The politics of culture and identity in American jazz criticism

This dissertation examines developments within the field of American jazz criticism from the 1930s through the 1980s. I analyze the discourse among the creators, critics, and consumers of jazz in the context of broader cultural and political issues, especially race and nationalism. In my focus on the pre-World War II era, I investigate the role that critics played in the white jazz audience's division between an elite connoisseurship heavily inflected with primitivist ideology, on the one hand, and a populist youth-oriented consumerism that helped erode racial barriers, on the other. I also analyze the way white and black critics and fans used the written swing discourse (both in the mass-circulation fan magazines Down Beat and Metronome and in the black newspapers) for different means and to different ends.;In the post-World War II period, I show how critics propagandized a notion of American cultural identity founded on jazz's universalist, integrationist impulses, an effort that converged with the dominant intellectual tendency toward consensus politics and history. I then show how this integrationist paradigm (which coincided with the emergence of a "jazz mainstream") suffered a withering attack by black cultural nationalism in the 1960s, only to reemerge in full force with the jazz renaissance of the 1980s.;I have drawn on a full range of jazz representation: magazines, books, newspapers, liner notes, concert programs, interviews with critics and editors, personal correspondence, college course syllabi, and publicity literature.