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In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism. In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.

Culture --- African Americans --- Spirituals (Songs) --- Cultural sociology --- Sociology of culture --- Civilization --- Popular culture --- Afro-Americans --- Black Americans --- Colored people (United States) --- Negroes --- Africans --- Ethnology --- Blacks --- African American spirituals --- Afro-American spirituals --- Negro spirituals --- Folk songs, English --- Hymns, English --- Research --- History. --- Music --- Social aspects. --- Social aspects --- Black people

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Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late 19th-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In this work on postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons.

African Americans --- Jubilee singers. --- Minstrel shows --- Spirituals (Songs) --- Musicians --- Afro-Americans --- Black Americans --- Colored people (United States) --- Negroes --- Africans --- Ethnology --- Blacks --- African American spirituals --- Afro-American spirituals --- Negro spirituals --- Folk songs, English --- Hymns, English --- African American minstrel shows --- Blackfaced minstrel shows --- Negro minstrel shows --- African Americans in the performing arts --- Revues --- Vaudeville --- Blackface entertainers --- Music --- History anc criticism. --- History --- History and criticism. --- Blackface --- Racism against Black people --- Anti-Black racism --- Antiblack racism --- Racism against Blacks --- Black people --- Impersonation --- American minstrelsy --- Minstrelsy --- Minstrelsy, American --- Blackface. --- Racism against Black people.