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Full-Text Articles in Ethnomusicology
Higher Ground: Rev. Dr. William Barber Ii And The Political Content Of Prophetic Form, Braxton D. Shelley
Higher Ground: Rev. Dr. William Barber Ii And The Political Content Of Prophetic Form, Braxton D. Shelley
Yale Journal of Music & Religion
This essay argues that Rev. Dr. William J. Barber’s message on “Higher Ground,” a speech delivered at a massive 2014 protest rally, reveals his intentional problematization of distinctions between the sacred and the secular. As Barber’s articulation of what Ashon Crawley calls “Blackpentecostal breath” spill over the boundaries posited by conventional categories—they are too ecstatic to be ordinary speeches, and too political to be traditional sermons—these plural expressions identify themselves as sounds that come from another world. If both content and form are understood as thought, it becomes apparent that these prophetic utterances critique the oppression wrought by contemporary social …