The Sound of Racial Feeling

Ronald Radano

Abstract: Critics continue to debate the value of U.S. black music according to a flawed distinction
between racial authenticity and social construction. Both sides have it half-right. Black music’s value
arose historically as the result of a fundamental contradiction in the logic of race tracing back to the slave
era. As “Negro” in form, the music was constituted as the collective property of another property, a property-
in-slaves. The incongruity produced a perception of black music as an auditory form embodied with
fleshly substance, and this sense of racial feeling would live on despite its inconsistencies with modern
ideas about race.

The feel of the body, the sensation of flesh, is

never very far from the sound of black music. This
quality of embodiment–of animated sound waves
working affectively to link person to person–sits
at the very heart of its aesthetic value. Listeners
often describe U.S. black music as if there were a
common sentience, or even a human presence, in
its audible makeup. This condition is most obvious
in vocal renditions, but particularly revealing are
those circumstances in which there is no singer
singing, or in which voice represents but one aspect
of a larger expression. For example, listeners fre-
quently comment that a particular instrumental-
ist’s tone sounds warm, angry, intimate, or sensu-
ous, to the point of granting that player’s timbre
and embouchure qualities of emotion. Jazz lovers,
moreover, have long compared improvisations to
acts of storytelling, recognizing greatness in musi-
cal tales that seem to fuse sound with the personal-
ity of the artists who play them.

Yet another line of thinking identi½es the physi-
cality of black music in its historical associations
with dance, a linkage that traces back to early mod-
ern styles such as the cakewalk and ragtime. It
would be hard to fathom James Brown’s recording
of Cold Sweat without also calling to mind the

RONALD RADANO is Professor
of Music and a Senior Fellow at
the Institute for Research in the
Humanities at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is pres –
ently writing a book on the histor-
ical formation of black music’s
racial feeling and value. He coedits
the book series Re½guring American
Music (Duke University Press) and
Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
(University of Chicago Press).

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image of his bodily struts and gyrations;
to remember Michael Jackson’s perfor –
mances without imagining the grace,
precision, and flow of his onstage virtu-
osity; or to appreciate Nas’s hip-hop
videos without their accompanying as –
sembly of sultry bodies, clad in high-end
ghetto chic. And yet there is still some-
thing else going on when we encounter
black music’s racial feeling, bringing
about a condition that reaches to the core
of the music’s value as it has come to
inform the overall character of modern
U.S. pop. This feeling involves the histor-
ical depth of black music’s literal, bodily
attachments, producing a palpable affect
of human form so enduring that it is dif –
½cult to listen without also experiencing
the fleshly sensation of blackness as
such. It is this perception, built upon his-
torical peculiarities in U.S. racial struc-
tures, that still orients black music’s
value and that continues to inform its
experience well after the sig ni½cance of
race in other ½elds of public knowledge
has largely been discredited.

Some might claim that a sense of the
body is common to all musical experience,
or at least to all music that has come to be
experienced in the modern West. Oliver
Sacks, for one, has argued that music’s
affective capacities are inherent to per-
ception, its relation to the living so inti-
mate as to suggest an auditory sentience,
inducing a condition of “musicophilia . . .
[where] music itself feels almost like a
living thing.”1 To be sure, philosophers
from Herder to Schopenhauer, and music
theorists from Heinrich Schenker to Don-
ald Tovey, have engaged a vast metaphor –
ical language in order to evoke a sense of
music as embodied form, whether de –
picted abstractly in the spirit of Das Volk
or in the organicism of European harmony.
But the masterworks of the European can –
on have not occupied the lion’s share of
public attention in the United States for

the past century or so; rather, another
realm of musical mastery, produced un –
der the guise of the popular and for which
black music has served as the informing
impulse, has dominated.

The extraordinary innovations of Af –
rican American musical artists are where
audiences in the United States and in
metropoles around the world have com-
monly sought their cultural truth in sound,
perceiving in these diverse performances
a wisdom and realness coalescing as
racial blackness. It is not simply the case
that black music represents the United
States’ contribution to a greater embod-
ied musicality, expressing a condition
inherent in all musical creations. Rather,
black music’s qualities of animation are
deeply seated in a racial logic that is unique
to African American practices and that
grows from a prior ideological order of
knowledge. The embodied experience of
black music brings about a collision of
ideological systems of thought, a conflict
producing an aesthetic order so powerful
that it seems even to short-circuit semiotic
processes. In a modern world of arti½ce
and hyper-mediation, listeners discover
in black music a naturalness and alive-
ness that conjures the uncanny feeling of
a discernible, fleshly presence.

