Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, "collective memory" emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase "collective memory" in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that memory is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to memory until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History," the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of memory who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for "modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory." For Nora, memory was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left." Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of memory as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as "Sites of Memory" or "Cultural Memory" or "The Politics of Memory. "2 The emergence of memory as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a computer-driven, interactive & “virtual improvising orchestra” that analyzes an improvisor's performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musician's playing and independent behavior arising from the program's own internal processes. The author contends that notions about the nature and function of music are embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and that interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them. Thus, Voyager is considered as a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices.

Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager

and general in order to be able to be performed on a wide variety of new inputs. The inputs may be an inventory of notes based upon key, style, et cetera. (Pressing’s cognitive model calls this the “referent.”) My taxonomy is a way of making those inputs clear. 184 Since improvisation (and composition) is fundamentally cognitive and motor selection, then this presupposes a set of things from which to select. One can only select if there are options, choices. Now, it seems that whether a person (agent) is aware (conscious or cognizant of the options (all or even some)), one may always post facto reconstruct the set of choices which were available or present to the agent at the time of selection. By this I mean the set of choices that were available to the agent from an objective point of view. This set has little to do with the actual, individual conscious states of the agent; however, it does involve many specific conditions of the agent and the agent’s environment. For example, a musician S may say that “it never occurred to me to play that B-flat after the A,” even though objectively that choice was available to S. Sometimes, however, we describe others, and even ourselves, as just doing something—no other options presented themselves to consciousness. So, “selection” may seem like an inappropriate term or concept for what is going on in improvisation. It may, however, seem more accurate in composition. When humans perform actions in quick succession, consciously it does not seem like a choice or decision is being made for each separate action. In fact, in some cases it may be difficult to individuate the rapid succession of actions into discrete units. It seems to be a unitary flow of movements. These are half-intentional actions. Beside the (SCI) case, examples of this kind of phenomenon are playing sports, talking, and just mundane actions like walking to the market. From a phenomenological perspective, in some moments the choice or decision aspect can be discerned, while other moments “feel” automatic. Consequently, it is in these seemingly automatic moments that selection may be an erroneous description. But there are several pieces of evidence that suggest that in both cases similar or the same processes are realized. First, it would be impossible to account for talent and skill if some sense of choice or selection or decision was not involved. Indeed, psychologists and others 185 indicate that some people are better than others (usually in some specific domain of behavior) in their speed of thinking, choosing, and moving in situations that require rapidity. In other words, if we cannot attribute responsibility to selection or choice, even in an attenuated sense, training and effort would be diminished or demolished. Why would one train if one could not control the automatic thinking or moving? What would be our understanding of talent and expertise? Second, there is reductio ad absurdam argument that can be given here, analogous to the one Thomas Nagel presents in the classic “Moral Luck” article. One could argue that artistic agents are never responsible for anything they do; they have no agency because all novel thoughts impinge. Humans do not cause their thoughts and selection. My only response is that creativity is still a mystery, and we are not yet epistemically entitled to run this argument to the point of absurdity. Furthermore, cognitive science has informed us that even in these moments sub-conscious motor and kinetic programs or mechanisms are running. Some of these were delineated for improvisation above. This is one reason why a phenomenology needs to be appended to cognitive models and the like. One should also be interested in what is present to the consciousness of the agent, and what is consciously occurring while playing (if anything), not only the underlying processes posited by a cognitive theory, nor what could be going on as argued for in a philosophical theory. David Sudnow is perhaps the best example of a phenomenological approach to improvising. By introspecting on his improvised piano playing and his learning how to play 62 For example, see Sian Beilock, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have To (New York: Free Press, 2010). 