Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, NY

Chris Johnson is currently an independent scholar and more recently an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College in New York City.

His ongoing projects include ‘Social History and Bebop, Charlie Parker and the Blues Cadence’ an essay on jazz theory and performance. Chris has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar teaching and doing research at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universitat in Münster, Germany and a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.

Talk Title: The African Drum in the Jazz Age: Metaphor and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth Century Black Culture

This essay considers the ways in which the African drum specifically and African imagery generally have been presented in poetry, painting, sculpture, music and dance. An interest in the African also brought about expressions of primitivism and abstraction in twentieth century art and performance, which are discussed in the second half of this piece. The African drum was a symbol, an image, a metaphor, indeed a theatrical prop that represented home.

Alain Locke’s collection The New Negro (1925) was a showpiece of diasporic reference. Locke’s own essay suggested the inspirational use of the African arts for African Americans as he featured photos of African masks. In the poem ‘Afro-American Fragment’ (1930) Langston Hughes wrote “Subdued and time-lost / Are the drums” and Richmond Barthe’s sculpture of a young woman in African Dancer (1933) “emphasized the primitive.” Charles Alston’s mural Magic and Medicine (1937) included animals, lightening, the sun, dancing, drums and fetishes to portray a “romantic and magical” view of Africa.

Presentations of artistic works are framed among the arguments of contemporary scholarship.

WEB LINK: www.blackvistas.com.