Ams 650
Final Paper
May 7th 2013
The Problem with White Hipness, Race, Gender and Cultural Conception in Jazz Historical Discourse. The idea of African American music and hipness as cultural critique has detached itself over the past from the circulated internationally, particular historical context of bebop; it has inspired many young generations of white people to adopt both the style of hipness, which have shifted to changes in sartorial style, and African American musical, and the social attitude that hipness has been trying to signify (Lott 216). Indeed the idea of a subcultural resistance and politics of style has been central to cultural studies, including classic Subculture: “The Meaning of Style.” There has been a struggle over meaning in jazz that we have learned in class and from my group wiki. I will show you the similarities between what we learned in class from Scott Devaux and Bernard Gendron and my cartoon group wiki and Ashley’s wiki such as, races, sex gender and music style. Race is the aspect of a struggle over meaning of jazz that our group wiki have focused on as same as the article from Scott Devaux. For example, “White Hipness”, is about the interrelationships among the gender, class, music, and social diversity of African American. White people symbolizes African Americans as a sexual freedom, social conscience, and resistance to the dominant order in the imagination of white Americans. White Americans have confused the most "transgressive" aspects of the culture of African American with its true character, they fall into the trap of viewing blackness as absence. The view of blackness falls into its concomitant exoticism and the legacy of historical primitivism of “the other”, whether conceived as an absence of bourgeois pretensions
References: Stebbins, Robert A. "A Theory of the Jazz Community*." The sociological quarterly 9.3 (1968): 318-331. Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for" Blackness". U of Minnesota Press, 1995. Monson, Ingrid. "The problem with white hipness: Race, gender, and cultural conceptions in jazz historical discourse." Journal of the American Musicological Society (1995): 396-422. Gendron, Bernard. "Moldy figs and modernists: Jazz at war (1942-1946)." Discourse 15.3 (1993): 130-157. DeVeaux, Scott. "Constructing the jazz tradition: Jazz historiography." Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 25. No. 3. St. Louis University, 1991.