During the thirty-year period after

World War II, U.S. black music acquired
a stature unprecedented in the history of
the nation, an elevation of cultural rank
and visibility that established it for the
½rst time as a legitimate American cultural
form. What brought about this progressive
ascendency relates to a complex of fac-
tors, ranging from changes in attitudes
about artistic practice among some of the
nation’s leading African American musi-
cians to the international circulation of
black jazz and pop performers under the
auspices of the U.S. government; from
the rising power and presence of musical

Ronald
Radano

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127

The Sound
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Feeling

entertainment in U.S. consumer society
to the growing interest in African Ameri-
can culture after the appearance of a new
strain of civil-rights activism and the de –
colonization of African states.2 Yet it is
dif½cult to imagine the shift in legitimacy
taking place had it not been for still an –
other factor: namely, the curious paradox
informing the comprehension of black
music as a national cultural expression.
As black music assumed a central place in
the mainstream of modern life, commen-
tators representing a range of perspectives
seemed to agree that what de½ned the
music above all was its connection to an
earlier era, when the music’s racially dis-
tinctive features were thought to be plain
and clear. Despite the music’s enormous
diversity, its wide visibility in contempo-
rary pop, and its unprecedented interac-
tion with the broad spectrum of popular
style, many observers preferred to focus
on what was different about black music,
to the point of proposing that this differ-
ence could be traced to a racial aspect
masked in the language of “culture,” to a
realness or soulfulness reaching to the very
heart of black being.

Claims of black music’s soulful essence
were closely bound up with more practical,
on-the-ground concerns about cultural
ownership, which were being raised at the
time by leading artists and activists. For
many of these committed advocates, black
music represented a form of aesthetic
property with a deep history that right-
fully deserved to remain exclusively under
the control of black people.3 “The idea of
the Negro’s having ‘roots’ and that they
are a valuable possession rather than the
source of ineradicable shame,” Amiri
Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) wrote at the
time in his foundational history of black
music, “is perhaps the profoundest change
within the Negro consciousness since the
early part of the [twentieth] century.”4
Constituted within the social world of

the United States, the difference of musical
blackness had been formally recognized
as a property form. But it was a property
form that seemed to matter much more
than a parcel of land or a bag of goods.
This particular property was seated at the
heart and soul of the African American
collectivity, to the point where many be –
lieved that one could actually hear in black
music the very presence of black humanity.
Given how intimately connected it was to
the black body, “if anyone should sell it,”
argued the black activist Booker Grif½n,
“it should be black people.”5

It is striking that a new coalescence of
ideas about black music’s qualities of ani-
mation had entered into public knowledge
at precisely the same time that enduring
beliefs in race were ½nally coming undone.
Just as the biological and social sciences
were making plain that physical and phe-
notypical differences between humans
bore no relevance to intelligence, person-
ality, or character, and at the very mo –
ment when appeals for political justice
were insisting on the equality of all U.S.
citizens regardless of color or counte-
nance, the rhetoric surrounding black
music had intensi½ed and nearly codi½ed
racialist notions of musical essence, sug-
gesting, in effect, that audible differences
based on race were real.6 One might
imagine that the entertainment indus-
try’s heightened economization of black
music would have served to dismantle,
rather than to elevate, claims of essence
and authenticity, more typical of our
understanding of fetishized commodity-
forms, whose production and labor are
obscured. And yet the music’s status as
an economized, cultural property appeared
actually to have increased its liveliness,
its anthropomorphized aura, making it
seem to possess, in common parlance, a
quality of soul. What in fact made black
music different from other musical forms
was not some metaphysical condition of

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blackness, but rather its material origins
as a commodity, ½rst taking shape as part
of a racial economy under antebellum
slavery. The fleshliness of blackness, the
soulful sense of it as a living thing, had
entered into post–World War II U.S. cul-
ture from a prior time and place. Racial-
ideological and economic forces were
fundamental to black music’s origins and
mysti½cation, bringing about what we
might think of as an act of appropriation
that was never entirely completed. It is in
this incompletion–in African Americans’
partial retention of an inalienable, racial-
ized cultural property–that we locate the
basis of black music’s affective character.

What I am calling the racial feeling of

black music originates in an early struggle
over cultural ownership that took place
when black music was ½rst constituted as
a public form. In “Negro music,” U.S.
slaves produced what may be African
America’s ½rst and most enduring collec-
tive property, an expression recognized
and acknowledged as attached to the
black body as it existed within the larger
social arena of the South. While group
performances had always been a part of
black social life, reaching back far in Af –
rican history, they underwent a profound
transformation in the context of antebel-
lum Southern culture. If these perfor –
mances contributed to the making of his-
torical, African ritual practices, they be –
came heightened in signi½cance as they
underwent translation within the frames
of Western knowledge in the United
States, ultimately proving disruptive to
the prevailing social order. Signi½cantly,
a newly conceived “Negro music” was
thought by whites not to be music in the
common form, but a direct outgrowth of an
inferior species, a property, “Negro slave,”
which revealed in sound inborn qualities
of character and temperament. Racialized,
black sound, many observers suggested,

related directly to the physiology of the
African body; it therefore could never be
entirely extracted from the slaves’ pos-
session. Out of this rather bizarre logic, a
strange thing happened: a property-form
named “slave” was now in possession of
its own property; it had created property
where no property should have rightly
existed. And from this seemingly miracu-
lous development, turning on a glitch in
the racial logic of the U.S. slave economy,
black chattel established during the late-
antebellum era an entire world of its own,
a distinctive, musically informed culture
whose value depended on the music’s
structural inaccessibility to a white ma –
jority. Seemingly autonomous, “Negro
music” was in fact fundamentally con-
nected to the primary, economic context
of masters and slaves, to a social relation
that determined its racial particularity.

Thinking about the rise of black music
this way helps us revise the common as –
sumption that it grew directly out of the
internal contexts of an insider culture, and
enables us to bring the music’s under-
standing into alignment with current
philosophical theories of blackness.7 Such
a way of thinking also challenges the
view that black music is a strictly “black”
entity that, despite its various transmuta-
tions, has somehow maintained an en –
during quality or essence–a “changing
same,” as Baraka famously called it–
unique to African American experience
and accessible to whites only after having
emerged, full-blown, from the con½nes
of absolute blackness. Thinking about
black music this way, ½nally, helps us rec-
ognize how it emerged and evolved ac –
cording to identi½able social processes
along the symbolic boundaries that struc –
tured a profoundly racialized world.8
Black music’s value is not, in reality,
inherent to a racialized physicality, nor
did it arise in its essential form directly
out of the African past, no matter how

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important a role that past played in the
music’s formation. Rather, it developed
as the result of an unequal economic rela-
tion, as a property of a greater property-
in-slaves, whose performative engage-
ments with the “supernatural” established
precedents for sonically based forms of
exchange. From the start, the music’s
pow er was patently material: it simulta-
neously exceeded white control while also
remaining structurally embedded in a
white-majority world. Black music’s very
constitution depended on the relation of
domination and resistance within the
ideological force ½elds of racist belief.

It follows, then, that the idea of “Negro
music” could not have come into existence
had it not been for a nineteenth-century
conception of race that allowed for hu –
mans to be categorized as a species of
property. That status meant that any cre-
ative expression produced by slaves
should remain under the rightful claim of
white mastery; never would the slaves’
music simply be “music,” for it would al –
ways be attached to those black bodies-
as-things. The refusal of whites to observe
black music as “music” marked the basis
of its inaccessibility; despite their status
as owners, the slaves’ masters could never
fully possess black music and culture.
After slavery, moreover, this embodied,
racial feeling within black music would
elevate its cultural value and its authen-
ticity, identifying a kind of secret life
existing within the music’s resonant
forms. While contemporary writers still
commonly argue that authenticity is in –
herent to black music, and that it is in fact
what has compelled whites to repeatedly
attempt to steal it, we might better un –
derstand authenticity as something born
out of a botched robbery involving two col –
luding parties. Here, the thieves (whites)
could never wholly possess that which
they attempted to steal; the very ground
rules they had established and operated

under, rules that had invented difference,
precluded their ownership of black music.
The incompleteness of white claims would
thus expose a fundamental contradiction
in the relationship of race and culture,
whereby black music’s inextricable at –
tachment to the black body limited white
entitlement to what was, in the emerging
modern, deemed to be a publicly accessi-
ble commodity-form.

