"The Great Migration"

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018

Focusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–64, this article traces transatlantic attitudes toward blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African American musicians into assuming the mask of blackface minstrelsy – an active personification of difference driven by a lucrative fantasy on the terms of white demand. I ask why this imagery found such zealous adherents amongst post-war youth, situating their gaze within a longer tradition of colonialist display. Subaltern musicians caught within this regime were nonetheless able to ‘speak’ via sung performances that signified on the coordinates of their own marginalization. The challenge for musicology is thus to heed the relational syncretism arising from intercultural contact while acknowledging the lived experience of African American artists unable to fully evade the preordained mask of alterity.

Classic Harmonica Blues , 2012

Prace Historyczne, 2019

The author aims to portray the Great African-American Migration by showing the everyday life of the migrants. Starting from presenting the different ways of migrating North, he later describes conditions in which the migrants lived in the Northern cities, relationships with their non-Black neighbours and with the so-called Old Settlers (meaning African Americans who had lived in the North before the Great Migration), their economic struggle, ways of overcoming the problems, as well as the distinctive culture which the migrants eventually developed, and the ferment which these cultural changes created in the whole American society. The narration is based mostly on the oral histories collected from numerous Northern cities: Albany (New York), Chicago (Illinois), Cincinnati (Ohio), Cleveland (Ohio), Detroit (Michigan), Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and New York (New York).

All knowledge is individually constructed and contextually situated. Plainly put: different things mean different things to different people, under different circumstances, in different places and at different times. What then is the meaning of an education.

2009

Space and Culture, 2008

Black music and its corresponding performance practices have deeper continuities than movement, musical, and celebratory patterns. Crucially, these deeper continuities have not been fully explored by such disciplines as ethnomusicology, geography, or cultural studies. Based on data gathered over twelve years' participation in Jamaica's Dancehall performance, and over six years of research, I wish to expand my reading of New World performance practices to other Black performance genres. In analyzing Dancehall's macro-and micro-spatialities, spatial categories, philosophies, and systems were revealed, thus delineating what is best captured by the term performance geography.

The Place of Music: from words to space, a semantic itinerary. Towards a poetics of geographical categories in American popular music (1920-2007). The discourse on American popular music is fraught with geographical terms whose function is not merely to situate or to categorize music. This lexical field points to the existence of a geomusical imagination around American popular music, which attributes value and meaning to genres and styles that can be traced back to specific locales. Such rootedness is interpreted as a sign of authenticity in the musical discourse. For that reason, geographic authenticity has been fabricated by the music industry in order to increase the value of cultural products. In the same way, local authorities and the tourism industry have promoted the musical image of specifc places in order to make them more attractive to residents and visitors alike. Such initiatives can be considered as applied geomusicality, and decrease the gap between geomusical fiction and geographic reality. This study explores the many facets of geomusicality, from the American journalistic discourse to local initiatives that aim at promoting the musical image of places. It closes on a case study devoted to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. The way the “cradle of jazz” was represented in the news and in official discourses as well as the musical reactions to the hurricane allow one to assess the many implications of geomusicality and its hold on popular imaginations.