{"id":142,"date":"2013-12-10T15:49:31","date_gmt":"2013-12-10T20:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/?page_id=142"},"modified":"2014-01-23T15:02:43","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T20:02:43","slug":"chris-johnson","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/speakers\/chris-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/afammusicworldculture\/files\/2013\/12\/image001.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/afammusicworldculture\/files\/2013\/12\/image001-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"image001\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-766 alignleft\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Chris Johnson<\/em><br \/>\n<em> Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, NY<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>His ongoing projects include &#8216;<em>Social History and Bebop, Charlie Parker and the Blues Cadence&#8217;<\/em> an essay on jazz theory and performance. Chris has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar teaching and doing research at Westf\u00e4lische Wilhelms-Universitat in M\u00fcnster, Germany and a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Talk Title:\u00a0The African Drum in the Jazz Age: Metaphor and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth Century Black Culture<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This essay considers the ways in which the African drum <em>specifically<\/em> and African imagery <em>generally<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Alain Locke\u2019s collection <em>The New Negro (1925)<\/em> was a showpiece of diasporic reference. Locke\u2019s own essay suggested the inspirational use of the African arts for African Americans as he featured photos of African masks. In the poem &#8216;<em>Afro-American Fragment&#8217; (1930)<\/em> Langston Hughes wrote \u201cSubdued and time-lost \/ Are the drums\u201d and Richmond Barthe\u2019s sculpture of a young woman in<em> African Dancer (1933)<\/em> \u201cemphasized the primitive.\u201d Charles Alston\u2019s mural <em>Magic and Medicine (1937)<\/em> included animals, lightening, the sun, dancing, drums and fetishes to portray a \u201cromantic and magical\u201d view of Africa.<\/p>\n<p>Presentations of artistic works are framed among the arguments of contemporary scholarship.<\/p>\n<p>WEB LINK: <a href=\"http:\/\/blackvistas.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">www.blackvistas.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8216;Social History and Bebop, Charlie Parker and the Blues Cadence&#8217; an essay on jazz [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3592,"featured_media":0,"parent":85,"menu_order":20,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3592"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":769,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/142\/revisions\/769"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/afammusicworldculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}