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Jazz and Postwar French Identity

Improvising the Nation

Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor

In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France’s postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country’s stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals.
As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music’s international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation.

Lexington Books

Pages: 290 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-2876-4 • Hardback • June 2016 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-4985-2877-1 • eBook • June 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / Jazz, Music / Philosophy & Social Aspects, Social Science / Popular Culture

Jazz and Postwar French Identity

Improvising the Nation

Hardback

eBook

Summary

In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France’s postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country’s stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals.
As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music’s international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 290 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-2876-4 • Hardback • June 2016 • $136.00 • (£105.00)

978-1-4985-2877-1 • eBook • June 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / Jazz, Music / Philosophy & Social Aspects, Social Science / Popular Culture

Author

Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor earned a PhD in history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, the State College of Florida, and Anna Maria College.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: Le Monde du jazz
Chapter Two: The Gendered Jazz Public
Chapter Three: The Question and Politics of Race
Chapter Four: More than an American Music
Chapter Five: Red, White, and Blue Notes: French Jazz
Chapter Six: And What of Empire?
Conclusion: Improvising the Nation

Reviews

. . . . Jazz and Postwar Identity is an important and thought-provoking book which provides a huge amount of new information about the history of jazz discourse in France during the 1950s and 1960s. Undoubtedly a major contribution in the field of French jazz studies, it puts forward topics such as gender and the situation of jazz in the French Empire (and then former Empire) on which research still needs to be carried out. For these reasons, McGregor’s book is a landmark that will certainly pave the way for further research on jazz in France after 1945 and provide a necessary complement to Rashida Braggs’s book published the same year.
— H-France Review

Jazz and Postwar French Identity is an important contribution to the growing literature on jazz in France. Particularly valuable are McGregor’s studies of jazz and gender, and of the music’s place in French colonial and post-colonial experience; the author’s discussions of the local jazz scene’s framing of race, and its relationships with an imagined ‘America’, are equally concentrated and assiduous.
— Tom Perchard, Goldsmiths, London University

Jazz and Postwar French Identity underscores the remarkable historical interconnections that exist between the United States and France, the multiple ways in which cross-cultural pollination occurred, how transnational relationships were formed, and ultimately how the complex process of disentangling these networks stands to have lasting implications for contemporary conversations on culture, identity, globalization, and of course racialization.
— Dominic Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles

Jazz and Postwar French Identity

Improvising the Nation

Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor

Jazz and Postwar French Identity

Improvising the Nation

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