Racial Imagination Research Articles

Acts of Self-Representation: Nazi-Fascist Wartime Cultural Diplomacy

This article probes culture as a site of both cooperation and rivalry by examining two exhibitions, of 1939 and 1942, which were jointly supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. These under-researched exhibitions reveal how the two regimes shared a common belief in culture as a tool of mobilization, but differed in their visions of race, culture, ideology and war.

"His Eyes Disappear": (Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot

"His Eyes Disappear":(Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot Benjamin Williams (bio) TEJU COLE uses film photographs and oblique prose divagations to take us on a voyage across the globe with a peripatetic philosopher in his 2017 photobook, Blind Spot. With COLE snapping photos, processing the film, and composing corresponding texts, we travel from the United States to Lagos (where COLE grew up), next to a lake in Switzerland; then, in a "flickering series of scenes," we are transported from the sites of a Balinese massacre in Ubud, Indonesia, to New Zealand, and from there to makeshift memorials for migrants scoring the earth near the Arizona border, and back again to Africa.1 The travel photographs paired with lyrical prose make us consider how exposure within the photographic and textual frame creates epistemic and ontological disjunctions, or what COLE calls "blind spots." Rather than an "attempt at comprehensiveness and totality," COLE'S collection maintains "faith in the fragment and the montage," which can "evoke the truth about a situation."2 We are asked to look more toward an intermingling visual constellation [End Page 93] of the photobook as a whole and to discover a through-line connecting disparate places and people. COLE creates an aesthetic assemblage or montage of photography, testimony, poetry, and ethnography to illuminate a kind of missing truth about the connections between historical displacement, attenuated pasts, mobility, and racial representation. While Cole's fiction and its relationship to photography and racialization have been widely discussed, his own photographic practices, as exemplified in Blind Spot, the "fourth in a quartet of books about the limits of vision," have received only limited critical attention.3 Most criticism, like Robert Pinsky's, examines Cole's terse and oblique commentary in the photobook to argue that Cole reveals "mysteries of the ordinary," which are "attained in patiently awaited, brief flashes."4 Similarly, Colin Dickey illuminates how Cole's fragmentary images are used to explore the "absences that define documentation and nonfiction," as exemplified through the slow and deliberate practices of film development that Cole uses.5 More recently, Monika Gehlawat argues that Cole uses intermedial aesthetic practices to "foster an atmosphere of thoughtful discretion," reticence, and inwardness for both photographed subjects and the audience.6 Yet, these accounts are limited in their engagement with questions concerning the historical and transnational trajectory of photography that has been calibrated in accordance with hierarchical conceptions of race. Alexandra Kingston-Reese, however, provides an incisive corrective as she reflects not only on intermediality but also on the racialized politics of vision and aesthetics of blackness in Cole's photobook. Kingston-Reese finds that through the emphasis on aurality, visuality, and digital presence, the volume creates slant rhymes and "networked contemporary artistic practices" to foster "empathetic forms," illuminate "perceptual weaknesses," and afford "new modes of reading."7 I follow Kingston-Reese's attendance to Cole's ethically insightful and "ethnically observant" intermedial aesthetics, but I turn my attention to the coeval processes of photographic portraiture and race-making exhibited in the work.8 More specifically, I examine Cole's aesthetic process, which reveals how portraiture's methods are co-constitutive of a reductive imaginary of race that we face, or fail to face, in the photograph.9 As I argue, Blind Spot explores ethically fraught issues within the sensorially confused space of the photo collection by [End Page 94] playing with exposure, light, and composition to confront what Paul Gilroy calls "epidermal thinking."10 To challenge such framing ontologies of race, Cole practices anti-portraiture, which allows the audience to (re)search, (re)envision, and (re)frame the racial imagination that uses photographic documents, especially those emphasizing physiognomy and bodies, as a locus for classification and racial categorization. By (re)framing an alternative way of seeing according to the limitations of vision, Cole's compendium of photographs and text engages with our ethical obligation as he activates cultural memory and uses film photographs to move us to forget the familiar and instead see unfamiliar faces and places on their own terms, where darkness signifies wisdom or potentiality. Cole's process of anti-portraiture thus responds to the...

