Gayle Wald
Biographic Data
| ID | 3625935 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gayle Wald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gayle |
| FAMILY NAME | Wald |
| SIGNATURE | WALD G |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University, Washington, DC |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The aesthetics of feminist thinking: Methods, forms, desire
This introduction to a special issue on the Aesthetics of Feminist Thinking considers the aesthetic dimensions of feminist theory - its style, its forms, and its formal possibilities across writing, visual culture, performance, and other mediums. It traces how feminist thinking has endured, disappeared, and reappeared, how it takes on new forms across generations and geographies, and how it might redistribute itself in surprising aesthetic maneuv…
Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America
Keywords Symposium
2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Alt…
When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Journal Article When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras Get access When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras. By Claudrena N Harold. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. x, 251 pp. Paper, $22.95.) Gayle Wald Gayle Wald George Washington University, Washington, DC Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 108, Issue 4, March 2022, Pag…
A queer black woman invented rock-and-roll”: Rosetta Tharpe, memes, and memory practices in the digital age
In recent years, musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73) has gone from being a “forgotten” rock trailblazer to being a viral video sensation and the subject of the Internet meme “A queer black woman invented rock and roll.” This article traces the “meme-ing” of Tharpe, paying attention to how the meme constructs, circulates, and mobilizes knowledge about her in online and offline spaces. After briefly reviewing the challenges of writing about Th…
Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads trace…
“Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That”: Listening with, to, and through José Muñoz: The following is a transcript of a roundtable that took place on February 21, 2105 at the IASPM-US conference in Louis…
James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature
Book Review| December 01 2015 James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes. By Morrissette, Noelle. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2013. xiii, 243 pp. Paper, $45.00.Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem. By Marcoux, Jean-Philippe. Lanham, MD: Lexin…
Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space
This essay examines two live performance events-the opera singer Marian Anderson's historic 1939 concert on the National Mall, and "Soul at the Center," a little-remembered but significant 1972 festival at New York's Lincoln Center-to examine how sound works as a cultural practice of resignifying the meaning and feeling of racially exclusive spaces. Drawing on the sonic philosophies of musicians Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (in their concern wi…
Clueless in the neo-colonial world order
Passing Strange and post-civil rights blackness
The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his identity.2 In her groundbreaking 2000 article 'Black like this: race, generation, and rock in the post-civil rights era', anthropologist Maureen Mahon describes the 'contemporary condition of double-consciousness' that shapes the experiences of African-Americans growing up in the decades after the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. 3 Focusing on members of the Bl…
Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist “Un-Forgetting”
Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist “Un-Forgetting” Gayle Wald (bio) I did not set out to write a biography. When I first encountered the remarkable Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the musical trailblazer who became gospel’s first national superstar in the late 1930s, I was riveted. It was the late 1990s, I was at a conference on rock music at Duke University, and George Lipsitz had shown a videotape with a tantalizing clip of the performer doing “Down By the Riv…
Reviving rosetta tharpe: Performance and Memory in the 21st Century
This article examines the pleasures and dangers of the ‘reviving’—that is, restoring to memory, of a ‘forgotten’ female gospel-guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It argues that the erasure of black women from cultural memory is not merely the effect of the passage of time, but of small but significant acts of forgetting that themselves constitute cultural practices. As examples of attempts to forestall forgetting and ‘revive’ the dead, the essay l…
Have a Little Talk: Listening to the B-Side of History
forgotten recordings - such as 'have a little talk with jesus', the 1952 sister rosetta tharpe-red foley duet documented in this essay - may reveal a more complex account of popular music history than that which can be compiled from recordings that are remembered and passed on. released as the b-side of a red foley and the sunshine boys 45, 'have a little talk' is the product of a then-unprecedented collaboration in nashville of a black woman and…
From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover
Rosetta Tharpe was gospel music's first national star, one of its earliest recording artists, and its pre-eminent crossover figure of the 1940s, the decade of gospel's emergence as "popular" music. Such popularization of gospel held special significance for Tharpe as an African American female musician who negotiated the different modes of femininity available to her as, alternately, a popular or gospel entertainer. Although Tharpe earned scorn i…
