Culture on the Margins
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A01=Jon Cruz
Abolitionism
Along the Way
Andrew Arato
Asset management
At Best
Author_Jon Cruz
Bourgeoisie
Categorization
Category=AVLK
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSL
Civil service
Collective consciousness
Collective identity
Commodity
Concept
Consideration
Cultural analysis
Cultural appropriation
Cultural critic
Cultural framework
Cultural hegemony
Cultural materialism (cultural studies)
Cultural movement
Cultural practice
Cultural retention
Cultural sensibility
Culturalism
Culture
Customer
Disenchantment
Employment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethnic enclave
Ethnic studies
Ethnoscience
Ethos
Externality
Funding
Ideology
Incentive
Income
Infrastructure
Interaction
Lunsford Lane
Modernity
Narrative
Negotiation
Obligation
Opportunity structures
Pension
Percentage
Personal experience
Phaedo
Phenomenon
Refrain
Reinterpretation
Residence
Retirement
Romanticism
Saving
Sensibility
Sentimentality
Slave narrative
Slavery
Social environment
Social science
Solipsism
Spiritual (music)
Subculture
Subjectivity
The Sociological Imagination
Transcendentalism
V.
Value theory
Product details
- ISBN 9780691004747
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism.
In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.
Jon Cruz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the coeditor of Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception.
