Barlow, Daniel
(2017)
In the Aural Tradition: Cultural Pedagogies of Black Music.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
In the context of cultural networks of black Atlantic discourse, this dissertation asks how black music was and is employed for pedagogical purposes. Recognizing that aurality, race, and pedagogy are dynamically involved in the production, reception, and interpretation of culture, the dissertation outlines new directions of inquiry into the aural dimensions and educative functions of African American musical languages. It submits aural tradition as a framework for understanding the ways in which modern African American cultural producers engaged with, intervened in, and regenerated ways of listening that came to mediate popular culture. Moreover, the dissertation conceptualizes African American cultural pedagogy to reveal and constellate a series of cultural pedagogies found within the wide trajectories of African American cultural history. By examining listening alongside African American literature’s epistemological and political investments in recovering diasporic heritage, the undervalued role of listening attains its proper estimation. Hence, the dissertation begins in the early twentieth century when black music came to circulate widely in national and international flows of distribution and reception, and argues that cultural pedagogies coexist as pedagogically reflexive mediations of cultural production in relationship to the sociopolitical dynamics of black diasporicity. The most fundamental relationship between orality and literary production is not writing itself, but the undervalued art and work of listening that effectively enables writing and subsequent learning. By adopting aural tradition as a category of analysis, long-celebrated techniques of literary craft used to represent sound and music are further affirmed as virtuosic constituents of African American literary production; in the shift toward listening, however, such techniques are more fully regarded as efforts to recalibrate, recondition, and newly enhance aurality and teachability.
Share
| Citation/Export: |
|
| Social Networking: |
|
Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
20 June 2017 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
31 March 2017 |
| Approval Date: |
20 June 2017 |
| Submission Date: |
14 April 2017 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
266 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > English |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
African American, narrative, narratology, cultural theory, music, pedagogy, cultural pedagogy |
| Date Deposited: |
20 Jun 2017 21:03 |
| Last Modified: |
20 Jun 2017 21:03 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/31477 |
Metrics
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}