SHUM 2528

Borderlands History of Jazz: Mexico and African America

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

Since the early 20th century, perhaps no form of music has reflected more elements of American culture than jazz. At various points, jazz has signified working class defiance, African American cultural resistance, mass-mediated popular culture, expressive freedom, high-art avant-gardism, social and political protest, and third world and subaltern solidarity. This course reexamines jazz practice from the point of view of the history of Mexican and Gulf/Caribbean influences in early jazz, and considers this alongside the Underground Railroad to the South, the Afro-Mexican experience, abolition in the Atlantic world, jazz and capitalism/imperialism, Jack Johnson in 1920s Tijuana, and more. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach, this course will combine a historical timeline with weeks focusing on thematic and methodological issues relevant to Africana Studies.

When Offered Fall.

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