Arthurian Cosmopoiesis: Wolfram's Parzival

Offering five possible thematic pedagogical approaches to Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200–1210), this article argues that the romance, often overlooked due to its complexity, is a rich and timely medieval work that will capture students' imaginations. We offer a practical guide for using the romance (or selected excerpts) to introduce students to current medieval studies approaches through its treatment of the Global Middle Ages, the medieval racial imagination, and the complexities of gender, and we explain how the social dynamics of Parzival' s narrative world-building recommend its inclusion in courses with topics such as medievalism, speculative fiction, and adaptation. (CN & AMR)

Fascination and Terror: Orientalism and the Return of the Repressed in A Tale of Two Cities and "A Christmas Tree"

Dickens's works, like those of many of his contemporaries, are haunted by Europe's racial other(s). Taking A Tale of Two Cities and "A Christmas Tree" as its primary examples, this paper traces how the racial imagination prefigures characters, subjectivities and narratives in a manner that produces the Other as the double subject of fascination and horror. Informed by anticolonial critique and Freudian psychoanalysis, this paper moves beyond the calling out of Dickens's racism to reading the ways whereby fascination with the Other resolves, in the Dickensian text, the repression that produces racial horror.

Racial Tasting: On the Performance of Sugar

Racial Tasting: On the Performance of Sugar

Empire, diplomacy, and the racial imagination: Spain at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932)

ABSTRACT This article uses Spain's participation at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932) as the basis to raise questions pertaining to the place of Arab music in the racial imagination of Europeans. It argues that Spain's unique response to the challenges arising from the study of Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry reveals still uncharted tensions and fractures running through musicology and Orientalist discourse at the time. My line of inquiry sheds light on the origins and characteristics of the forms of self-reflexivity evident in the musicological work produced by Spain and other European countries. In what ways did the shifting tectonics of North African politics impact or even impair the capacity of European musicological discourse to inscribe Arab music in the global imagination in ways supportive of Europe's identity projects? To what extent was the discourse on Arab music emerging in the context of colonial rivalry suitable for Spain to rewrite the memories of its past of anti-Muslim violence? What could Spain's unique position as both an insider and an outsider relative to notions of Europe reveal about western attitudes towards Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry? The answers to these questions lie not only with the peculiar ways in which Spain addressed its identity crises, but also with the extent to which the Cairo Congress exposed the inadequacy of reigning paradigms in musicology, anthropology and the social sciences, and underscored their inability to keep up with the changing face of North African societies.

“Is a Cushite Made in the Image of God?”: Christian Visions of Race in Late Antiquity

There has been an increasing interest in classical and late antique studies on the existence of something approximating the modern concept of race in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Scholars of early Christianity have also debated the presence of prejudice based on skin color. The following study seeks to broaden this conversation by including late antique contexts outside of the Roman Empire as well as marginal language communities within the Roman Empire. This paper will demonstrate that anti-Black prejudice—or racism—did indeed exist in the late antique Roman world and that such racism was more pronounced in Roman literature written in Greek and Latin.

Challenging Essentialist Anti-Oppressive Discourse: Uniting Against Racism and Sexism

Challenging Essentialist Anti-Oppressive Discourse: Uniting Against Racism and Sexism

Postcolonial Finance

This article politicises the discourse of emerging markets in global finance. The black-boxed appearance of credit markets easily obscures the significant amount of subjective evaluation and cultural work that underpins capital flows. This article reveals the colonial, masculine, and racial imagination that informs the articulation of emerging markets as geographies of risk and profit. This brings into view the postcolonial nature of contemporary finance and how colonialism’s regimes of power and knowledge remain crucial for the reproduction of the global political economy. To illustrate this point, the article highlights the sociality of credit practices. Contrary to their mathematical appearance, credit is a relationship with the future, mediated by social imaginations of trust. Focusing on emerging markets as ‘risk-versus-reward’ investments, this article examines the long-term colonial histories embedded in modern investment discourses. The article aims to show the continuing relevance this history plays for emerging market economies in modern financial markets and their political economies.

