4 - Black Bodies, Black Sounds: Film and the Racial Score

Summary

Up to this point we have seen how the reception of jazz in France – and the subsequent role of jazz in Francophone African fiction – can be traced back to the tension in Western thought between music and literature. Moreover, the argument has addressed how the gerrymandered boundary between these two media has naturalized, among other things, the idea of race. The argument has been that the critical apparatus that creates jazz is the sediment of aesthetic contouring which, over more than two millennia, has been directed toward race's naturalization – a process by which Africa, to cite V. Y. Mudimbe, is transformed into a ‘place of “primitiveness” and “disorder.”’ The orchestrated, that is, scored, tension between music as the exemplary black medium (and indeed, the proof of blackness) and writing as white (and the ontological guarantee of whiteness) has a long history that, in its French incarnation, culminated in the ‘tumulte noir’ of the interwar years and was most dramatically distilled in a French idea of jazz that largely still pertains. This construction/reception of jazz in turn produced a series of distinct responses in the work of French ‘continental’ authors as well as those commonly referred to as ‘Francophone African.’ Among this latter group, the response evolved from Ousmane Soce's very early Mirages de Paris to recent jazz fiction by authors such as Leonora Miano and Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Each case examined has revealed a rich yet strained negotiation between the writer's narrative and the persistent jazz trope. Consistent across the decades is the fact that all these African authors sense in the music something that is both familiar and potentially foreign; beneficial yet fraught.

Yet despite the evident usefulness of distinguishing between white (French) and black (Francophone) texts, what unites these works, whether ‘white’ or ‘black,’ is the notable absence of actual music – at least according to their own expressed or implicit assumptions about what music is.