A World Unknown: New Perspectives on Bob Dylan and the Blues
Due Date: 09-15-2024
Deadline for abstract submission (300–500 words): 15 September 2024
In 1963, Bob Dylan released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, an album that infused traditional folk and blues motifs with political commentary, surrealist imagery, and wry humor, while simultaneously gesturing toward yet-invented forms of songwriting capable of critiquing the novel modes of political power that emerged in the wake of WWII. That fall, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) published Blues People, a work of revisionist historiography that not only challenged bourgeois conceptions of the blues as a passive, politically unthreatening reaction to historical trauma but also recast the blues as a proactive response to postbellum geographical mobility and economic uncertainty. Just as Dylan’s engagement with the blues rejected the combination of reverence and paternalism that marked the folk and blues revivals, Baraka viewed the blues as a “kinetic,” “self-refining” art form, one whose most direct descendants could be identified not in the commercialized, minstrelized sounds of rock ’n’ roll, but in the exploratory realms of bebop and avant-garde “jazz,” as well as within then-nascent forms of Black Nationalism (Jones 235, 220).
Today, large swaths of academia dismiss Baraka’s revisionist arguments, and within the field of Dylan studies critics dutifully depict Dylan’s intertextual engagement with the blues not as a process of critical experimentation, but as acts of depoliticized nostalgia.
This collection seeks to challenge such positions, rejecting all notions of the blues as a fundamentally emotive and functionally apolitical tradition, while embracing the critical, political, and artistic potential of the blues form. We envision a volume that will serve as not only a resource for scholars but also a model for critics eager to explore new ways of articulating the political and aesthetic salience of the blues and of Dylan’s artistry. For more information, see the full call for papers.