Beyond the slave era and into the ½rst
two decades of the twentieth century, the
bodily attachments of black music re –
mained deeply connected to new African
American forms, carrying forward an
increasingly anachronistic idea of race
into the modern. What was perceived to
be only partially accessible to whites
steadily grew in aesthetic value, particu-
larly as black musical forms began to cir-
culate as commodities and as the racial
idea of an impermeable cultural black-
ness assumed a central place in popular
thinking. Listeners came to believe that
black music’s embodiment revealed a
peculiar African American sensibility that
was somehow shielded from the wider
white realm, when, in fact, the music’s
embodiment had simply expanded via
the machinery of the consumer market.
Mass circulation brought black music
seemingly everywhere as it rapidly devel-
oped within the emerging lingua franca
of popular music, appearing in the new
genres of musical theater, ragtime, blues,
and “syncopated music.” These styles, in
turn, inspired new expressions by white
vaudeville and blackface entertainers,
whose conscious imitations and musical
derisions reinforced the idea of blackness
as real. This is why interracial musical
relation and exchange would never tar-
nish black music’s realness, why the
white, attempted robbery of black music
was always inevitably botched; it had to
be in order to maintain the very idea of
race. Had it not been for this historical

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legacy and the racial logic it produced,
the value attached to black musical au –
thenticity would have never endured. In –
deed, had it not been for race, black musi-
cal authenticity would never have existed
in the ½rst place.9
It was around this same time that cele-

brated black musical forms came to play
a critical role in shaping a distinctive Af –
rican American history, uncompromised
by white knowledge and claim. James
Monroe Trotter’s portrayal of black stage
performers in Music and Some Highly Musi-
cal People (1878) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s trib-
ute to the “sorrow songs” in the Souls of
Black Folk (1903) are two famous exam-
ples. Better known at the time among
African American city dwellers, however,
were the efforts of a new generation of
black popular composers who proposed
that their syncopated music provided evi –
dence of black cultural and racial unique-
ness. Among the most familiar today is
pianist Scott Joplin, who em braced the
belief in a racially identi½able musical
essence echoing forth from a distant past.
“There has been ragtime music in America
ever since the Negro race has been here,”
Joplin told the African American critic
Lester Walton in 1913. It was just that
“white people took no notice of it until
about twenty years ago.” The celebrated
bandleader James Reese Europe similarly
asserted that the essence of black popular
music was very old, reaching back to a
primal order. In an exchange from 1909,
he told Walton that white people were
basically clueless about this origin, having
become confused by their own stylistic
labels. The term “ragtime,” Europe ex –
plained, “is merely a nick-name, or rather
a fun name given to Negro rhythm by our
Caucasian brother musicians many years
ago.”10 For both Joplin and Europe, the
animated properties of black music could
never be extracted; indeed, they could only

be vaguely comprehended by whites. But in
that vagueness, one discerned the presence
of a black body enlivening audible black
forms. As Walton himself asserted, despite
its long history within a majority-white
world, Negro music was “of purely Negro
origin.”

In all of these instances, black music
was understood as a primordial entity, a
racially determined sound form whose
economized origins in slavery were reen-
visioned according to a new origin in the
African past, only to be reeconomized and
reracialized in the modern as the cultural
property of a new African American citi-
zenry. Black music was the stuff of black-
ness itself; it was at once seemingly alive
in the body and also attached to a long-
gone ancestry, a realm predating Western
modern knowledge and history. Endowed
with ancestral roots, it had ascended
from the past into the present and among
the living, taking form as a modern-age
relic. In fact, the term relic was sometimes
employed to describe “Negro music,” as
well as blacks themselves, particularly
those elders who had survived since slav-
ery. Relic was also used to refer to the burnt
detritus of lynching victims, suggesting a
perceived relation between dead, black
bodies and the ancient, Af rican sounds
that carried forth among an inferior,
declining species. Indeed, the racialist
rhetoric of blacks and whites never seemed
too far apart, despite the unequal conse-
quence it had on their lives. “Hav[ing]
forgotten the language of their savage
ancestors,” the white critic Henry Edward
Krehbiel proposed in his 1914 book, Afro-
American Folk-Songs, “does it follow that . . .
they have also forgotten all of their
music? May relics of the music not re –
main in a subconscious memory?”11 This
was another way of ar ticulating the com-
mon view that African American musical
practices were racially determined. They
were intimately connected to the black

