Neo-Griot Reviews Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery
Black Culture and the Law
Bryan Wagner’s Disturbing the Peace is a re-imagination of the possibilities of cultural history. Rather than subjecting his source material–early twentieth-century popular music, the recordings of folklorists, novels, and newspaper articles, all supplemented by prodigious secondary reading–to the traditional analytical methods of social history, Wagner uses them to experiment with voice and temporality in a way that troubles our understanding of folklore, black culture, and the construction of history itself. He admits a degree of “speculation, and even presumption” in his work, but believes it is worth it if “the book succeeds in making otherwise unimaginable connections appear indelible, even for a moment” (p. 237).