Penny M. Von Eschen
Auteur van Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
Over de Auteur
Penny M. Von Eschen is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Werken van Penny M. Von Eschen
Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (American Encounters/Global Interactions) (2022) 3 exemplaren
Satchmo Blows up the World 1 exemplaar
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- Northwestern University (B.A.|Philosophy|1982)
Columbia University (M.A.|History|1986)
Columbia University (Ph.D.|History|1994) - Beroepen
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Discussing issues in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Von Eschen writes, “The tours were intimately linked to U.S. responses to such crises, and exposed a freewheeling, bold willingness on the part of policymakers to wield covert and overt military and diplomatic muscle to serve their immediate strategic and economic interests” (pg. 27). Of the artists, Von Eschen writes, “For those who had long been denied artistic recognition and fundamental rights as citizens, the tours represented a critical victory in civil rights” (pg. 29). Louis Armstrong’s tour served to force attention to certain issues in the U.S. According to Von Eschen, “If issues of civil rights had been relatively contained in the early jazz tours, Armstrong’s Ghana trip and his subsequent denunciation of Eisenhower during the 1957 Little Rock crisis dramatically illuminated the connections between the domestic and foreign policies underlying the tours” (pg. 65).
Examining tours in the Soviet Union, Von Eschen writes, “The Soviets’ aversion to jazz rested, in part, on a racist recoiling at black American cultural expression even as they were relying on claims to racial equality within the Soviet Union and exposure of American racism as perhaps their most effective Cold war[sic] weapons” (pg. 96). This played out in nearly every tour. Von Eschen writes, “Amid an ongoing battle over the politics of representation of black people, [Duke] Ellington, like other black musicians and their allies, perceived the State Department jazz tours as a platform from which to promote the dignity of black people and their culture throughout the world in the era of Jim Crow” (pg. 125-126). Von Eschen sheds light on the contradictions in U.S. policy, writing, “Officials’ acknowledgement of the Afro-diasporic appeal of jazz clashed with the notion that it was a uniquely American form with a modernist aesthetic” (pg. 177). Furthermore, “The State Department’s embrace of a once marginalized music to reform and revitalize the image of America shows a misplaced reliance on African American culture to project vitality and optimism on the part of a country that was deep in crisis” (pg. 184).
Looking to the last years of the program, Von Eschen writes, “For many in the State Department, the pinnacle of cultural exchange was reached with the jazz tours of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Unlike the earlier tours, they showed a striking convergence of interest between the State Department, the musicians, and the audiences” (pg. 191). In this way, “The cultural-presentations programs not only strove to maintain the support of strategic allies in Latin America and the oil-rich Middle East, win over potential dissidents in the Eastern bloc, and court new African nations. They also targeted elites in Southeast Asia” (pg. 218). Von Eschen writes, “The State Department missed no opportunity to promote jazz in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But by the mid 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam pullout, the Watergate crisis, and the energy crisis, some officials were calling for a more modest foreign policy” (pg. 241). This led to the U.S. Information Service taking over the cultural-promotion programs.
Von Eschen concludes that jazz and the State Department “is the story of an America deeply implicated in the machinations and violence of global modernization: the slave trade that forced millions of Africans to the Americas; the U.S. involvement in coups, in countries ranging from Iran and Iraq to the Congo and Ghana; and the arming of such military states as Pakistan” (pg. 254). Finally, “If there is anything that can be learned from the tours, it is that audiences never confused or conflated their love of jazz and American popular culture with an acceptance of American foreign policy” (pg. 257).… (meer)