Friday, September 17, 4:00-5:00 p.m.
https://duke.zoom.us/j/97418287202
If the act of collecting begins with objects, with things, how do we assess the collecting of things produced by other things, by a people who were seen and treated like things?
This, in a nutshell, is the situation we face when investigating the early history of Black music phonography. By focusing on two, seminal cylinder recordings-one, a tale of atrocity documented by the occupying forces of German Colonial East Africa in 1906; the other, an African American popular song commercially produced to order 50,000 times during the 1890s-this talk re-examine the effect of the phonographic turn on the making of Global Black music.
Ronald Radano considers two arguments. First, that common notions of musical theft (i.e., of White people stealing Black music) are actually upside down. Through its recording actions, White power sought from the outset to recover what was seen as a property lost when Black people began to claim ownership of “Negro music.” Second, that White power’s inability to recover what was deemed racially inalienable gave new value to Black music, enriching it with an animating energy that ironically grew as it disseminated across commercial markets. Global Black music value develops from this fundamental contradiction of failed expropriations giving way to imaginings of a racially inalienable, enlivened sound.
Ronald Radano is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of two award-winning books, “New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique” (Chicago, 1993) and “Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music” (Chicago, 2003), and coeditor of “Music and the Racial Imagination” (Chicago, 2000) and “Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique” (Duke, 2016). His new study on the history of black music value, “Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counter-History” is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
