Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Performing Arts — African and African American Studies

Looking in particular at the music scene in Manhattan, historian David Gilbert (independent scholar) traces the path from minstrelsy to jazz.  African Americans broke into entertainment by presenting themselves as more authentic than white men in blackface.  Though they found themselves judged by minstrel stereotypes and their performance devalued as natural rather than the result of rehearsal, blacks improved their cultural capital by presenting themselves as proficient in their craft, and their professional capital by earning high wages and forming friendships that allowed them to develop their art.  James Reese Europe further expanded black professional capital by organizing black musicians to command high wages for playing society dances and providing music for dancers Vernon and Irene Castle.  Europe tried to expand black cultural capital by introducing the musical innovations of ragtime.  He did succeed in getting whites to listen to it in Carnegie Hall, but he could not overcome whites tendencies to see themselves as modern partly by seeing blacks as primitive.  Clearly written and well grounded in historiography and archival material, this will be an important resource for those interested in race relations, urban history, and entertainment history as well as early-20th-century music per se.Summing Up: Highly recommended. lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.