F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Broadside Ballad Survey/Collection/Analysis

While I have not come up with a well thought out frame for my project, I am primarily interested in how popular cultural forms and art influence and shape public opinion on contemporary issues. In my initial research, I came across broadside ballads, a popular English literary and print genre that proliferated in the 17th -19th centuries. My thinking is that these ballads would contain stories, tales, and narratives of the heroic actions of stock characters or the everyman. In many cases, broadsides were cheaply made and mass distributed, which means they had a reach arguably larger than most major publishing houses. However, mass distribution alone does not make a cultural artifact worthy of study. What does make broadsides interesting to study is the wide range in content, structure, musicality, and cultural influences that participate in the construction of such a genre. Therefore, it is my assumption that contained in many broadside ballads would be commentary, critique, other discursive practices that ultimately shape readers and public minds about contemporary issues of economics, abolition, international relations, and morality. By virtue of their crossing generic forms, broadside ballads rely on an influence from oral traditional ballads and printed ballads typically geared towards entertainment. At the heart of my thesis/argument is that this particular appearance of a folk oral tradition in printed form is peripherally related to a minstrel tradition that saw Black people not as human agents involved in a creative process, but as stock caricatures manipulated to entertain masses of white people. Ultimately, I am interested in how the broadside ballad tradition made a lasting impact on the balladic genre, how oral literacies compete against printed literacies for control over historical narrative, and how popular forms of entertainment and literature make a lasting impact the future production of popular art forms. There is more I want to investigate in how this also contributes to a deeper understanding of the Black Atlantic, but I need to do more surveying of broadside ballads first. 

Since this is a DH project, I envision this project utilizing tools of audio visual storytelling in order to guide readers through a more immersive experience pertaining to broadside ballads. Particularly, I imagine finding popular ballad tunes and linking them to ballad texts. Perhaps also finding similar ballads performed in different tones/moods/timbre etc. Therefore, this project will not only encompass a close reading and collection of broadside ballad texts, but will interdisciplinarily approach the study of these texts through a musicological lens as well. This means that sound, visual cues, and literary techniques all work in concert to build a dynamic and multilayered cultural artifact in need of analysis and study. 

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