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk , the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fa…
The Vestments and Investments of Race
Race Men. By Hazel V. Carby. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 228 pages. $24.00 (cloth). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics. By George Lipsitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 274 pages. $19.95 (paper). In Essex Hemphill's poem "Heavy Breathing," an excerpt of which appears as an epigraph for the opening chapter of Hazel V. Carby's new book Race Men, the speaker exp…
Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order
Research Article| September 01 1999 Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order Gayle Wald Gayle Wald Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1999) 14 (3 (42)): 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-14-3_42-50 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gayle Wald; Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order. Camera Obscura 1 September 1999; 14 (3 (42)): 50–69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215…
Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres
Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues
Anna Deveare Smith's Voices at Twilight
Anna Deveare Smith’s Voices at Twilight Gayle Wald The Mark Taper Forum Production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a work-in-progress that is part of the “On the Road: A Search for American Character” series conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Emily Mann. Set design by Robert Brill. Costume design by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Allen Lee Hughes. Original music by Lucia Hwong. I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woma…
Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space
This essay examines two live performance events-the opera singer Marian Anderson's historic 1939 concert on the National Mall, and "Soul at the Center," a little-remembered but significant 1972 festival at New York's Lincoln Center-to examine how sound works as a cultural practice of resignifying the meaning and feeling of racially exclusive spaces. Drawing on the sonic philosophies of musicians Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (in their concern wi…
From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover
Rosetta Tharpe was gospel music's first national star, one of its earliest recording artists, and its pre-eminent crossover figure of the 1940s, the decade of gospel's emergence as "popular" music. Such popularization of gospel held special significance for Tharpe as an African American female musician who negotiated the different modes of femininity available to her as, alternately, a popular or gospel entertainer. Although Tharpe earned scorn i…
A queer black woman invented rock-and-roll”: Rosetta Tharpe, memes, and memory practices in the digital age
In recent years, musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73) has gone from being a “forgotten” rock trailblazer to being a viral video sensation and the subject of the Internet meme “A queer black woman invented rock and roll.” This article traces the “meme-ing” of Tharpe, paying attention to how the meme constructs, circulates, and mobilizes knowledge about her in online and offline spaces. After briefly reviewing the challenges of writing about Th…
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads trace…
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres
Reviving rosetta tharpe: Performance and Memory in the 21st Century
This article examines the pleasures and dangers of the ‘reviving’—that is, restoring to memory, of a ‘forgotten’ female gospel-guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It argues that the erasure of black women from cultural memory is not merely the effect of the passage of time, but of small but significant acts of forgetting that themselves constitute cultural practices. As examples of attempts to forestall forgetting and ‘revive’ the dead, the essay l…
Anna Deveare Smith's Voices at Twilight
Anna Deveare Smith’s Voices at Twilight Gayle Wald The Mark Taper Forum Production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a work-in-progress that is part of the “On the Road: A Search for American Character” series conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Emily Mann. Set design by Robert Brill. Costume design by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Allen Lee Hughes. Original music by Lucia Hwong. I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woma…
Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues
Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres
Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order
Research Article| September 01 1999 Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order Gayle Wald Gayle Wald Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1999) 14 (3 (42)): 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-14-3_42-50 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gayle Wald; Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order. Camera Obscura 1 September 1999; 14 (3 (42)): 50–69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215…
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk , the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fa…
The Vestments and Investments of Race
Race Men. By Hazel V. Carby. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 228 pages. $24.00 (cloth). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics. By George Lipsitz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 274 pages. $19.95 (paper). In Essex Hemphill's poem "Heavy Breathing," an excerpt of which appears as an epigraph for the opening chapter of Hazel V. Carby's new book Race Men, the speaker exp…
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres
From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover
Rosetta Tharpe was gospel music's first national star, one of its earliest recording artists, and its pre-eminent crossover figure of the 1940s, the decade of gospel's emergence as "popular" music. Such popularization of gospel held special significance for Tharpe as an African American female musician who negotiated the different modes of femininity available to her as, alternately, a popular or gospel entertainer. Although Tharpe earned scorn i…
Have a Little Talk: Listening to the B-Side of History
forgotten recordings - such as 'have a little talk with jesus', the 1952 sister rosetta tharpe-red foley duet documented in this essay - may reveal a more complex account of popular music history than that which can be compiled from recordings that are remembered and passed on. released as the b-side of a red foley and the sunshine boys 45, 'have a little talk' is the product of a then-unprecedented collaboration in nashville of a black woman and…
Reviving rosetta tharpe: Performance and Memory in the 21st Century
This article examines the pleasures and dangers of the ‘reviving’—that is, restoring to memory, of a ‘forgotten’ female gospel-guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. It argues that the erasure of black women from cultural memory is not merely the effect of the passage of time, but of small but significant acts of forgetting that themselves constitute cultural practices. As examples of attempts to forestall forgetting and ‘revive’ the dead, the essay l…
Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist “Un-Forgetting”
Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist “Un-Forgetting” Gayle Wald (bio) I did not set out to write a biography. When I first encountered the remarkable Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the musical trailblazer who became gospel’s first national superstar in the late 1930s, I was riveted. It was the late 1990s, I was at a conference on rock music at Duke University, and George Lipsitz had shown a videotape with a tantalizing clip of the performer doing “Down By the Riv…
Clueless in the neo-colonial world order
Passing Strange and post-civil rights blackness
The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his identity.2 In her groundbreaking 2000 article 'Black like this: race, generation, and rock in the post-civil rights era', anthropologist Maureen Mahon describes the 'contemporary condition of double-consciousness' that shapes the experiences of African-Americans growing up in the decades after the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. 3 Focusing on members of the Bl…
Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space
This essay examines two live performance events-the opera singer Marian Anderson's historic 1939 concert on the National Mall, and "Soul at the Center," a little-remembered but significant 1972 festival at New York's Lincoln Center-to examine how sound works as a cultural practice of resignifying the meaning and feeling of racially exclusive spaces. Drawing on the sonic philosophies of musicians Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (in their concern wi…
“Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That”: Listening with, to, and through José Muñoz: The following is a transcript of a roundtable that took place on February 21, 2105 at the IASPM-US conference in Louis…
James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature
Book Review| December 01 2015 James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes. By Morrissette, Noelle. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2013. xiii, 243 pp. Paper, $45.00.Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem. By Marcoux, Jean-Philippe. Lanham, MD: Lexin…
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul
Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads trace…
Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow
A queer black woman invented rock-and-roll”: Rosetta Tharpe, memes, and memory practices in the digital age
In recent years, musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73) has gone from being a “forgotten” rock trailblazer to being a viral video sensation and the subject of the Internet meme “A queer black woman invented rock and roll.” This article traces the “meme-ing” of Tharpe, paying attention to how the meme constructs, circulates, and mobilizes knowledge about her in online and offline spaces. After briefly reviewing the challenges of writing about Th…
Keywords Symposium
2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Alt…
When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Journal Article When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras Get access When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras. By Claudrena N Harold. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. x, 251 pp. Paper, $22.95.) Gayle Wald Gayle Wald George Washington University, Washington, DC Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 108, Issue 4, March 2022, Pag…
Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America
The aesthetics of feminist thinking: Methods, forms, desire
This introduction to a special issue on the Aesthetics of Feminist Thinking considers the aesthetic dimensions of feminist theory - its style, its forms, and its formal possibilities across writing, visual culture, performance, and other mediums. It traces how feminist thinking has endured, disappeared, and reappeared, how it takes on new forms across generations and geographies, and how it might redistribute itself in surprising aesthetic maneuv…
Art (17 works) · History (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Art history (12 works) · Race, History, and American Society (11 works) · Music History and Culture (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · History (7 works) · Computer Science (5 works)