Preserving Sacred Space: Mahalia Jackson’s Transnational Song Labor During the Era of Decolonization

Abstract

American performance traditions and music industry trends have historically denigrated religious practices and spaces that African descended people considered sacred or worthy of regard. This legacy of sacrilege is an extension of colonialism wherein the cultural traditions of those conquered are marked primitive, strange, or laughable. Mahalia Jackson resisted such colonial systems of meaning through her discursive song and narratives incorporating both sacred and vernacular Black American traditions across the United States of America and Europe. It was her European success in the early 1950s that boosted her domestic career and distinguished her from peers with equal or greater talent. This critical hearing of her performance, together with a brief archeology of the term “gospel,” reveals how Jackson’s decolonial song labor disrupted structures that had previously excluded the African descended practices and people, and Negro women in particular, from the realm of the sacred.