Friday, November 9th, 2012 Spirituals, Jazz, and Hip-hop: Musical Mediations of Blackness in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine

Description

The talk will be followed by a discussion in the Buzek Lounge (102N) from 4-5pm.

“Africa” has figured strongly in the Russian imagination, going back to the gift of Hannibal to Tsar Peter the Great, the alternate erasure and lauding of Pushkin’s blackness, the portrayals of Africa in Soviet cartoons, and the role that Africa plays vis-à-vis post-Soviet notions of class and race today. Musically, racial imaginings have been more closely tied with African Americans, a mediated sense of blackness imposed on all with dark skin. Musicians such as Paul Robeson were instrumental in shaping Soviet ideas about pan-African identity, reinforced through circulations of jazz during the Cold War. In post-Soviet spaces, hip-hop has taken on this role of reinforcing ideas about race. This paper explores the changing notions of “blackness” as it was mediated in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet society through performances of spirituals, jazz, and hip-hop. It analyzes how these musical genres intersected with discourses on slavery/serfdom in pre-revolutionary Russia, the notion of equality in the Soviet era, and racialized concepts of class identity in the post-socialist era. Drawing on figures such as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and 50 Cent among others, this presentation analyzes the complex ways that music figured into racial discourse in Russian-speaking lands. Taking into account the triangular relationship of the U.S., the USSR and Africa, it seeks to uncover the ways in which ideas about race and racism are circulated, reinforced, broken down, and recast through African American-based music genres that have had a far-reaching socio-political impact across the globe. The presentation builds on Paul Gilory’s concept of the “black Atlantic” to include a discussion of Russian lands that was omitted from black music history analysis until recently, with the growing presence of African migrants in former Soviet spaces. The presentation makes the argument that the complex ways that race has worked its way into politics and social networking in the former Soviet Union, a society that once claimed “racism did not exist” has much to do with how musical networkings both reinforce and alleviate growing xenophobia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Adriana Helbig is an assistant professor of music and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Global Studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies in the University of Pittsburgh. A member of the graduate faculty, she teaches courses on global hip-hop; world music; music, gender, and sexuality; music and technology; and cultural policy. She is also founder and director of the Carpathian Music Ensemble, a student performance group that specializes in the music of Eastern Europe, including klezmer and Romani/Gypsy music. She is the recipient of numerous grants and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, IREX, and Fulbright. She has held a research fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and was an inaugural research fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her articles on Romani (Gypsy) music, post-socialist cultural policy, music and piracy, music, race, and migration, and global hip-hop have appeared in edited collections and journals such as The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Current Musicology, and Popular Music. She is the co-author, with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo, of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine (Greenwood Press, 2009). Her book Hip-Hop Revolution: Music, Race, and Migration in Ukraine will be published by Indiana University Press.