Democracy’s New Song

Marina Bilbija

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011, vol. 637, issue 1, 64-77

Abstract: W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is commonly regarded as the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography. But Black Reconstruction did more than correct the historical record, it also interrogated the very limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and what and who its “appropriate†subjects should be. Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melodrama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strategic invocations of music in emotionally and spiritually charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an affective and de-familiarizing device through which he is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious experience of freedom and their understanding of democracy.

Keywords: W. E. B. Du Bois; melodrama; music; occult history; democracy; religion; race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716211407153 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:637:y:2011:i:1:p:64-77

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211407153

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().