ABSTRACT
Issues of racial representation and discrimination have been central concerns for jazz historians and critics since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The emphasis placed on race in the New Jazz Studies thus represents not a revolutionary shift but rather the continuation of a long tradition of interdisciplinary critical thinking about race in jazz. Drawing on African American cultural studies and critical race theory, the New Jazz Studies treats race as two things at once: both a social reality that has determined and often limited the options available to jazz musicians and their audiences, and a fluid social construction that jazz itself plays an important role in creating and influencing. Recent scholarship has attempted to define the ways in which particular musical gestures and practices come to represent race, such that musicians enact, and audiences hear, racial identity and difference in musical sound and performance. This chapter surveys major topics in the last twenty years of scholarship on jazz and race, including black modernism and avant-gardism; the role of community organization and activism in combating racism; the uncovering of whiteness as a “marked” racial category; and the complex interrelationships among race, gender, and sexuality in jazz. In conclusion, I suggest that the recent turn toward internationalism in jazz studies has the potential to move the field forward by challenging the black-white racial binary that implicitly defines most considerations of race and jazz.
