This course explores early African American musics and group epistemologies during the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods, from the 1600s to the 1880s, that indicate early African American conceptions of nation. We will begin with understanding royal court music traditions of kingdoms of which enslaved Africans were previous citizens, and their indigenous conceptions of national identity. These areas are Senegambia, the Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin (Gomez, 1998).
We will explore the formation of African American culture that developed through African American English, religion and musical practices. We will engage in a close study of the Hush Arbor tradition, African American spirituals, ring shouts and early African American organology to understand early African American group epistemologies that indicated an early national identity as a ‘nation within a nation.’
We will read primary sources including Arab travel writers, West African oral histories and epics, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano and Omar Said, as well as the biography of Harriet Tubman, as ethnographic sources of early African American musical practices like junkanu and code songs used for secret messaging. We will also examine post-antebellum ballads, prison gang work songs, blues, and congregational music to understand the formation of post-Civil War African American cultural identity during the Reconstruction Period. This course will also engage primary oral history sources like the WPA Slave Narratives, other oral histories, music recordings and documentaries, as well as secondary ethnomusicological and Africana Studies scholarship.
Topics:
We will explore the formation of African American culture that developed through African American English, religion and musical practices. We will engage in a close study of the Hush Arbor tradition, African American spirituals, ring shouts and early African American organology to understand early African American group epistemologies that indicated an early national identity as a ‘nation within a nation.’
We will read primary sources including Arab travel writers, West African oral histories and epics, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano and Omar Said, as well as the biography of Harriet Tubman, as ethnographic sources of early African American musical practices like junkanu and code songs used for secret messaging. We will also examine post-antebellum ballads, prison gang work songs, blues, and congregational music to understand the formation of post-Civil War African American cultural identity during the Reconstruction Period. This course will also engage primary oral history sources like the WPA Slave Narratives, other oral histories, music recordings and documentaries, as well as secondary ethnomusicological and Africana Studies scholarship.
Topics:
- Early African American history
- Pre-colonial West, West Central and East African societies
- Music of pre-colonial West, West Central and East African Royal Courts
- Folkloric or common music traditional musics of West, West Central and East Africa
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
- Middle Passage
- Development of early African American music forms and expressive culture: spirituals, worksongs, ring shouts, festivals, instrumental musics
- Development of early ante-bellum African American group identity, how it developed through music, language and religion.
- Development post-bellum African American group identity through blues, sacred congregational musics, worksongs, ballads and other forms.
