Scoring race : jazz, fiction, and Francophone Africa / Pim Higginson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Higginson, Pim, author.

Series:

African articulations

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African literature (French).

African literature (French)--20th century.

African literature (French)--20th century--History and criticism.

Jazz in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

237 pages : illustration ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

[Woodbridge, Suffolk] ; [Rochester, NY] : James Currey, [2017]

Summary:

Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine the convergence of aesthetics and race in Western thought and to explore its impact on Francophone African literature. France's "tumulte noir," the jazz craze between the two world wars, consolidated an aesthetic model present in Western philosophy since Plato that coalesced into French "scientific" racism over the 19th century; a model which formalized the notion of music as black. France's "jazzophilia" codified what the author names the "racial score:" simultaneously an archive and script that, in defining jazz as "black music," has had wide-reaching effects on contemporary perceptions of the artistic and political efficacy of black writers, musicians, and their aesthetic productions. Reading avant-garde French writers Sartre and Soupault to prize-winning Francophone authors Congolese Emmanuel Dongala to Cameroonian Leonora Miano, Scoring Race explores how jazz masters Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane became touchstones for claims to African authorship and aesthetic subjectivity across the long twentieth century. This volume focuses on how this naturalization of black musicality occurred and its impact on Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represented an epistemological obstacle.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [221]-232) and index.

ISBN:

9781847011558

1847011551

9781847011770

1847011772

OCLC:

991400158

Publisher Number:

99972747158