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

Publication: Journal of Popular Culture

Publication Date: 01-FEB-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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...

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