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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2018
Focusing on the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an African American singing ensemble that toured South Africa in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals how the transnational reach of commercialized black music informed debates about race, modernity, and black nationalism in South Africa. The South African performances of the Jubilee Singers enlivened debates concerning race, labor and the place of black South Africans in a rapidly industrializing South Africa. A visit from the first generation of global black American superstars fueled both white and black concerns about the racial political economy. The sonic actions of the Jubilee Singers were therefore a springboard for black South African claims for recognition as modern, educated and educable subjects, capable of, and entitled to, the full apparatus, and insignia, of liberal self-determination. Although black South Africans welcomed the Jubilee Singers enthusiastically, the article cautions against reading their positive reception as evidence that black Africans had no agenda of their own and looked to African Americans as their leaders in a joint struggle.
1 For historical context on uplift ideology see Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For context on nineteenth-century black music see Radano, Ronald, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Brooks, Daphne, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Schenbeck, Lawrence, Racial Uplift and American Music 1878–1943 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Ward, Andrew, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)Google Scholar.
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9 Graber, Katie J., “‘A Strange, Weird Effect’: the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the United States and England,” American Music Research Center Journal, 14 (2004), 27–52Google Scholar, gives an astute reception study, as does Cohen.
10 See Fisk University: History, Building and Site, and Services of Dedication, at Nashville, January 1, 1876 (New York: Published for the Trustees of the University, 1876)Google Scholar; and Richardson, Joe M., A History of Fisk University, 1865–1946 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980)Google Scholar.
11 Armstrong and Ludlow, 23.
12 Keegan, Timothy, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (London: Leicester University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
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14 For valuable discussion and invaluable translation of Imvo’s Xhosa coverage of the Singers, I am indebted to Khwezi Mkhize, “Empire Unbound: Imperial Liberalism, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africak,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2015, chapter 1, “‘To see us as we see ourselves’: John Tengo Jabavu, Empire, Colonial Belonging and the Public Sphere,” 27–66.
15 Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, 6 Sept. 1873, 7. All subsequent quotations are from this page.
16 Pike, The Jubilee Singers; Pike, The Singing Campaign; Marsh.
17 Pike, The Jubilee Singers, 49.
18 Ibid., 32.
19 Ibid., 26.
20 Ibid., 28–29.
21 Ibid., 27.
22 Ibid., 27–28.
23 Ibid., 90.
24 Ibid., 88–89.
25 Trotter, James Monroe, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Boston, MA: Lee and Shepard, 1878)Google Scholar. On Trotter see Stevenson, Robert, “America's First Black Music Historian,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 26, 3 (Autumn 1973), 383–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schenbeck, Racial Uplift, chapter 1.
26 Trotter, 255.
27 Mrs. Mossell, N. F., “The Colored Woman in Verse,” AME Church Review, 2 (1885), 63Google Scholar, italics added.
28 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989; first published 1903), 204–5Google Scholar.
29 Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers, 32.
30 Trotter, 258, italics added.
31 Marsh, 78.
32 Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students, 23.
33 Ibid., 57.
34 Ibid., 128, original emphasis.
35 Ibid., 131.
36 Ibid., 130–31.
37 Christian Express, 1 Aug. 1885, original emphasis, quoted in de Kock, Civilising Barbarians, 127.
38 See de Kock for details.
39 A useful documentary South African history of this period is Johns, Sheridan III, ed., Protest and Hope 1882–1934 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1972)Google Scholar.
40 Frederickson, George M., Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–43Google Scholar.
41 As quoted and translated in Mkhize, “Empire Unbound,” 64.
42 Ibid., 64–65.
43 Ibid., 66.
44 Ibid., 43.
45 Ibid., 66.
46 Leselinyana, 1 Oct. 1890, quoted in Erlmann, “A Feeling of Prejudice,” 344.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Mkhize, 67.
50 See Erlmann, Music, Modernity, for details.
51 Imvo, 67, italics added.
52 Quoted in Olwage, Grant, “Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism,” in Randall, Annie J., ed., Music, Power, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005), 25–46Google Scholar, 25.
53 Quoted in Shipley, Lori, “Music Education at Hampton Institute, 1868–1913,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, 32, 2 (April 2011), 96–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 117.
54 Ibid., 102.
55 Grahamstown Journal, 19 Sept. 1890, 3.
56 Grahamstown Journal, 27 Sept. 1890, 3.
57 All quotations of this Imvo issue, 16 Oct. 1890, come from its third page.
58 Thelwell, “Toward a ‘Modernizing’ Hybridity,” 25.
59 See de Kock, Civilising Barbarians; and Mkhize, “Empire Unbound,” for other examples of Jabavu's citational politics.