Introduction

Summary

From Senegalese author Ousmane Soce's early novel Mirages de Paris (1937) to contemporary works such as Leonora Miano's Tel des astres éteints (2009) and Blues pour Élise (2010), and Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014), Francophone African novels repeatedly return to jazz as an idea, a contested site, a formation, through and around which these authors negotiate notions of race and identity. Indeed, no other musical form has so consistently appeared in this literary tradition. At the same time, these writers’ relationship to the music has, with few exceptions, never been merely celebratory or simple. Though attitudes have changed over time, Francophone African texts contending with jazz repeatedly treat the music with equal measures of awed respect and notable suspicion. To understand why this is the case, one has to examine the very specific circumstances of jazz's reception in France, particularly between the interwar period, and how that reception in a sense produced a particular – and particularly French – iteration of this diaspora musical form that has impacted every Francophone African author wishing to engage with music – while also making the music an important waypoint on the path towards a fully constituted Francophone African subjectivity. The almost unavoidable negotiation with jazz stems from its particular intersection with writing and race during the interwar period, the very time when Francophone African subjects began their most sustained push towards emancipation. Thus, what they were fighting and also being trained by was a racialized universe, at the heart of which lay a musical genre that the French avant-garde fetishized as the exemplary expression of blackness. That which Francophone authors are contending with is the manner in which, through a long series of processes that this study will examine in some detail, jazz became a trope in French writing, overdetermined by historically and epistemologically established ideas of music, writing, and race.

The historical moment between the wars, when jazz took on its outsized function in the French intellectual and artistic world, has generated a rapidly growing critical library.