Follow

• 

  Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

  Charles B. Hersch

  Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born.

  This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture.

• 

  Village Elections in China: Democratizing the Countryside

  Qingshan Forrest Tan

  This study considers the institutional evolution and progress of village elections in China. China’s dramatic economic growth in less than 30 years is the result of economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, and thus has lifted more than 200 million people out of poverty. This change began with the “household responsibility system” permitting peasants to farm their own land, which eventually led to the abolishment of the commune system. In an effort to establish viable rural governance after de-communization, villagers took the initiative in establishing village self-government and electing their own leaders to manage village affairs. This book studies the creation and evolution of democratic institution of village election. It examines the causes of village election, the making of state and provincial election legislation, state implementation and improvement of village election rules and procedures, and the role of domestic and foreign players in influencing electoral institutionalization of village self-governance, and it assesses the impact of village election on Chinese political development. It argues for the institutional buildup of democratic infrastructures to ensure what could eventually be the beginning of a more extensive move towards democracy.

• 

  DemocraticArtworks : Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan

  Charles B. Hersch

  Focusing on the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s, this book argues that the arts can strengthen democracy by politically educating citizens. Focusing on a period in which the meaning of democracy came to the forefront of public debate, the fifties and sixties, the author argues that the arts can strengthen democracy by politically educating citizens. Hersch addresses this issue by first looking at the ideas of Lionel Trilling and the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s, as expressed through literature and social commentary, and then by showing how jazz and rock musicians in the 1960s, through their individual songs and performances, expressed the ideas and ideals of the political movements of that decade. Democratic Artworks is the first to consider the New York Intellectuals, sixties jazz, or Bob Dylan from the perspective of political theory and to focus on their contributions to democracy.