Dreams in double time

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
Dreams in Double Time takes up a single question grounded in comparative, decolonial study: why was bebop, a radical, wartime music created by black experimentalists in 1940s Harlem nightclubs, so conceptually productive for Mexican American, Japanese American, and Afro-Chinese American listeners during the global realignments of the post-WWII years? The project works to answer this question by way of three novella-length chapters, each following a member of a "trio" of loosely linked writer-musicians—and, in effect, their varying contexts and communities. The first figure, James T. Araki, was a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and eventual literature and folklore scholar credited with helping introduce bebop to Japan during the Allied Occupation. The second, Raúl R. Salinas, was a Mexican American prison poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist whose investments in jazz helped document East Austin's rich music histories and instantiate a bop-inflected Chicano literary idiom. And the third, Harold Wing, was an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bop pioneers including Charlie Parker, Errol Garner, and Babs Gonzalez—and, importantly, took the lessons of those performances to his work as a public servant in Newark's City Hall shortly after the uprisings of the late sixties. By following these figures during these postwar decades, Dreams in Double Time records the reach and importance of Harlem's black experimentalists among differently marginalized audiences of color across (and beyond) the United States—audiences newly driven to disrupt the standard logics of racial democracy. Among this project's key interventions are its interdisciplinary analyses of improvisation and composition across media; its attention to underground networks of music circulation, creation, and documentation in and beyond the United States; its investment in "histories from below" that highlight "minor" figures and materials; and its deeply relational (decolonial) commitment to the study of race and ethnicity. In form and content, Dreams in Double Time thus aspires to a fundamentally relational narrative discourse that interweaves figures, sites, materials, and histories typically considered in isolation—not to resolve their inevitable tensions in a tidy appeal to a universal, but instead to sit with them, listening for their chords

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2020; ©2020
Publication date 2020; 2020
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Leal, Jonathan James
Degree supervisor Saldívar, Ramón, 1949-
Thesis advisor Saldívar, Ramón, 1949-
Thesis advisor Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart)
Thesis advisor Saldívar, José David
Thesis advisor Schultz, Anna C
Degree committee member Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart)
Degree committee member Saldívar, José David
Degree committee member Schultz, Anna C
Associated with Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature.

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Jonathan James Leal
Note Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2020 by Jonathan James Leal
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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