Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race’, and Intellectuals in France, 1918–1945 by Jeremy F. Lane (review)

The history of jazz criticism in France between the wars and the attitude towards jazz music of the black intellectuals who led the Negritude movement might seem two rather minor strands in the cultural development of France in the first half of the twentieth century. When woven together in such a way as to situate them in the broader socioeconomic context while unpacking the ambiguity of the attitudes that underpinned them, they offer a revealing portrait of the ideological complexity of the period, both for the white jazz critics and the black intellectuals who were often influenced by them. Thus a pioneering critic such as Hugues Panassié turned out to be a right-wing sympathizer of Action française, but this did not prevent him from exercising a decisive influence on the future president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who went on to invite major jazz musicians to the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966. It was the Belgian jazz critic Robert Goffin who perhaps influenced his friend Léon-Gontran Damas to inflect the poems of his 1937 collection Pigments with numerous allusions to jazz. If Aimé Césaire seemed impervious to the appeal of a musical style imported from North America, his fellow Martiniquais René Ménil could find an inspiration for his creole identity in the music of Duke Ellington; and Frantz Fanon could go on to take the ‘respectable’ intellectual aspirations of bebop musicians as a model for postcolonial cultural production. Jeremy F. Lane’s study brings out the underpinnings of these varied attitudes to jazz, using a formidable battery of analytical tools drawn from Derrida as well as the sociopolitical analysis of industrial production in the interwar years and during the German Occupation. In spite of his critical comments, Lane’s study owes a debt to Matthew Jordan’s earlier survey Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010; see French Studies, 65 (2011), 565–66), which gives a broader account of the assimilation of jazz into French culture during the same period. Lane’s account is more deconstructive and ideological, bringing out the contrast between those who saw jazz as an alienated product of a mechanized and racist American society and others who wanted to see it as the authentic expression, however mediated, of an African cultural heritage. Lane’s study is published in an extended series of ‘Jazz Perspectives’ devoted to international jazz criticism, and all of the extensive quotations from often rare source texts have been translated into English, presumably by the author, with only the occasional poem quoted in the original French. This makes some of the linguistic choices somewhat perplexing, such as the decision to use the French word ‘nègre’ throughout, rather than any English equivalent, perhaps out of an excessive sense of political correctness. This is a rewarding study (if not for the fainthearted) whose resonances reach far beyond the apparent limitations of its immediate subject matter.