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flesh, living on as a resonance of ances-
tral voices: “spooks,” as in the common
parlance of the time, or what James Wel-
don Johnson later called “the specter of
minstrelsy.”12 In the imagination of both
blacks and whites, black music was al –
most as much a part of black personhood
as were one’s flesh, hair, and vital organs.
It brought into relation a racial physicality
with the larger project of black culture, a
culture that grew conceptually more
expansive, recognizable, and affecting as
it circulated in public knowledge. And
because black music was not limited to
the physicality of the body, but took form
within the sensory arena of hearing, it
had far greater social influence and ef –
fect. What was a valuable possession also
represented an occupying force within
the greater body politic.

Given the power of this kind of perva-
sive racial thinking, it is no real surprise
that so many African Americans would
vigorously invest in the evolving, racial
myth of black music. Innovation of musi-
cal difference became key to the advance
of black culture, enabled by the growth of
a new professional class of musicians
whose talents accommodated a consumer
public caught up in racial fantasy. Each
investment, each recommitment to the
claims of difference–in soulfulness, in
hotness, in sorrow, in syncopation, in
improvisation–paid back mightily. With
each innovation, each new gesture of
“Negro music,” the racial feeling of black –
ness would multiply and grow stronger,
as it also reaf½rmed African Americans’
creative ability to invent form, contra-
dicting enduring claims of an “imitative”
nature. Black music had become a prized
possession with which African Ameri-
cans would bargain for a place in U.S. cul-
tural life; by af½rming their difference
from a majority-white public, and reveal-
ing again and again the botched attempted
robbery of musical culture within an

established master/slave relation. In “the
secret of black song and laughter,” as Zora
Neale Hurston called it, African Americans
had found a common currency, a cultural
right that “they traded . . . to the other
Americans for things they could use.”13
Into the 1920s and 1930s, and with the

emergence of jazz, black music supplied
African Americans with a new kind of
value, a new mode of cultural currency
through which they traded and bargained
their way into public life. The music’s
prominence as the international language
of an emerging, world-metropolitan youth
culture helped broaden its stature and
appeal among African Americans inside
the United States, whose interest was
fueled by reports of the successes of white
society orchestras performing under the
name of jazz and touring Europe, Asia,
and Latin America.14 Motivated by this
turn of events, a new generation of highly
talented and educated black musicians
began introducing a radically innovative
style that fused Southern practices with
the musical grammar and performance
practices of an emerging mainstream
sound. Hurston characterized the hot jazz
of late-1920s Harlem as a new life form
that “rears on its hind legs and attacks the
tonal veil with primitive fury,” bringing
into being a modern incarnation of racial
feeling, and revealing the body lurking
within an otherwise civilized art form. In
the same fashion that black composers
had before them, these new black artists
sought to repel white claims of posses-
sion: “I am not playing jazz,” Duke Elling-
ton insisted in refusing the journalistic
label, “I am trying to play the natural feel-
ings of a people.”15 It might seem only
proper that the mys ti½cations of racial
blackness would be sustained even as
older ideas of race had begun to collapse.
After all, American investment in black
music’s mysti½cation had been under way

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Ronald
Radano

for nearly a hundred years, and it pro-
foundly affected tastes and experiences
across the color line. For many musicians
who subsequently emer ged on the scene,
the claims of realness and authenticity
may have been what Stuart Hall would call
“strategic,” particularly as the music’s eco-
nomic value grew.16 And yet it is nonethe-
less striking that an earlier mysti½cation
of black music became embedded within
a commodity-form, its putative racial
essence strangely formalized in order to
advocate for its equal standing among the
other arts. No matter how right and just
such claims may have been, they also
were confusing. It is a confusion that lives
on into the present.

Still today, we have a situation whereby
the most important indicator of aesthetic
value in popular music is also the princi-
pal marker of separation among its citi-
zenry. We live in a world in which, de –
spite all the productive challenges to the
claims of race–all the biological and his-
torical evidence amassed to demonstrate
that race is not real, together with the sea
change in political and social thought
about racial inequality–the qualities of
black music still seem profoundly racial,
or at the very least, the racial aspect of the
music remains unresolved. That we ½nd

value in this embodied racial affect is why
black music remains so influential. It is
also why we can hear in music that is not
identi½ably “racial” (that is, majority-
white music) key signi½ers of blackness,
from the gospel inflections common to
popular vocal styles to the groove-based
rhythmic orientation that underpins over
sixty years of rock ’n’ roll. The accumula-
tion of meanings attached to this affec-
tive blackness has assumed the quality of
myth: in black music’s many forms, we
encounter allegories of race as it lives on
in the United States. It is, indeed, not
entirely an unhappy tale, for it is from
these racial qualities of animation that
we derive so much pleasure and witness
the continuing struggle of difference. But it
remains unclear what ultimately the mu –
sic’s narratives can tell us. As appealing
as it is, black music’s racial embodiment
also supports a reactionary politics that
goes against the grain of our strong est
democratic ideals, suggesting the need, af –
ter David Scott, for a new conscript of black
music in the vein of the tragic.17 It may be
our challenge to consider how we might
begin to deracinate music’s critical lexicon
and modes of analysis while also paying
respect to the legacies and traditions cre-
ated under the banner of racial difference.

endnotes

Author’s Note: A version of this essay was delivered before the Department of Music, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, on October 5, 2012. I am grateful for the vigorous exchange
that ensued, and particularly for the comments and follow-ups by Ben Brinner, Steve Feld,
Jocelyne Guilbault, Andrew Jones, Leigh Raiford, Griff Rollefson, and Bryan Wagner.

1 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 2008), x.
2 Entry into a vast literature might begin with Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the
Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Penny Von
Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004); Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community and Black
Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Suzanne E. Smith,
Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999).

3 Such thinking seemed to lay behind Roy Eldridge’s claim in 1951 that he could hear the dif-
ference between white and black jazz improvisers. His failure to meet the challenge in an

142 (4) Fall 2013

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The Sound
of Racial
Feeling

infamous “Blindfold Test” interview with Leonard Feather, published in Down Beat, served
to reinforce white attitudes of entitlement. Feather clearly missed the point of the exercise,
showing no comprehension of why Eldridge would make the claim as a defense of black cul-
tural ownership. The incident serves as a case in point of how racially essentialist stances
could be put to strategic use in order to claim cultural property. Leonard Feather, The Book
of Jazz (1957; New York: Horizon, 1965), 47.

4 LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 218.
5 Grif½n made this statement in a 1971 article published in the Los Angeles Sentinel. For back-
ground, see Charles L. Hughes, “‘Country-Soul’: Race and the Recording Industry in the United
States South, 1960–1980,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012), 163.
6 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997); George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (1968; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); P. V. Tobias, “Brain-size,
Grey Matter, and Race–Fact or Fiction?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 32
(1970): 3–26, cited in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; New York:
W.W. Norton, 1996), 140–141; and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in
the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (1994; New York: Routledge, 1986).
7 See, for example, Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Robert Gooding-Williams, Look,
a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).

8 Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual

Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195.

9 And while practices that may be attributed to soul can be reproduced and even expanded
upon by whites, the soulfulness of white expressions always remains suspect simply because
white subjectivity was not constituted within this racial economy; its connection to soul-
fulness is always mediated through the idea of blackness. In this way, all white productions
of black music carry a dubious authenticity that quali½es even the strongest performances.
10 Joplin is quoted in Edward Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 222. For Europe, see Lester Walton, “Is Ragtime Dead?” New York
Age, April 8, 1909. Thanks to Dave Gilbert for calling my attention to this article.

11 Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folk-Songs (1914; New York: Frederick Ungar Pub-

lishing, 1962), ix.

12 James Weldon Johnson, Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, found in Voices from the
Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 281–283.

13 Zora Neale Hurston, The Sancti½ed Church (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island, 1983), 78.
14 Studies of the international emergence of jazz are rapidly developing and already represent
a vast literature. One place to begin is Bruce Johnson, “The Jazz Diaspora,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 96–113. Reports of the international presence of jazz were beginning to appear
domestically in the early 1920s. Recordings such as Fletcher Henderson’s Shanghai Shuffle
and Louis Armstrong’s Cornet Chop Suey show that interest traveled both ways.

15 Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1995), 828–829. Ellington is quoted in Eric Porter, What Is
This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 37.

16 Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20 (1–2) (Spring/

Summer 1993).

17 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 2004).

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