Music, Culture and Racializations. Debates around the Category of "Black Music" in the United States

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual approach to the so-called African American Music. I argue, first, the need for a historical conception of racial, synthesized in the concept of racialization, according to which the racial condition is understood as a set of adscription processes secondment produced by different sources and by different actors (political, cultural, economic, media), referenced to heterogeneous discourses, institutional frames, knowledge and powers. This historical radicalization of the race allows us to meet the "staging of the race", the social interactions that function as instances where the creation, communication and interpretation of socially significant racial differences and inequalities. Considering the insistence of racialization of United States music I will seek to build, in dialogue with other interpretations, a notion of black music for observing its changes and discontinuities. Finally, I will argue that black music refuses to be understood as a homogeneous unit and its research in historical discontinuity terms encourages new considerations about the variations of their cultural meanings and opens new perspectives on the making of blacknesses in the United States.