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About

This work is concurrent with a Master Thesis projet at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, under supervision of Dr Laurence Cossu-Beaumont.

This research supposes a solid matter, written and oral, including musical and biographic elements. The textual analysis of songwriting will held an peculiar place, between the following concerns.

We aim to question the variety of lexiques, in music so as in literature, underligning how african-american culture borrows to other diasporic slangs (deriving from spanish, french, german, yiddish): how do these transformations operate and to what extent are they mutual?

Another concern are the transformations and textual circulations: we are questioning the nature of transformations that allows a comodification of african-american music. The comodification has a major importance when it comes to lightening the movements between holy and unholy songs (see Joel Rudinow, Soul music: tracking the spiritual roots of pop from plato to motown, University of Michigan Press,2010).

The status of the african-american troubadour

It’s less activism than cultural transformations that will guide this research,focusing on the status of the “troubadour”, defined as a creator carrying, recreating stories, tales, thus transforming myths and conscientized history, turning them into a whole new material.