Race in Translation: Producing, Performing, and Selling African-American Music in Greater France, 1944-74

ISBN-10: 132122463X
ISBN-13: 9781321224634
Series: Race in Translation
Pages: 403
Language: English
Published: 2014

Description

Though framed by questions of African-American music's political power, racial meaning, and cultural value, this dissertation is especially focused on its materiality. Drawing on manuscript collections, audiovisual archives, and oral histories in France, it closely examines the mechanisms of musical creation and circulation: the growth of new record labels and commercial radio stations that specialized in blues and jazz, the incorporation of jazz and spirituals into US military infrastructures and Cold War foreign policy, the role of jazz in the development of post-liberation radio and television networks, and finally, the circulation of African-American music within spaces of postwar black internationalism and Pan-Africanist politics. By tracing these transnational networks of cultural production and dissemination, this dissertation helps to clarify the complex power structures that defined the postwar Atlantic World, and through it, the histories of the United States, France, and Francophone Africa.