Imperial Jazz: The Black Sound at the Dawn of Radio and Recording

How does structural racism determine the development of popular genres? How does the mainstream appropriate black subcultures? The literary scholar Timothy Brennan examines Pop’s segregation.

Timothy Brennan is a professor at the departments of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and English at the University of Minnesota. His work deals with issues of intellectual history, cultural theory, the avant-gardes, theories of colonialism and imperialism, problems of translation, and popular music. He is the author of Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (2008), and edited the first English edition of Alejo Carpentier’s classic study, Music in Cuba (2001). Other publications include Empire in Different Colors (2007) and “World Music Does Not Exist” (2001). Among others, Brennan is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the German Research Association. He has taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the Humboldt University in Berlin.