2 - Querying Jazz: Early Francophone African Engagements with the Racial Score

Summary

In the previous chapter I discussed representative works of French literature from the years of jazz's heyday in the French capital to the present. In each, African-American music offered, with varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of naivety, a site of racial consolidation and expression. We saw that, though the attitude toward the relationship between jazz and race evolved over time, from the 1920s to the present jazz remained a vehicle for the idea of race to a degree that none of these novels was entirely able to deconstruct or dismiss. In sum, these Euro-French authors, following a score that was 2,500 years in the making, privilege jazz as the signifier of blackness. For Soupault and Sartre, the adequacy of this new art form lay in its ability to preserve and/or tame the compound unit of African primitivity and American industrial modernity, what Jean Cocteau called a ‘catastrophe apprivoisee’ [domesticated catastrophe]: the primitive rhythmic subtext to the sounds of the factory that is jazz. Subsequent authors, beginning with Boris Vian, engaged with the music's racialization in far more self-conscious fashion, trying at various junctures and in various ways to disentangle jazz from the history of its discursive formation as a distinctively racialized aesthetic artifact. What we saw in these later writers was that, despite such attempts, the scoring of race through jazz, and jazz's construction as a fundamentally racialized idea within the white French imaginary, has rendered it an unalterably racialized phenomenon. Thus, even much more recent French authors who recognize the racial history I have traced nevertheless fall prey to its endlessly and uncontainably reverberating effects. Because producing race was, in a sense, the principal motivation behind the music's consolidation as ‘jazz,’ and because this was in turn the effect of a long Western tradition's association of all music with difference, there is no way to remain within any discussion of jazz and yet be unfettered by its essential racialization. For this simple reason, (white) French writers have not been the only authors to grapple with this new music, the nature of that engagement is not identical. Because the foreignness of jazz was also national – jazz was very specifically an American product – the difference it offered was not only racial but national as well.