Crossing Traditions: American Popular Music in Local and Global Contexts

by Babacar M'Baye, Alexander Charles Oliver Hall

Overview

In Crossing Traditions: American Popular Music in Local and Global Contexts, a wide range of scholarly contributions on the local and global significance of American popular music examines the connections between selected American blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop music and their equivalents from Senegal, Nigeria, England, India, and Mexico. Contributors show how American popular music promotes local and global awareness of such key issues as economic inequality and social marginalization while inspiring cross-cultural and interethnic influences among regional and transnational communities.

Specifically, Crossing Traditions highlights the impact of American popular music on the spread of sounds, rhythms, styles, and ideas about freedom, justice, love, and sexuality among local and global communities, all of which share the same desires, hopes, and concerns despite geographic differences. Contributors look at the local contexts of Chicago blues, early rock and roll, white Christian rap, and Frank Zappa alongside the global influence of Mahalia Jackson on Senegalese blues, the transatlantic character of the British Invasion’s relationship to African American rock, and the impact of Latin house music, global hip-hop, and Bhangra in cross-cultural settings. Essays also draw on a broad range of disciplines in their analyses: American studies, popular culture studies, transnational studies, history, musicology, ethnic studies, literature and media studies, and critical theory.

Crossing Traditions will appeal to a wide range of readers, including college and university professors, undergraduate and graduate students, and music scholars in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810888272
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/29/2013
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Babacar M’Baye is an associate professor of American and Pan-African cultures and literatures at Kent State University. He has published numerous articles and chapters on the relationships between African-American and African cultures and literatures. He is the author of The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives (2009).

Alexander Charles Oliver Hall is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Kent State University. He has published several essays in the field of utopian studies, which have appeared in the Journal of Technology Studies, Meridian Critic, and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.