Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Weston, Ryan

Titel

It's not like going to church and singing a hymn: Performance, identity, and Canadian gospel music

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Gospel music is often popularly understood as the music of modern African American Protestant Christianity, sung in churches every Sunday and making occasional forays into the wider popular culture as either source material or background adornment. Gospel choirs appear as backing vocalists for everyone from Madonna to Bruce Springsteen, while artists such as Aretha Franklin and Jennifer Hudson have deep roots in church singing and gospel performance. Yet the place of gospel music in contemporary culture is much more complex than these examples would indicate. This project locates gospel music, particularly outside the church, as an integral aspect of Canadian popular culture, creating ongoing opportunities for individual meaning-making which challenge the dominance of Christian theological interpretations in the reception of the genre. Through ethnographic research at Canadian folk festivals, along with archival and historical investigations, I suggest that gospel music illuminates key issues of representation of racial and religious identity in contemporary Canada. In pursuit of this argument, this project takes a two-pronged approach. First, the history of gospel music in Canada is unearthed, beginning with the spirituals of enslaved Africans through to contemporary radio and television programming centred on gospel recordings and performances. This history is then situated within the context of the folk revival movement in Canada, with the venue of Canadian folk festivals serving as the key site of the interactions under study here. These discussions help to situate this musical style within a specifically Canadian context which has often been ignored in the current scholarship. Second, I develop a thorough analysis of audience interactions with gospel music within these festival contexts, examining ways in which audiences engage with issues of race, construct their own meaning from gospel songs, and perform religious and racial identities during gospel sessions. Employing reception theory and performance theory as my central theoretical frameworks I focus the analysis on the experiences of audiences and consumers rather than producers or performers, offering new insight into individual engagements with the intersection of religion and popular culture. Highlighting occasions of harmony and dissonance, this project offers unique perspectives on the process of consumption of gospel music and provides new insight to discussions of contemporary Canadian identity, particularly concerning issues of race, religion, and performance. Ultimately, I situate gospel music as a particularly salient area of analysis and engagement within religious studies, Canadian studies, and cultural studies due to the elements of performance and identity woven into the music itself.