Black Ephemera

Mark Anthony Neal examines how the digital age has changed the way Black performance is preserved, located and studied. A clip of Bert Williams in the 1916 silent short "A Natural Born Gambler" or a Josephine Baker routine from the 1920s can now be found with a few keystrokes, and that ease has reshaped both classroom teaching and scholarly research. Neal welcomes this wider access, but he asks what happens to the Black musical archive as Black American culture spreads worldwide as an export.

Using music and sound as his primary sources, Neal contends that the cultural core of Black America becomes harder to see as materials move from analog formats into digital ones. By reading the digital present alongside the culture produced before digitization, he argues that Black music has been treated as disposable material at best, and at worst as ambient noise behind the continuing exploitation and commodification of Black culture.

Neal frames the difficulties of Black archives as questions of how knowledge travels and takes shape within Black life, which is often hidden, transient, elusive, unstable and increasingly digital. The book reminds readers that technological progress still requires a return to the archive. Neal ultimately proposes a new conceptual model for understanding Black culture in the digital world.