| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ronald Radano. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 417. $27.50.

For centuries, would-be masters of black music have struggled to specify its essential properties and fix its elusive meanings. Black music has been both hailed as a testament of African-American cultural continuity, soulfulness, and resistance and belittled as evidence of racial pathology and cultural inferiority. Black music has centered blackness as difference even as its production history and broad appeal expose the fallacious assumptions of race-based logic. In his provocative study, Ronald Radano challenges historical and contemporary tendencies to place race before music, or music outside of the reach of race. Black sound and black music are more aptly understood as products of a remarkably potent "racio-social discourse" that marks the "crossroads of modern racial understanding" (p. 232). From Euro-African encounters to the jazz age, Radano's work traces how modern race thinking and black music marked intertwined phenomena, investing black performance and a variety of genres with essential properties, myths of origin, and social power in ways that buttressed as well as eroded racial hierarchy in American society.

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