HIST-LIT 90HS: Music and Modernity in the Americas

Instructor: Jake Wilder-Smith
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm

This seminar explores how music not only reflected but also shaped history and culture in the Americas during the twentieth century. Turning to writers, artists, and intellectuals who treated music as a tool for understanding the upheavals of modernity—rapid urbanization, mass media and mass migration, as well as changing conceptions of racial, national, and class identities—we will examine how the music of the Americas entered the modern imagination. How did new musical forms influence experiments in literature, film, sociology, and anthropology? And how did writers and intellectuals come to see music as a template for social action and political change? Course materials encompass works of literature, films, musical recordings, essays, photographs, and much more, and include works by figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Machado de Assis, Langston Hughes, Mário de Andrade, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico García Lorca, William Faulkner, and Clarice Lispector. Across the semester, we will listen to music from a wide array of genres, including American jazz and blues, Brazilian samba, and Argentine tango.