This book shows how and why music became part of the social changes Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on the story of Black music in Paris and the people who created it, enjoyed it, criticized it, and felt at home when they heard it. African Americans, French Antilleans, and French West Africans wrote, danced, sang, and acted politically in response to the heightened visibility of racial difference in Paris during this era. They were consumed with questions that continue to resonate today. Could one be Black and French? Was Black solidarity more important than national and colonial identity? How could French culture include the experiences and contributions of Africans and Antilleans? From highly educated women, such as the Nardal sisters of Martinique, to the working Black musicians performing in crowded nightclubs at all hours, the book gives a fully rounded view of Black reactions to jazz in interwar Paris. It places that phenomenon in its historic and political context, and in doing so, it shows how music and music making formed a vital terrain of cultural politics. It shows how music making brought people together around pianos, on the dance floor, and through reading and gossip, but it did not erase the political, regional, and national differences among them. The book shows that many found a home in Paris but did not always feel at home. This book reveals these dimensions of music making, race, and cultural politics in interwar Paris.
The conclusion reinforces the point made throughout the book that at times of great crisis, various Black networks in France and the francophone Atlantic found ways to transcend their differences. They did this through cultural production as well as political action. Yet this broader pan-African or pro-Black sense of solidarity coexisted with regional, political, and class affiliations, all of which found expression in music. Some of the complexity of these identities, in fact, found greater expression in music than in literature or politics; this complexity appears very clearly when one traces the musical activities of figures such as Wali Kané, Maïotte Almaby, or Paulette Nardal. The conclusion reflects on how their experiences impacted the following decades in their own lives and in French culture.
This chapter analyzes the unabashed moment of imperial pride that was the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. It explains how music making at the Exposition performed ideas about race. The Exposition presented challenges and possibilities for colonial subjects trying to work out where they belonged, how they belonged, and whether they wanted to belong in the French Empire. The chapter examines both the official, state-sanctioned representation of race and ethnicity at the Exposition and some critiques of it generated by anti-colonial groups. The Exposition demonstrated hierarchies of race through displays of music and dance. It asserted the value of France’s “civilizing” influence based on those representations. French colonial subjects exposed some of those representations as false and promoted their own “authentic” music and dance performances both at the Exposition and at an anti-Exposition organized by surrealist, communist, and anti-colonial activists. The chapter argues that the Colonial Exposition had such a high profile that it galvanized French men and women of color to resist misrepresentations of their cultures. It may, therefore, have had a longer-lasting effect on them than on the white metropolitan French population targeted by the Exposition.
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