Music and the Racial Imagination. (Cultural Topics).

Music and the Racial Imagination. Edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [xv, 703 p. ISBN 0-226-70200-6. $29.]

From its first line: "A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race" (p. 1), this illuminating and courageous book looks unsparingly at the varied intersections of music and race and insists upon a new musicology capable of addressing them.

In a wide-ranging introduction, Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman enumerate the many internal and external challenges to critical practices in historical musicology and ethnomusicology, finding that scholarship proceeded largely as if such challenges had never occurred. Historical musicology, for example, "remained committed to a historically and musically centered 'Europe' whose cultural and artistic boundaries, despite centuries of global encounter, remain tidy and distinct" (p. 4), and ethnomusicologists showed little sustained interest in questioning the field's most central concepts of ethnicity, culture, and subjectivity.

The authors' goal in this "aggressively multidisciplinary" volume is "to formulate and advance new thinking about musicological practice as it seeks to situate the discipline more explicitly within the existing conversation about cultural politics and race" (p. 5). Each article offers substantial insights, but the book's strongest impact comes from the cumulative effect of multiple interrogations from multiple viewpoints. The essays are united by their attention to the manifestations of the "racial imagination," defined in the introduction as "the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity" (p.5).

The book's twenty essays are organized into five sections. The first, Body/Dance, opens with Deborah Wong's "The Asian American Body in Performance," reflecting on the presence of Asian Americans in jazz and hip-hop, frankly confronting the "problematic relationships" between Asian American and African American bodies. Wong considers "the relationships between the body, race, and performance, and the racialization of bodies through performance" (p. 57), a distinction which proves resonant in the succeeding chapters. Frances R. Aparicio's exploration of the "mulatta and/or the black woman dancing, walking, or moving to the musical rhythms of the Caribbean" (p. 95) is a fascinating inquiry into a central motif. Brian Currid's "Ain't I People: Voicing National Fantasy" examines Singin' in the Rain and A Star is Born to explore "the hegemonic articulation of the materiality of race and gender" and its relationship to "the production of Americanness" (p. 118), and Tera W. Hunter's "'Sexual Pantomimes,' the Blues Aesthetic, and Black Women in the New South" describes the "contested terrain" of African American vernacular dance in Atlanta (p. 106).

Hybridity/Mix, the second section, begins with Christopher A. Waterman's masterful analysis of the history of Bo Chatmon's "Corrine Corrina," in which the author explores the song's "shifting yet coherent relationship" to ideas about "racial difference and commensurability" (p. 168), and moves on to uncover subtler points as he finds the song in various guises throughout the twentieth century. Rafael Perez-Torres's "Mestizaje in the Mix; Chicano Identity, Cultural Politics, and Postmodern Music" echoes Waterman's interest in crossover and examines the centrality of mestizaje to contemporary Chicano music. In "Performing Decency: Ethnicity and Race in Andean 'Mestizo' Ritual Dance," Zoila S. Mendoza finds race central to the construction of identity in comparsa performance. Margaret J. Kartomi's "Indonesian-Chinese Oppression and the Musical Outcomes in the Netherlands East Indies" details three centuries of neglected musical history. In "Ethnic Identity, National Identity, and Music in Indo-Trinidadian Cultu re," Peter Manuel offers an examination of such controversies as the participation of Indians in calypso and soca, finding them "key texts in the complex negotiations ...