In Soundscapes of Liberation,
Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music
in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest.
Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media:
the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record
industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the
translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in
spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that
broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these
contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers,
writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new
meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse
Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many
African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as
well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of
African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of
racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to
postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding
globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.
Celeste Day Moore
(Author)
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