Holler afroamericani: forme poetiche, tecniche musicali e gradi d'opacità

Hollers were a genre of solo singing songs used exclusively by African Americans and mainly in the South of the United States until the ’60 to express brief poetic compositions. Authors have discussed hollers only as a disharmonic group of vaguely defined vocal techniques and considered them only when they deemed them a relevant example of connections between Africa and the Blues. By recurring to research methods from the fields of Ethnomusicology, History, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies, in this thesis I offer a detailed perspective on the hollers genre per se: I discuss the poetic structures, the music techniques, the relations between the poetic and musical planes. I do this by considering the available documentation as well as by recognizing and respecting the limitations posed to our comprehension by the different layers of opacity set up by the hollers authors. Only after this discussion, I offer some hypotheses about the genre relations to specific African musical traditions and about the connections with the history of the Blues by looking at the musical productions of some professional musicians. I discuss the audio documents theoretical and historical relevance in the development of African American music, as well as examples of expressive techniques inside contexts of severe social inequality. I also discuss hollers documents (within the boundaries posed by their opacity) as valuable oral sources about the historical dimension of the forms of oppression of minorities in the United States through the development of the system of mass incarceration.