Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars.(Book Review)

Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars. Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Joel Dinerstein, who teaches English at Ithaca College in New York, describes this book as "an inquiry into the strategies and symbols that sustained national identity in a period of rapid social, technological and cultural change." He argues that African Americans, by integrating "their artistic and aesthetic traditions with those of the colonial powers they came in contact with ... constructed a functional culture for industrial society" (24). Tracing the evolution of African American music from work songs to the jazz and swing in the 1930s that reflected the tempo of life in the cultural arena and the workplace, he insists that African Americans created jazz and swing to give humans agency in a mechanical age. In his opinion, the black legacy--rather than that of German, Irish, Native American, Jewish, Chinese, or other ethnic groups--gained dominance and has prevailed because, just as work songs reflected the rhythm of agricultural labor in the slave society, "African-Americans had matched the motor activity of their cultural forms to the motorized society" (279; author emphasis). The train became the icon of that society as the children of former slaves found work in northern cities. The jazz train became the musical representation of mechanized rhythms. The evolution of the train from the first steam-powered locomotives to the sleek streamliners parallels the evolution of music from blues to the polished, well-organized swing bands, and dances from the Turkey Trot to the Lindy Hop and Jitterbug.

Music, as Dinerstein perceives it, functions as a way for humans to deal with social and environmental factors over which they have little or no control. Jazz and swing were aesthetic renderings of the felt experience of the physical landscape, and dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug were not only forms of individual expressions of body movement, but also important forms of social interaction. Through detailed descriptions of the ideology and organization of the Ziegfield Follies, the Savoy Ballroom, and the ...