James Currey Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa: 3 (African Articulations)

Review Scoring Race is a significant contribution to French world literary criticism, francophone postcolonial studies, and African cultural studies. ― WASAFIRI Contribution majeure aux études culturelles africaines....L'écriture est assurée et énergique, le propos clair, la démonstration sans fioritures, l'approche transdisciplinaire (anthropologie, théorie littéraire, critique, philosophie- épistémologie, herméneutique, métaphysique). ― NOUVELLES ÉTUDES FRANCOPHONES Scoring Race will be of interest to those examining the racially fraught relationship between jazz, its colonial and postcolonial audiences, and the critics, novelists, and filmmakers who incorporate it in their works as they attempt to maneuver with, or outmaneuver, an iconic but ambiguous musical heritage. ― STUDIES IN 20TH & 21ST CENTURY LITERATURE Higginson constructs his argument carefully and meticulously, each chapter building on the previous one. This is a book that actually rewards a linear reading from cover to cover. [...] While students of literature will find immediate value in Higginson's close readings, both jazz scholars and those seeking to better understand the working of race in French intellectual life would find much of interest in these five, dense, chapters. ― Journal of the African Literature Association Product Description Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies, musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine the convergence of aesthetics and race in Western thought and to explore its impact on Francophone African literature. France's tumulte noir, the jazz craze between the two world wars, consolidated an aesthetic model present in Western philosophy since Plato that coalesced into French scientific racism over the 19th century; a model which formalized the notion of music. Reading avant-garde French writers Sartre and Soupault to prize-winning Francophone authors Congolese Emmanuel Dongala to Cameroonian Léonora Miano, Scoring Race explores how jazz masters Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane became touchstones for claims to African authorship and aesthetic subjectivity across the long twentieth century. This volume focuses on how this naturalization of black musicality occurred and its impact on Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represented an epistemological obstacle. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz's profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects. How and why, Pim Higginson asks, did these writers and filmmakers approach jazz and its participation in and formalization of the racial score? To what extent did they reproduce the terms of their own systematic expulsion into music and to what extent, in their impossible demand for writing (or film-making), did they arrive at tactical means of working through, around, or beyond the strictures of their assumed musicality? About the Author Pim Higginson is Professor of Global French Studies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.