When black music and dance sounded and embodied its African origins … exactly how, why, and for whom were those soundings and embodiments materializing?” (p. 5). He pursues answers to this question in five diffuse chapters that present an array of archival material and draw on theories and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, comparative musicology/ethnomusicology, folklore, African diasporic studies, and dance history. The book argues that for some “academics, performers, and activists, listening to, analyzing, sounding, embodying, and even resisting black music's and dance's African origins enabled their holding modernity's promises of freedom and equality to the fire[,] usually as their acts of faith in modernity but also as acts of stepping inside and outside of its regimes of truth” (p. 6). Chapter 1, “Analyzing the African Origins of Negro Music and Dance in a Time of …