Soundscapes Of Liberation

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

The Wireless World sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. It is a co-written book, the result of more than five years of collaboration. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the co-authors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion. They also demonstrate that by paying more attention to audiences, programmes, and soundscapes, historians of international broadcasting can make important contributions to wider debates in social and cultural history. Exploring the idea of a 'wireless world', a globe connected, both in imagination and reality, by radio, The Wireless World sheds new light on the transnational connections created by international broadcasting. Bringing together all periods of international broadcasting within a single analytical frame, including the pioneering days of wireless, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the study reveals key continuities and transformations. It looks at how wireless was shaped by internationalist ideas about the use of broadcasting to promote world peace and understanding, at how empires used broadcasting to perpetuate colonialism, and at how anti-colonial movements harnessed radio as a weapon of decolonization.

In the late 1950s, free jazz broke all the rules, liberating musicians both to create completely spontaneous and unplanned performances and to develop unique personal musical systems. This genre emerged alongside the radical changes of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Black Power movements. Free Jazz is a new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author’s experience as a performer. More than a catalog of artists and albums, the book explores the conceptual areas they opened: freedom, spirituality, energy, experimentalism, and self-determination. These are discussed in relation to both the political and artistic currents of the times and to specific musical techniques, explained in language clear to ordinary readers but also useful for musicians.

The Routledge Handbook of Francophone Africa brings together a multidisciplinary team of international experts to reflect on the history, politics, societies, and cultures of French-speaking parts of Africa. Consisting of approximately 35% of Africa’s territory, Francophone Africa is a shifting concept, with its roots in French and Belgian colonial rule. This handbook develops and problematizes the term, with thematic sections covering: Colonial and post-colonial ties between France and sub-Saharan Africa Belgium, Belgian colonialism and Africa The Maghreb African Francophones in France Francophone African literature and film ‘Francophone’ and ‘Anglophone’ Africa Beyond national boundaries and ‘colonial partners’ The chapters demonstrate the evolution of "Francophone Africa" into a multi-dimensional construct, with both a material and an imagined reality. Materially, it defines a regional territorial space that coexists with other conceptualisations of African space and borders. Conceptually, Francophone Africa constitutes a shared linguistic and cultural space within which collective memories are shared, not least through their connection to the French imperial imagination. Overall, the Handbook demonstrates that as global power structures and relations evolve, African agency is increasingly assertive in shaping French-African relations. Bringing this important debate together into a single volume, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars interested in Francophone Africa.

From the Napoleonic Wars to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, via the great world conflicts of the 20th century, Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of ‘postwar transitions’ in the field of music and to demonstrate the influence that musicians, composers, critics, institutions, and publics have had on the period that follows conflict. Leading historians, political scientists, psychologists and musicologists explore the roles of music and culture in demobilization, reconstruction, memory, reconciliation, revenge, and nationalist backlash. Moving beyond the popular conception of music as an agent of peace, this study reveals music’s more complex and ambivalent role in the process of transition from war to peace.

At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.

**FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research** Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X’s emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp’s sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane’s music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and ’50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared—Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination—were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic “cool” that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, indigenous histories, and humanity. Many of his works address historical traumas, such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War, global environmental disharmony, and targeted racial violence, and focus on major figures, including Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, and Anne Frank. This innovative book demonstrates that Lokumbe’s musical compositions, created in collaboration with his ancestors, are multisensorial spiritual soundscapes that aspire to chronicle, heal, and liberate. This is a captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe. The cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen draws on several years of close conversations with Lokumbe, as well as his journals, to provide a powerful collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. The authors explore Lokumbe’s creative journeys and the spiritual dimensions of his art. They trace Lokumbe’s entire career, from his early years in the Texas and New York City jazz scenes to his widely acclaimed orchestral compositions. The book also addresses Lokumbe’s work in prisons and schools with the Music Liberation Orchestra, founded in the 1970s. Illuminating his philosophies of music, spirituality, justice, and freedom, this book immerses readers in Lokumbe’s many revelatory worlds.