“Improbable Spectacles”: White Supremacy, Christian Hegemony, and the Dark Side of the Judenfrage

ABSTRACT This article works to clarify the dynamics of Jews, white supremacy, and Christian hegemony in the United States by addressing Karl Marx’s attention to the “free states of North America” in his infamous review essay “On the Jewish Question” (1844). Marx’s review discloses both the Christian form of subjectivity universalized by political emancipation and the racial whiteness upon which Jewish emancipation rested in settler-colonial territory. Together, these paths untraveled but implied by Marx demonstrate the complementarity of Jewishness and whiteness in the racial imagination of US democracy, dismantle assumptions that antisemitism and white supremacy are necessarily isomorphic, and suggest how Jewish inclusion as citizens in the democratic state signals the constitution of a Judeo-Christian subject.

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and WhiteThe Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to CounterculturesAnxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and WhiteThe Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to CounterculturesAnxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics by Matthew Fox-Amato

Reviewed by: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics by Matthew Fox-Amato John Brooke Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics. Matthew Fox-Amato. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019. ISBN 978-01906-6393-3. 343 pp., cloth, $39.95. How can we "see" the experience of American slavery and the struggle to abolish it? Matthew Fox-Amato's Exposing Slavery presents a powerful argument: the sudden eruption of photography in 1839 allowed Americans of all walks of life to see themselves, and others, in quick constructions of self and situation. Almost instantly, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and photographs joined steam, cheap print and postage, and the telegraph in reconfiguring the relationship between self and society. Exploring a problem that has fallen "through the cracks between history, the history of photography, and art history," Fox-Amato argues that Americans North and South, free and enslaved, used the photograph to engage the contested place of slavery and race in late antebellum America (2). The four chapters and epilogue in Exposing Slavery present Fox-Amato's argument in simple clarity, exploring how slaveholders, slaves, abolitionists, and soldiers all used photography to present their own interpretations of race, slavery, and freedom. Chapter 1, "Policing Personhood," describes how slaveholders, in part responding to the domestic critique in Uncle Tom's Cabin, made images that reinforced the argument that slavery was a domain of "interracial intimacy and harmony" (67). These images of well-dressed slave nurses and white infants rooted in a religious "Madonna" motif and of trusted slave artisans reinforced the case that a benevolent slavery was a positive good for the union. Means of constructing images of subordination, portraits of slaves were also means to recovering valuable fugitive property. Slaves, too, were interested in photography. Chapter 2, "Enduring Images," offers a fascinating look at how slaves presented themselves in slaveholder portraits and how cheap photography was a vehicle for self-purchased presentation. Tintypes and daguerreotypes left behind, carried away, or mailed from a distance allowed slaves to see the faces of their kin lost in the slave trade, fundamentally "asserting the sociality and full humanity" in the face of their denial (102). So too, abolitionists black and white deployed photography for presentation of self. Chapter 3, "Realizing Abolition," stresses how photographic images served as talismans of membership in an embattled but virtuous minority cause, depicting both suffering white rebels and fugitives transformed. The themes of these first chapters echo in different registers through Exposing Slavery's perhaps problematic chapter on Civil War photography, "Domesticating Freedom." Here Fox-Amato's major protagonists are white soldiers, North and South, constructing their visions of race as the end of slavery loomed. Confederate officers sat with household slaves who were serving them at the front, in a gender reversal of the nurse-and-infant images: in time of war, race relations under slavery [End Page 418] were still intimate and harmonious. Given the resource differential, far more Union images were made, but these, too, present a form of domesticity. In another echoing reversal of the nurse-and-infant images, Union officers stood or sat in authoritarian poses before their tents, while "contraband" servants knelt or stood behind them in obedient postures. White Northern soldiers were the liberators, but African Americans were constructed as a subordinate and feminized caste. A Northern Jim Crow regime was being crafted and refined during the war for union and emancipation. Fox-Amato offsets this white domestication of freedom with a brief discussion of the imagery of black manhood and bravery. The photography of black soldiers clearly echoes themes of chapters 2 and 3, as black soldiers visually testified against the institution. However, this offset is unbalanced, and these echoes are undeveloped: we get twenty pages (185–205) and at least eleven illustrations of the domesticating freedom theme and five pages and four illustrations of the black manhood theme. Given the massive volume of photography of black soldiers, perhaps "black bravery" might have been a theme of a separate chapter, despite important recent work. (See especially Ronald S. Coddington, African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012...

Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr.

Reviewed by: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South by R. Scott Huffard Jr. Steven E. Nash Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements (4). Huffard roots his argument in the New Orleans Exposition of 1884–85, where the South displayed all its “commodities” to investors. He calls the exposition’s vision of reunion through capitalist development the “phantasmagoria,” a sort of waking dream of capitalistic standardization, creative destruction, and consolidation. For all its bluster and bravado, the southern railroad phantasmagoria was fragile. White southern boosters used it to preach reunion and court outside investment. By portraying everything as for sale in the South, these boosters constructed narratives that excused the failures and excesses of this capitalistic fever dream as well. Newspaper editors deflected criticism of higher accident mortality in the South, due to cheaper, and often inferior, construction methods as the work of often fictive train wreckers. When trains linked new towns and previously marginalized regions of the South to a national capitalistic system, they often brought diseases such as yellow fever with them. The proliferation of express routes laden with wealth sparked the rise of outlaws. White New South boosters went to great lengths to absolve the railroad and capitalism of any fault in these developments, but Huffard argues that these unintended and dangerous consequences were products of the railroad system. The destruction of space and time that made labor, passengers, and goods more mobile also threatened to destroy the railroad phantasmagoria. One of the crucial elements of Huffard’s analysis is the issue of race. Railroads had a profound impact on southern race relations, notably in terms of labor, mobility, consumption, and segregation of public spaces, in the 1880s and 1890s. On the one hand, railroad companies employed African Americans and offered them the type of well-paying jobs that no other southern industry would. White southerners met these challenges by reshaping notions of black criminality (fears of anonymous, mobile Black men) and pushing Black workers into railroad jobs that conformed to their racial imagination (manual laborers and porters). Most importantly, the New Orleans Exposition’s vision of all the South’s resources as commodities included [End Page 57] African American bodies. Black convict laborers laid mile upon mile of railroad track across the South. In his reassessment of the South’s capitalistic development in the late nineteenth century, Huffard connects the convict labor system, which commodified Black men’s bodies, to slavery. Viewing convict labor as capitalism taken to its extreme, Huffard forges new links between the Old and New South. Engines of Redemption is a strong piece of historical scholarship that carefully blends and interprets a variety of sources. Some readers might question why the author devoted little attention to the railroad work of Reconstruction. Other readers might wish that Huffard explored the issue of boosterism further, comparing the rhetoric and effort of railroad companies to other industries such as textiles, coal mining, and other manufacturing endeavors. Railroads may have been the common thread in regional industrialization, but a stronger comparison may have demonstrated the pervasiveness...

Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah

Reviewed by: Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah Christian David Zeitz Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah. Berlin: Ullstein, 2019. Pp. 208. Cloth €20.00. ISBN 978-3961010363. Marketed as Erzählendes Sachbuch by Ullstein, Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum combines anecdotal criticism with critical race theory, collecting fourteen conceptually themed chapters—for example, "Arbeit," "Vertrauen," "Liebe"—by German writers, journalists, and cultural critics of color and/or with migration histories. Initiated in reaction to Horst Seehofer's renaming of the Innenministerium to Heimatministerium, the book seeks to problematize the recent positive reappropriation of Heimat: as both historical amnesia of its necropolitical place in Nazi racial imagination and policy and the not-so historical organized killing of migrants orchestrated by [End Page 225] the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU) in the name of Heimat, and as wider normalization of defining Heimat negatively in terms of antiblackness, antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. At the same time, most contributions are aimed at updating such essentialist and exclusionary ideals of Heimat, with a pointed focus on lived realities in Germany that these conceptions invisibilize and marginalize. Sasha Marianna Salzmann's contribution, which starts off the volume, is concerned with the forms of alliance-building that a shared markedness and visibility under white German representational regimes provide for marginalized identities, despite their mainstream framing as diametrically opposed: queer, Jewish, Muslim. Debunking myths of (inherently) Muslim anti-LGBTQ sentiment and antisemitism, Salzmann recounts lively discussions about everyday racism in German refugee centers between her mother, a Jewish quota refugee from the former Soviet Union, and her two roommates, Syrian Muslim refugees, and also discusses Jewish-queer-Muslim dance culture in Berlin clubs and Muslim-looking men stepping in for Salzmann in cases of homophobic microaggression. A shared sense of vulnerability and visibility across supposedly oppositional sexual, ethnic, and religious markers affords care and security networks that the state mostly reserves for the majority population. Fatma Aydemir, in her chapter on "Arbeit," remembers an incident when a fellow ethnic German intern told her that she was only invited to a job interview due to an unfair (i.e., unfair to ethnic Germans) Migrantenbonus. Aydemir deconstructs this term not as a bonus that is given to migrants, but as a bonus that migrants give to the German economic and civil system, based on the premise that they must and do work harder to challenge the hegemonic whiteness of fields like the media. The chapter effectively outlines the unacknowledged visible and invisible migrant and postmigrant labor, so indispensable to neoliberal capitalist technologies that sustain the racialized good life in the Heimat. In "Vertrauen," Deniz Utlu dissects trust issues racialized Germans have with the German state apparatus: using the NSU murders as an example, he describes a circle of suspicion (negative trust), in which the police first suspected the victims, despite indications of a neo-Nazi connection, in line with a general suspicion of migrants and racialized populations, leading the latter to suspect the police of strategically disavowing their lived knowledge of physical (and symbolic) racist violence. This leads Utlu to conclude that the state's appeal to unconditional trust on the side of migrant and racialized citizens is quasi-religious in nature and incompatible with its grounding in secular, democratic rationality. The chapters "Liebe" by Sharon Dodua Atoo and "Beleidigung" by Enrico Ippolito emphasize racism as a structural as opposed to individual problem and remind us of how difficult it can be for ethnic Germans to accept this ensuing reality of complicity. "Blicke" by Hengameh Yaghoobfirah and "Zuhause" by Mithu Sanyal are more directly inflected by cultural studies approaches: Yaghoobfirah offers a personal mediation of regimes of representation, [End Page 226] focusing on the white gaze and the intersectional politics of lookism, while Sanyal's contribution is a short yet concise genealogy of the terms Heimat and Deutsch, and proposes doing away with monocultural narratives of what (supposedly) was in favor of creating transcultural narratives of what is yet to come. In "Gefährlich," Nadia Shehadeh describes how a discursive practice that maps threat, danger, fear, and terror on Arab and Muslim bodies (as well as...

