Laurent DuBois. The Banjo

For Laurent DuBois, the ring of the banjo is the sound of the making of the modern world. In his astonishing work The Banjo: America’s African Instrument, DuBois convincingly and compellingly demonstrates the instrument’s historical role as both symbol and product of diaspora and dislocation. Evolving from West African gourd instruments, the banjo on its journey to the Americas traced the growth of New World slave capitalism and symbolized the attempts by the Africans at the center of that commerce to maintain connections to a lost past while making a new future. The instrument and its musicians were “inventing Africa again and again as it sounded, creating a new place that felt like—but could never quite be—the old place” (136). Building on pioneering banjo scholarship by Cecelia Conway and Tony Thomas, and placed perfectly within work on the rise of global slave capitalism by scholars from Eric Williams to Sven Beckert, DuBois has added significantly to our understanding of music’s key role in understanding the transnational history of the modern world.

Art · Genealogy · Visual arts · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies