Listening for Africa, David Garcia’s theoretically ambitious and meticulously researched new text—far broader in scope than his well-respected but relatively specific monograph on Afro-Cuban musician Arsenio Rodríguez (2006)—provides what is sure to become a classic account of the discursive construction of blackness through music, in both academic and artistic practice. Garcia argues that Africa, as a figure of spatial periphery and temporal anteriority to modernity, became an inescapable element of how black music was heard during the period 1930-1960.
Calling out the displacement of modernity’s Others is not in itself novel, but Garcia makes specific contributions in a few senses. He traces the foundational role of academic musicology and its listening practices in rich historical detail by examining the personal and institutional correspondence and fieldnotes of U.S., European, and Cuban academics in or adjacent to the musicologies: Melville Herskovits, Mieczyslaw Kolinski, Helen Roberts, Katherine Dunham, Richard Waterman, Fernando Ortiz, Harold...
University of California Press