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CLA JOURNAL 261 Book Reviews Jabir, Johari. Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 198 pp. ISBN: 9780814213308 . $71.95 Hardcover. Johari Jabir’s Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” descriptively examines the music making of the First South Carolina Volunteers (1st South), the nation’s first federally authorized black Union Army regiment during the Civil War. Published in 2017, the book is not a history of the regiment nor is it a musical history of the regiment. Rather, it is a detailed description of how soldiers in black regiments during the Civil War collectively conjured a “cosmic vision of freedom” and U.S. citizenship through soldiering and singing. Using music as their preferred mode of conjuring, the soldiers – “sometimes using song lyrics that called out each member of the regiment’s name” – would experience both individual affirmation and collective identity that aided in their transformation from slave to soldier to citizen. In fact, musical conjuration allowed these formerly enslaved men to hear “themselves as free before they saw themselves as free” (16), and ultimately enabled them to see “that what they did not have, they could conjure” – even freedom (p. 4) Jabir defines the collective will to conjure – ashe – as a West African philosophical concept based on willing the power to make things happen, and the practice of conjuring as “the black cultural practice of summoning spiritual power as an intentional means of transforming reality” (2). He argues that these soldiers or“gospel army”expressly saw their cosmic crossover to freedom in the communal conjure performed each night in the “ring shout,” a religious ritual characterized by leader-chorus singing, hand clapping, drumming, and highly stylized religious dance moving in a counterclockwise circle. The “ring shout” made musical sense to these soldiers and created a social solidarity against the system of enslavement. Jabir writes, It was there, in the circle, that the soldiers had permission to sing of freedom before it had “officially” come to them. In the circle they could dance their way toward an alternate masculinity and manhood… All of what happened in the circle was ‘both’ a means by which to sustain themselves“and”it was also a message to the America that had exploited them. (139) Jabir’s purpose for writing Conjuring Freedom was to reveal the interrelatedness between the regiment’s creative use of religion,their way of recombining soldiering and singing, and their cosmic view of the future in their world and beyond using its members’ own unique narrative of religion, masculinity and music: all factors that enabled them to seize their freedom” (139). 262 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Drawing heavily from the disciplines of history, oral history, West African cosmology, African American history and religious texts, Islamic studies, and firsthand accounts, the book contains a total of five chapters that explore how song performance – embedded with the power of conjuring – aided in the “cosmic vision of freedom” by the 1st South regiment. The book begins with a Prelude and an Introduction. There are no photos and no musical transcriptions of the sacred songs. However, the book concludes with a Postlude. Of the five chapters, there are only three that begin with either a poem, song lyrics from the slave songs the regiment sang, and/or quotations featuring the writing of David Walker, an African-American abolitionist, and members of the 1st South including Corporal Thomas Long and Sergeant Prince Rivers who are documented in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1882 memoir Army Life In A Black Regiment. Higginson, a Unitarian Universalist minister, soldier, and abolitionist, was appointed as the regiment’s first commander from 1862-1864. Chapter 1, “A Strange Fulfillment of Dreams: Racial Fetish and Fantasy in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment” discusses what Jabir terms the “racial fetish” and “fantasy” in Higginson’s book Army Life in a Black Regiment. Jabir recounts the descriptive interpretation of the soldiers and their music as described in racial terms by Higginson, and his appointment as the leader of the 1st South Carolina volunteers in 1862 after the Union army’s victory in...

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