“Things aren't arranged so that this could be as you want”: Jules Peterson and F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Playing in the Dark” in Tender Is the Night

Abstract How might a contemporary critical reader gauge the character Jules Peterson in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night? An “Afro-European,” Peterson is dead in a Paris hotel room in 1925, but how that death signifies in a wider circumference of American racial issues and attitudes deserves exploration. Scholars and readers need to probe Fitzgerald's racial imaginary, even when we sense he is less centrally engaged by this key subject than we might be in our ideological climate. This article positions the Jules Peterson portrayal as a test case in examining Fitzgerald's narrative choices in his fourth novel. In his impulses, Fitzgerald recreated the tensions in the American popular culture at large with regard to the consumption of racialized sexual images in early modernism. Toni Morrison's analysis in Playing in the Dark depicts race and blackness in American fiction as composed of “the associative language of dread and love that accompanies blackness.” Applying Morrison, the argument here is not as centered on Fitzgerald's “views on race,” however they may be interpreted with evidence from his own era. Rather it is concerned with his conscious and unconscious representations of a racialized fictional American imaginary that dictates repetitive usage of color and thus influences our readings of Tender Is the Night. Jules Peterson is the bold summoning of a troubled emblem from Fitzgerald's racial and gendered imagination, rendering possibilities and nightmares that burst the bounds of his major novel.

Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (2016)

