Colloquium: David Garcia, “Mapping Black Music in Modernity"

The keynote presentation for UGA's annual Music & Art Research Symposium is happening on Thursday, March 8th at 5:00 pm in Lamar Dodd School of Art, Room S150.

Abstract: 

The idea of Africa as a uniquely temporalizing and spatializing marker is one of modernity’s most productive machines. People have put its imaginings of Africa toward the creation of much music, dance, and film since at least the early part of the twentieth century. This talk focuses on a particularly precarious period of modernity, the 1940s and early 1950s. As a point of departure, the talk will use jazz historian Marshall Stearns’s diagram of the history of “Afro-Euro-American Music” to navigate through the music and dance of Chano Pozo and mambo in order to discover modernity’s precariousness and efficiency as an ordering machine.

Bio: David Garcia is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on African diasporic and Latinx music. His publications include Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006) and Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently editing a critical reader on the history of Latinx music, dance, and theater in the United States, 1783-1900.

The Colloquium Series is presented by the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Student Association. Dr. Garcia’s visit is also supported by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.

Upcoming Colloquium Series Events (all in HHSOM 408 at 5p unless otherwise noted)

Mar. 20: Colloquium, Jacqueline DjeDje

Apr. 17: Colloquium, Randall Kohl (HHSOM 412)