A Harlem in Every City: The Sonic Geopolitics of Cab Calloway’s Quizzicale, 1941–1942
Creators: name: Ge, Tianyuan
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2022

description: This thesis articulates a historical cartography of Cab Calloway and his short-lived radio show, Quizzicale, through the intersection of North American music studies and Black Geographies. A musical quiz program that aired from July 6, 1941 to August 11, 1942, Quizzicale broadcasted from a different U.S. city every week: foregrounding the interplay between Calloway and contestants from working- and middle-class African American communities, it offered North American listeners a rare sliver of Black airtime on Jim Crow radio waves every Sunday night. By studying how three major themes—representation, economics, and epistemologies of race—circulated from Calloway and the show into everyday Black historical life, I argue that the many spaces and places of Quizzicale together reveal Cab Calloway’s sonic geopolitics: the sonic-spatial dimensions of Black life and livingness that he embodied, mediated, and intensified.      Four sonic-spatial keywords organize the chapters of this thesis. In “Distortion,” I reckon with Quizzicale’s archival afterlife by interrogating how the historical violences surrounding its inception and promotion persist as archival violences at UNC. Using speculative methods to write Black quotidian historicity, I further suggest that the show’s illegibility to white audiences renders the border to an alternative Black space, from which Quizzicale’s cast and listenership critically disrupted the airwaves. In “Amplification,” I deconstruct the gendered narratological function to which Calloway has been relegated in jazz’s dominant historical paradigm, using analysis of Quizzicale’s multivalent reception in African American newspapers to show how Calloway amplified the listening practices of Black radio listeners who, in the months straddling the United States’ entry into World War II, processed notions of citizenship, equality, and modernity through the language of war. Across “Density” and “Collision,” I listen closely to one of the show’s only surviving recordings: a March 4, 1942 broadcast from Detroit’s Paradise Theater. By transcribing key musical moments and exchanges preserved in the recording, and explicating the themes of imagination, mobility, and affective solidarity contained with them, I demonstrate, following Katherine McKittrick, that “Black matters are spatial matters.” Operating as bandleader, quizmaster, and spacemaker, Calloway was imbricated within the density of Black life in Detroit on that spring evening. His praxis superimposed the Afro-geographies of Harlem and Detroit upon one another, yielding not only compelling geopolitical solidarities between these two enclaves, but also a rhizomatic connection between the shared experiences of Black life in every American city. Thus, this thesis places Calloway within a genealogy of Black musical-spatial practices that extend from his world, and the ephemerally archived sphere of African American wartime radio, into our present moment. In doing so, I attempt to show how music studies, critically expanded through its encounter with the theoretical, analytical, and ethical concerns of Black Geographies, can operate in ways that honor Black life.