The Experience and Impact of Black Entertainers in England, 1895-1920
1986; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3052184
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoIn a 1976 collection of essays entitled America, Daniel Walker Howe and several other American historians demonstrated the many facets of a more or less unified Anglo-American worldview in the nineteenth century.' Howe's excellent introductory essay, Victorian Culture in America,' discussed the especially close cultural connections between the countries stemming from their economies and ideologies. The United States and England possessed, he shows, a huge web of mutual beliefs in orderliness, personal self-control, and competitiveness and shared assumptions about education, race, modernization, and the proper role of women. Howe explained the perpetuation of this Victorian cultural community by citing the impact of a blossoming transatlantic communications system and the rapid spread of literacy in both England and America. Closer to the subject of music, he noted that British-American Victorianism came under increasing German influence... especially in education and 'high culture.'2 It is self-evident that America is indebted to European and especially British cultural forces and forms, but by recognizing an Anglo-American cultural unity at the outset of this discussion, I can more easily pinpoint the contribution of American blacks to stage entertainment as a whole. If we assume that forces favoring the cultivation of oratorios, operas, and symphonies came from East to West, from the Old World to the New, we should not make the identical assumption about banjo tunes and minstrel songs. English recognition of the black entertainer as a new and special force on the world stage suggests that cultural novelties do not drift in only one direction.
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