63 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck” in Mortal Questions, Canto Classics Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38. 64 David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account, foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 186 paino and improvise, Sudnow gives excellent descriptions of the process and actions. One of the most important insights he gives is that selection in jazz piano improvisation is in large part about fingering and the way one’s hands and fingers move across the keys. I can attest that the same is true for stringed instruments, like guitar. Often, when I improvise, my attention is on finger patterns that I know work (with embellishments) over certain “changes.” How strongly the phenomenology of playing an instrument comes to play in thinking about creativity and improvisation in particular comes to the fore in this extraordinary account of a conversation with the famous, brilliant pianist Bill Evans. ... I [Gene Lees] kidded him [Bill Evans] about his rocking a finger on a key on a long note at the end of a phrase. After all, the hammer has already left the string: one has no further physical contact with the sound. ‘Don’t you know the piano has no vibrato?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Bill responded, ‘but trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase.’ Evans reveals that there are motor selections that do not enter into the perceivable product (in this case sounds) but yet affect properties of that product. Not all selections will be perceivable in the final product (e.g., performance, recording). One should also be aware that selection may be coerced in both a literal and metaphorical sense. External factors such as authorities may constrain what artists do, thereby eliminating or reducing choices. I may only have the resources to learn one instrument. If I only know how to play saxophone, I am not going to pick up a trumpet. At any given time t, the agent (improviser, player, performer) has twelve pitches available in the range physically determined by the instrument. This range is vague because 65 Gene Lees, “The Poet Bill Evans,” in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert, Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 424. 187 given certain techniques, which some musicians are able to do and others not, and physical enhancements to instruments, the range can be extended, both to the top and bottom of the frequency or pitch range. But it would wrong to suppose that this complete selection options set is fully available every time, in every context to an improviser. What decreases the possibilities of the selection options group are the constraints that are given and/or accepted by the player, the genre, context, et cetera. Now, the agent may at any point deviate from these constraints (intentionally or otherwise), but she may not deviate from the complete selection options group, unless she changes instrument or technique. The idealized selection options group is coextensive with the set of all physically realizable pitches and all possible durations. This set may be expressed in many ways. For instance, one could simply give the Hertz (Hz) cycles (frequency) of the pitch indexed to a timed duration, such as eight seconds or two seconds. Obviously, this is an infinite set, because the duration of a produced pitch could be infinitely long, and the sound waves, although severely limited by human audibility capacity (even non-human animal audibility) could be infinitely low or high, although there are frequencies which we cease to call sounds. Practically, in Western music theory, the accepted range of pitches is the human audition range (called audio or sonic), 66 I am assuming the agent is using the Western Equal Temperament (ET) tempered system. On the drawbacks of the exclusive use of the ET system that was more or less codified in the eighteenth century, see Ross W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Scholars have identified at least 150 different temperament tuning systems in Western art music. Of course, ET does not apply to many non-Western music systems. The locus classicus is J. Murray Barbour, Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey, Dover Books on Music Series (n.d., n.p., 1951; reprint ed., New York: Dover, 2004). 188 which is approximately from 20 50 Hz (the lowest pipe organ sounds) to 20,000 30,000 Hz; while the accepted range of durations caps out at 128 notes. Selection is the process of choosing an output. The output may be physically realized or produced sound, or a notation for a realizable sound, or both. A single selection is actually an array of various factors as explicated in Pressing’s cognitive model. In using the term “choosing,” or “choice,” again I make no commitment to a theory of free will. This theory and taxonomy may remain neutral. If free will is false, then the selection process will be a product of some set of causal laws. Those causal laws will still have to operate within the taxonomy. Moreover, ideally a selection may be viewed as a choice of each discrete unit with relevant arrays, even though phenomenologically one may not be aware of all of the arrays. A musical phrase or lick may be played wherein the agent chose to play the lick as a whole. The entire phrase, then, which may consist of several pitches of different durations, dynamics, rhythms, and attacks, is the unit of selection—not each discrete pitch et cetera. Following are the selection options sets for musical sound generation (