Reviewed by: Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White by Lee Bebout Michael Jimenez (bio) Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White. New York University Press, 2016. Pp. 304. From the opening lines in the preface, the reader realizes the stakes in Bebout's book. He experienced what must be like every professor's nightmare: becoming infamous on Fox News because of his class at Arizona State University on whiteness. This experience informs his critical analysis, which takes a longue durée view of US imperialism and white supremacy, focusing specifically on its relation to Mexican American culture. He has no allusions that whiteness will cease to exist, but the role of a critical theorist is to expose invisibility. Bebout's study looks at US cultural subjects such as Cormac McCarthy's novel Cities of the Plain, Hollywood movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and country music lyrics. Chapter 1 investigates the way Mexican Americans are constantly seen as Other in US culture. This Mexican Other is juxtaposed with white Americans as a way to solidify white identity as the symbol of true citizenship. In short, whiteness is an identity that needs an Other to exist. Bebout surveys both Chicano/a studies and whiteness literature to analyze whiteness in relation to his conceptual paradigm of "whiteness on the border"; chapter 1 presents a genealogy of this literature, helping Bebout to produce a number of tropes about the Mexican Other that he uses to critique US culture. His argument is that these tropes are used to "reinforce the fantasy that the United States has always been and must remain a white nation" (71). Chapter 2 exposes the way white nativist literature and news reports utilized the Chicano/a literature about Aztlán as a potential threat of a Mexican takeover of the US Southwest. The conspiratorial idea, proposed by nativists like Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, that groups like MEChA (and the Mexican government) are supposedly organizing a massive Aztlán Plot appears like the wild ravings of the right-wing fringe. However, Bebout points out that various anti-immigrant laws recently passed in the Southwest expose white fears against invasion by the Mexican Other. Chapter 3 deals with the topic of white saviorism. This chapter does not deal with vocal, racist nativists but instead analyzes the white ally, searching for the subtle ways even benevolent liberal whites benefit from the white supremacist system, [End Page 207] especially in the way they rob Mexican Americans of agency. The very first example highlights the Latino Rebels criticism of one of Bill Maher's skits. In the process of trying to expose white American racism, Maher ends up reproducing racial tropes against Mexicans. Using the Latino Rebels here shows Mexican American agency just as it illustrates that Maher, even if he means well, still presents the Mexican Other as an object that needs saving. Bebout claims: "While white goodness relies on a savage Other and a binary relationship, it is formed through a rejection of the Other" (109). The Other escapes so-called savagery only with the help of the white savior. Bebout uses this lens to look at Giant and The Magnificent Seven, pointing out that these films portray the white ally protecting the helpless Mexican Other. Thus the white ally in movies becomes a paradigm for tolerant, white liberals in US culture, but Bebout thinks this is not far off from transforming the white cowboy heroes of movie westerns into the contemporary tales of heroic border patrol agents as "benevolent humanitarians of the state" rescuing the dying helpless migrant in the desert from heartless drug smugglers or coyotes (146). His analysis of border patrol agents covers evidence from media reports to Mexican American author Luis Alberto Urrea's humanizing portrayal in his novel The Devil's Highway. The choice of Urrea illustrates the way even Mexican American authors can continue elements of the white savior trope. The final chapter highlights white desire as heard specifically in American country music songs. Bebout continues his analysis by pointing out how white musicians sing about the...

Review: Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0

Patrick Burke, Come in and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 (hbk). xiv + 314pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-08071-0.Ever since Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano published their groundbreaking collection of essays, Music and the Racial Imagination, there has been a steady stream of studies exploring and extending the questions it raised about how musical practice relates to racial categories and racist discourse. Patrick Burke's study of the racial politics of jazz on 52nd Street in New York City explicitly takes its cue from this research. Beginning in the 1930s, when the famous Onyx Club emerged as a kind of unofficial 'workingmen's club' for studio musicians, and following the rise of 52nd Street as a major commercial centre in the 1940s, Burke develops a subtle and detailed analysis of the racial dynamics of jazz production and reception. His focus is on 'the mutual influence between musical style and racial representation' (p. 5) as these took shape within and around the area of 52nd Street.Clubs such as the Onyx, the Spotlight, the Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan's and many others are etched into jazz mythology, not the least by William Gottlieb's famous photograph of 52nd Street, which he took in July 1948. The neon signs above the clubs proclaim the myth as powerfully as do the many stories and images we have of what was going on inside. They announced to musicians and audiences alike not only the growing popularity of jazz, but also the new conception of jazz performance that was taking shape there, encapsulated in the after-hours jam sessions and small-group swing bands. The regular appearance of performers such as Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Dizzy Gillespie in the clubs, along with the musicians' emphasis on spontaneity and virtuosity as essential features, reinforces the claim that it was there, on 52nd Street, that jazz underwent a transformation from popular entertainment into a modernist art form, a change that was mirrored in the stylistic movement from swing to bebop.Broadly speaking, Come in and Hear the Truth is about the problem of conceptualizing this transformation. Most accounts of jazz history explain key moments of change in terms of a succession of styles, usually embodied in the work of a 'canon' of great (sometimes even heroic) performers and composers and measured against a set of core musical conventions. Taken together, these conventions form what is meant when performers and critics refer to the 'jazz tradition'. The transition from one style to the next involves artists in a thorough-going revision of this tradition, mostly by reconstituting those conventions that have become worn out, cliched or no longer meaningful. The really great players or composers are those individuals who are able to do this, to reinvent the music's language and gestures without destroying jazz in the process. An exemplary text in this regard is Martin Williams's The Jazz Tradition, in which the shift from swing to bebop is understood in terms of the individuals who made it possible. In Williams's study, 52nd Street exists only as a colourful backdrop to a story that is ostensibly about the individual artist's capacity to transform the musical materials they find in the work of their predecessors and, thus, to find new ways of rediscovering and, ultimately, overcoming the essential problems the jazz tradition presents them with.By focusing our attention on 52nd Street-'the street that never slept', in Arnold Shaw's famous phrase-Burke moves the question of change in an entirely different direction. Jazz styles appear in conjunction with each other, jostling for attention, their identity emerging from a complex cross-fertilization of ideas and methods, personnel and practices, rather than as successive stages of an evolutionary movement. Individual performers certainly shape what is happening, but not independently of the groups and clubs and recording studios within which they lived and worked. …

Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell

Reviewed by: Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell (Translated by Malena Kuss) Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain. By Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell. (Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. [xiii, 228 p. ISBN 9780190236816 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780190612672 (e-book), $42.75.] Illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. From its establishment as a scientific discipline, musicology has been considered as a part of the group of social sciences. In studies dedicated to colonial Latin America, however, musicologists have incorporated social aspects of music mostly as neutral and distant. In general, social context has figured mostly as a descriptive and contextual background of musical production, itself seen as a static and autonomous object understood according to its own terms. This has caused an artificial separation between two interacting ecosystems, namely the social and the musical, making it difficult to analyze the complex changes that took place in the function and nonverbal meanings with which colonial society interpreted musical practices based on specific cultural codes. Studies published during recent decades have revealed that issues of difference (whether race, class, or gender) have had and continue to have a deep impact on social dimensions of musical practices. Consequently, they must be incorporated into new narratives on both historical and critical analyses of music (Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]; Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, eds., Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015]). The application of a sociocultural approach to studies of Latin American colonial music becomes particularly pertinent and necessary, given that the prevailing caste system at work in that region during colonial times catalyzed a multiplicity of jumbled and disjointed situations involving mestizaje, with dramatic implications for social hierarchies and, consequently, for the dynamics between musical practice and the dialectics of power. Examples of this approach include Juan Carlos Estenssoro's Música y sociedad coloniales: Lima 1680–1830 (Lima: Editorial Colmillo Blanco, 1989), Geoffrey Baker's Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), and David Coifman's De obispos, reyes, santos y señas en la historia de la capilla musical de Venezuela (1532–1804) (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2010), the latter centered on Caracas. Based on archival research and centered on Mexico City during the eighteenth century, Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain studies the complex processes by which Mexico City Cathedral musicians in the eighteenth century constructed their own status and configured their professional and social profiles in the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1535–1821). The book proceeds from the general to the particular. From a cursory review of previous literature (chap. 1), it proceeds to explore musical practices in different urban spaces of Mexico City, analyzing how the mere ascription to a Spanish institution such as the cathedral represented, in and of itself, a form of status construction [End Page 643] (chap. 2). Chapter 3 focuses on the Mexico City Cathedral itself and examines some of the rough edges of musical practice, understood as an object within a changing network of relationships and social meanings. For instance, it probes how music served as a means for certain musicians to acquire new status upon becoming priests, as in the case of Martín Bernárdez de Ribera. Chapter 4 explores tensions surrounding the election of Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769), an Italian musician from the world of theater, to serve as chapelmaster. Chapter 5 then describes how Jerusalem's appointment transformed the music chapel's repertoire and operation and how cathedral musicians found themselves obliged to invoke the ideals of decencia (decency/respectability) and calidad (social quality) as attributes associated with the imaginaire of lo español (the Spanish) upon the emergence of new ambulant music chapels in the city (such as the one led by Antonio Portillo, former member of the cathedral) that competed with the cathedral chapel, itself seen as a musical group representing the ecclesiastical cabildo. The volume ends...

Book Review: Just Around Midnight by Jack Hamilton

Jack Hamilton. Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, 340 pp. In the history of rock, the subject of race, specifically that of black and white relations, has long served as a major point of contestation and contention. How

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White

Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White