Search results for ""Tracy Fessenden" "Religion Around Billie Holiday""

Book SynopsisExplores the multiple religious influences on Billie Holiday’s life and sound, combining elements of biography with the history of race and American music.Trade Review“A focused, enlightening examination of the gifted singer.”—Nick Ripatrazone The Millions“This beautiful, brilliantly charted exploration of religion around Billie Holiday is overflowing with insights into the woman, the music, the milieu, and religious aspects of personal and collective struggle. Informed, critically discerning, and in gorgeous prose, this is exemplary humanities scholarship, a rare and exciting achievement.”—John Corrigan,author of Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America“Fessenden’s work has significant value, particularly for the scholar invested in lived religion or the history of religion, jazz, and American popular culture.”—Adam Sweatman Reading Religion“It’s refreshing to read a nonfiction text so freewheeling, and to encounter a scholar who so delights in making observations for the sheer wit of them. Fessenden is interested in Holiday’s contemporaries and the coincidences of her career, and these aren’t artificially forced into an argument.”—Katherine Lucky Commonweal“From first to last, the prose is consistently compelling, the insights sharp and often surprising. One comes away from this book knowing more about lots of things and admiring the seamless interweaving. It will be impossible to hear Holiday’s music the same way.”—David W. Stowe Journal of the American Academy of Religion“With beautiful prose and nuanced analysis, Fessenden navigates the reader through the religious landscape that shaped Holiday’s life and career and tunes our ear to listen for how the soundscape and spirituality of those religious sources shaped her artistry. What emerges is a rich and compelling portrait at the intersection of Holiday’s personal history, American Catholicism, blues and jazz culture, and the currents of race and gender in American life.”—Judith Weisenfeld,author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration“Illuminating, graceful, insightful, and bold, Tracy Fessenden’s marvelous interpretation of Billie Holiday is no mere biography. Religion Around Billie Holiday is an extension of, and improvisation on, the big questions shaping Fessenden’s work. Holiday is not only, in Fessenden’s imagination, an exemplary narrative subject. She also challenged the naturalization of American racial, gendered, and religious norms. Through her, Fessenden brilliantly shows us the fault lines in identity that were there all along, like more strange fruit.”—Jason C. Bivins,author of Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion“A hungry, centrifugal curiosity animates Fessenden’s writing. At times, her sense of ‘religion around’ seems capacious enough to include nothing less than America itself. . . . The reward is richness of scope: every page brings a new tumble down another rabbit hole of twentieth-century American cultural history.”—Brett Grainger American Catholic Studies“Joining Matthew J. Cressler’s important study of Vatican II and Black Power in mid-century Chicago with Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2017) is Fessenden’s towering close reading of an African American vocalist whose Catholic-informed life, and others’ memory of it, reflect her discursive and performative treatment as the patron saint of jazz.”—Vaughn A. Booker Material Religion“Religion Around Billie Holiday is Fessenden's own performance of what listening around a life allows one to hear of religion and of America more broadly. She does it in a beautiful way.”—Hannah C. Garvey American ReligionTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Religion Around2. True Confessions3 The Story of Jazz4. Crossing Jordan5. Our LadyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisExamines how the popular musician and public figure Bono represents the power of evangelicalism and promotes a religion of neoliberal capitalism. Trade Review“A tough but needed critique of how U2 and Bono’s themes of human unity, racial reconciliation, and love are deployed in the service of larger market-driven projects.”—Paul Harvey,author of Christianity and Race in the American South: A History“From the parking lot of a Baptist church in the Florida Panhandle to Dublin, New York, Johannesburg, and the G-8 Summit at Gleneagles, Seales takes his readers on a tour of the evangelical grammar of humanitarian neoliberalism with Bono as his guide. Seales convincingly argues that when Bono speaks for Africa, he speaks for religious, cultural, and economic systems far more complex—and far less empowering—than his identity as a rock-and-roll saint may imply.”—Jill DeTemple,author of Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories: Religion and Community Development in Rural Ecuador“When I said that I never wanted to read one more word about the aid celebrity Bono again, I had not imagined the possibility of Religion Around Bono! This book is a concise, eloquent tour de force using Bono as a keyhole through which we can peer into the intimate workings of the religion of racialized, neoliberal, millennial capitalism. The intersectional critique of class, race, and gender draws on anthropology, ethnomusicology, politics, and religious studies to explain how religious sincerity and love obfuscate relations of exploitation.”—Lisa Ann Richey,editor of Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power“Chad Seales boldly claims that as Jesus is to Jewish law or Luther to Roman Catholicism, so Bono is to evangelical Protestantism: the prophet of a new religion, repurposed from the materials of the old. The gospel of Bono is the neoliberal promise that free markets bring salvation to the world’s poor. In his lyrics, his politics, and above all his consumer brand, Bono preaches the good news of millennial capitalism to evangelicalism’s rebellious kids: buy, believe, save, and be saved. A richly satisfying deep dive into the logics of consumer capitalism and evangelical self-fashioning, Religion Around Bono urges us to listen, question, and learn more.”—Tracy Fessenden,author of Religion Around Billie HolidayTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Evangelicalism Around2. Around Bono3. Neoliberalism Around4. Around Africa5. Love and DebtNotesBibliographyIndex

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