Django Generations

Description

Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.
In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
  Siv B. Lie is assistant professor of music at the University of Maryland. Notes on Terminology 
List of Figures   
Introduction   
Chapter One: Making Jazz Manouche 
Chapter Two: Cultural Activism’s Living Legacies 
Chapter Three: Generic Ontologies and the Stakes of Refusal
Chapter Four: The Sound of Feeling 
Chapter Five: Heritage Stories 
Conclusion 
Acknowledgments 
Appendix 1: Glossary 
Appendix 2: List of Formal Interviews 
Notes                                                                                                                                      
References   
Index 

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