Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021), a book by Assistant Professor of History Celeste Day Moore, was recently shortlisted for the 2022 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award.
The music book award is sponsored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and The Pop Conference.
The award honors the best books on popular music in the past year and is underwritten through the Wenner Journalism Fund. Chosen from nearly 70 works, this year’s shortlist is comprised of 15 books. Moore’s book traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest.
“By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism,” the publisher’s website says, “[she] demonstrates this music’s centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.”
