Liner Notes for the Revolution by Daphne A. Brooks

Liner Notes for the Revolution by Daphne A. Brooks

Author:Daphne A. Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press


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Harlem Renaissance New York versus Depression-era Black Texarkana. North versus South. Urban versus burgeoning industrial spot on the map. Vibrant post-war energy versus the onset of a new period of global, world-altering conflict. No doubt, my mother’s youth little resembled that of Jazz’s migrant characters. The rhythm of the Black Metropolis that Morrison’s novel maps out for readers is that of buoyancy and fluidity, kinetic movement and impassioned spontaneity. On the flip side there was Southern life for my mother as she came of age in an evolving industrial town which had an easier temporality to it, a slow-as-molasses pace to the days, even as World War II announced itself at the onset of her teen years. Big leisure pursuits consisted of chaperone-hosted rec room dances rather than roustabout rent-parties. Yet still, in either case, there were the records, the ones that Harlemite Felice carries under her arm in Jazz, on the way to pay the Traces a poignantly climactic visit, and the ones that fascinated my mother and her friends to such an extent that they looked forward to shaping their weekends around them. The records were the keys to dynamic lifeworlds curated by the girls, themselves. They are the objects that yield an array of pressing and important questions about, for instance, the relationships that Black girls and young women forged with their discs of choice in the early twentieth century.

Where did they go to listen to music and to purchase it and what kinds of places were they, that opened their doors to the ones so often unseen in American culture? Were these establishments, these record shops and other sites that sold discs, “safe spaces … where new socialities could be forged”?45 What drew them to these records and drove them to take certain discs home? What were the occasions in which they pulled them out and played them and where? In tiny bedrooms or in tidy parlors with doilies on the armchairs? In crowded kitchens or out on the front porch with a battery-operated contraption? When and how did these girls handle their possessions? Did they store them away under their beds for future hang time? Trade them with one another when they grew tired of them? To even speculate about these seemingly small, informal cultural rituals and routines is to insist on a deeper way of engaging with the casual luxuriance and dynamism of improvisatory life in everyday, blues-era Black girlhood, to take into account their own matter-of-fact gestures and practices that convey their confidence in “shapeshifting,” as Black feminist anthropologist Aimee Cox refers to it, this ability wherein “Black girls develop their own rhetorical performances and creative strategies …” to navigate worlds created without them in mind. While Cox is interested in tracing how this emerges in Black girls’ radical politics of the body and a social choreography that addresses “marginalization, isolation, victimization and absence …,” I find inspiration in applying her theory of shapeshifting to the sonic cultures that these Black



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