| Description |
237 pages : 1 illustration ; 25 cm. |
| ISBN |
9781847011558 cloth |
|
1847011551 cloth |
|
9781847011770 paperback |
|
1847011772 paperback |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [221]-232) and index. |
| 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. |
| Series |
African articulations.
|
| Library Class |
French R185
|
| Subject |
African literature (French)
|
|
African literature (French) -- 20th century.
|
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African literature (French) -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
|
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Jazz in literature.
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