Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army." by Johari Jabir (review)

For enslaved Africans, calling to one's gods for strength and an alternative way of being was to "conjure" (p. 2). In Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War's "Gospel Army," Johari Jabir explains how performances of sacred music beckoned a healing and transformative spiritual power that enabled members of the First South Carolina Volunteers to withstand dire circumstances and to envision freedom. Jabir's theory of conjuring compellingly encapsulates the creative expression of an African epistemology derived from shared experiences of forced displacement and chattel slavery. Jabir describes singing as a form of political activism through which the regiment transcended the limits of race in America by opening temporalities where new identities could be momentarily experienced, "a way of hearing freedom before seeing it" (p. 98).

Nightly performances of songs and ring shouts by the First South Carolina reveal less about the aesthetic dimensions of sound than the fusing of religion, music, and war by African American men. Jabir presents black Civil War soldiering as an improvisatory art form and a method of authorship that members of the First South Carolina Volunteers called "gospel" and what the author terms "Black Communal Conservatories" (p. 154). Jabir's theme of militarized male honor deconstructs prejudiced narratives about black Civil War soldiers and ties together fragmented army life scenes. Military service positioned these men to participate in established rites of passage that nineteenth-century Americans understood as "honor" (p. 108). Readers are invited to interpret honor as a form of freedom or at least as an established route used to claim agency and humanity through public service. Music and religion in this regiment facilitated a militarized black masculinity through which these men announced themselves, controlled their environment, talked back to captors, and stood in for other black Americans. Creative enactments of soldiering that fall under Jabir's term "spiritual militancy" expose a variety of sacred and secular elements that African Americans blended together in order to understand their world (p. 55).

This book makes an important contribution to the field of Civil War history in its resistance to narratives that overgeneralize African Americans as culturally and religiously uniform. Their performances showcased unique ways of knowing that forged collectivity among African people in America, yet the complexity of black American identities simultaneously resisted that unity. The non-Protestant and non-Christian musical and spiritual practices acknowledged throughout the book complicate and humanize individual members of the First South Carolina Volunteers and serve as an excellent reminder about American cultural diversity.

Jabir turns to popular culture products in the second half of the book. He analyzes scripting and scoring tropes in the Hollywood blockbuster film Glory (1989), revealing an investment in conditioning viewers to understand the Civil War in terms of black victimhood and white altruism. The author relates this framing, what he terms the "sonic politics" of Hollywood history, to the First South Carolina Volunteers and the problematic archival records he engaged during his research (p. 136). This chapter typifies how Jabir confronts narrative strategies that centralize black cultural assimilation and will prove to be a fantastic companion to Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008), Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997), and a host of other texts on Civil War memory and public history.