The Banjo

In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite the history of popular music in the United States. By situating that history in a transnational context, they have destabilized the unexamined, nationalist genealogies that dominate conventional narratives. At the same time, they have historicized the racial associations that attach to specific genres, and they have uncovered the agency that musicians and audiences were able to exercise within ideological and economic structures not of their own making.1 The two works under review—global histories of the banjo and the Hawaiian steel guitar—represent landmark contributions to this new scholarship. At the center of each of these histories lies an intriguing instance of cultural amnesia. The banjo was invented by slaves and clearly modeled on African precursors, and yet it is now associated with rural white communities, bluegrass music, and at times, racism. Similarly, the steel guitar was a Hawaiian innovation that exerted an enormous influence on country and blues music, but few fans of those genres acknowledge the debt. By tracing the transnational itineraries of these two instruments, Laurent Dubois and John Troutman have done much more than simply correct these oversights. These illuminating and insightful books challenge much of the received wisdom on American music history.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Black music · Blues · Context (archaeology) · Guitar · Ideology · Literature · Music history · Musical · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Race, History, and American Society

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