White law and Christianity ironically bred the very desires they suppressed
Evidence
[T]his music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden and despised by othersā¦ . Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birthā¦ . [T]he injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifleā¦ . [B]lue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethicā¦ . Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection ā¦ the recreations of the innocently criminal. ā¦ The forces of science and technology and the processes of the proletarianization of Black workers were orchestrating the supercession of Black Christian resignation by this second, derisively angry, consciousness. ā Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Blackā¦, 1403
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the thesis that repression breeds its own transgressive counter-cultureāsimilar mechanism discussed in the culture-industry and domination analytic common to Adorno and Marcuse.
- SHARE: For someone into jazz history or sociology of music: Wright reading blue-jazz as ārebel art blooming seditiously under a Protestant ethicā is a striking inversion of Weberās spirit-of-capitalism thesis.