The metaphysics of improvisation

In this article, I ask how a site of history gets made into a successful tourist destination of a remembered past. I focus on a U.S. corporate-sponsored homeland tour to Senegal and the Gambia (the region of Roots) aimed toward commemorating sites especially momentous for African American tourists. Through the lens of global "scapes," I analyze the multiple aspects necessary to create and sustain this place of meaning. Of interest are the ways in which culture can be produced as a commodified object and, in the process, made available for ritual framing and reappropriation. [commodity culture, tourism, pilgrimage, identity formation ritual]

Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning-the frame and the substance-of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"-from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences-and as a result, this book-represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.

History and Memory in African-American Culture

What Is Jazz? Introduction Jazz-the Word, by Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner Forward Motion: An Interview with Benny Golson, by Benny Golson and Jim Merod James A. Snead Black Music as an Art Form, by Olly Wilson Remembering Thelonious Monk: When the Music Was Happening Then He'd Get Up and Do His Little Dance, by Quincy Troupe and Ben Riley Improvisation and the Creative Process, by Albert Murray One Nation Under a Groove or, the United States of Jazzocracy Introduction What's American About America, by John Kouwenhoven Jazz and the White Critic, by Amiri Baraka Duke Ellington Music Like a Big Hot Pot of Good Gumbo, by Wynton Marsalis and Robert G. O'Meally Blues to Be Constitutional: A Long Look at the Wild Wherefores of Our Democratic Lives as Symbolized in the Making of Rhythm and Tune, by Stanley Crouch The Ellington Programme, by Barry Ulanov Jazz Lines and Colors: The Sound I Saw Introduction Art History and Black Memory: Toward a Blues Aesthetic, by Richard J. Powell Skyscrapers, Airplanes, and Airmindedness: The Necessary Angel, by Ann Douglas Calvin Tomkins Celebration, by Sherry Turner DeCarava Black Visual Intonation, by Arthur Jafa Improvisation in Jazz, by Bill Evans Jazz is a Dance: Jazz art in Motion Introduction Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands, by Jacqui Malone Characteristics of Negro Expression, by Zora Neale Hurston African Art and Motion, by Robert Farris Thompson Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire, by Michael Eric Dyson Noise Taps a Historic Route to Joy, by Margo Jefferson Tell the Story: Jazz, History, Memory Introduction Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in High Places, by Gerald Early Jazz and American Culture, by Lawrence W. Levine The Golden Age, Time Past, by Ralph Ellison Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style, by Eric Lott It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues, by Hazel V. Carby Other: From Noun to Verb, by Nathaniel Mackey Writing the Blues, Writing Jazz Introduction The Blues as Folk Poetry, by Sterling A. Brown Richard Wright's Blues, by Ralph Ellison Preface to Three Plays, by August Wilson The Function of the Heroic Image, by Albert Murray The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson's Prefaces, by Brent Edwards Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol, by Nathaniel Mackey

The jazz cadence of American culture

Introductory Notes, by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz, by George Lipsitz "All the Things You Could Be by Now": Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz, by Salim Washington Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985, by George Lewis When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women's Vocality, by Farah Jasmine Griffin Hipsters, Bluebloods, Rebels, and Hooligans: The Cultural Politics of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1954-1960, by John Gennari Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album, by Mark Tucker The Man, by John Szwed The Real Ambassadors, by Penny M. Von Eschen Artistic Othering in Black Diaspora Musics: Preliminary Thoughts on Time, Culture, and Politics, by Kevin Gaines Notes on Jazz in Senegal, by Timothy R. Mangin Revisiting Romare Bearden's Art of Improvisation, by Diedra Harris-Kelley Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing, by Jorge Daniel Veneciano Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop, by Robert G. O'Meally Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music, by Krin Gabbard "How You Sound??": Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz, by William J. Harris The Literary Ellington, by Brent Hayes Edwards "Always New and Centuries Old": Jazz, Poetry and Tradition as Creative Adaptation, by Travis Jackson A Space We're All Immigrants From: Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook, by Herman Beavers Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation, by Vijay Iyer Beneath the Underground: Exploring New Currents in "Jazz", by Robin D. G. Kelley , by v

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

Preface 1. Introduction Robert O'Meally 2. The meaning of narration in Invisible Man Valerie Smith 3. Frequencies of eloquence: the performance and composition of Invisible Man John F. Callahan 4. Ralph Waldo Ellison: anthropology, modernism and jazz Berndt Ostendorf 5. Ellison's masks and the novel of reality Thomas Schaub 6. The conscious hero and the rites of man: Ellison's war John S. Wright Notes Bibliography.

Robert G. O'Meally

Papers

History and Memory in African-American Culture

The jazz cadence of American culture

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

New essays on Invisible man

The craft of Ralph Ellison