Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity by Tsitsi Ella Jaji (review)

Correction:
The title of the book being reviewed was incorrectly listed as Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Identity. The correct title is Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity. The online version has been corrected.

Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity analyzes how music articulates Pan-African sensibilities. Jaji constructs a thoughtful discussion about how, at various times in Africa’s modernity, music has been the catalyst for or conduit of African solidarities. African diaporic music is part of a wider cultural practice of what she calls “stereomoderism,” which is the notion that music, particularly from the Black Atlantic, facilitates “transnational black solidarity” in film, poetry, literature, Internet websites, and live performances. This book identifies actors, events, and cultural texts that contribute to stereomodernism by creating cultural expressiveness that envisions Pan-African perspectives and aims.

Jaji focuses on South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana as places that have a history of cultural interactions and borrowing with African American texts. Her examples bring to light less-known interactions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. She carefully frames these instances by providing both extensive analysis and comprehensive historic and social conditions that account for each emergence. Jaji uses (and sometimes crafts) terms for each chapter that contribute to her broader argument of the diversity of stereomodernism: sight-reading and transcription (chapter 1), Négritude musicology (chapter 2), sheen reading (chapter 4), echolocation (chapter 5), and pirate aesthetics and logic (chapter 6).

Chapter two’s “Sight-Reading” is an exploration into how South African activists in the early 1900s used musical transcription to exercise transnational black solidarities. Sol Plaatje, John and Nokutela Dube, and Charlotte Maxeke, argues Jaji, all use musical transcription and notation to exercise claims to human rights for black people and forge important links with African Americans struggling in similar ways. The Dubes, for example, transcribed sounded Zulu music into sol-fa scores, staff notation, manuscripts, and narratives, thereby fostering notions of dynamic music practices that asserted Zulu cultural empowerment, as well as larger notions of black political solidarity. Following that is “Négritude Musicology,” which primarily discusses the Senegalese politician and writer Léopold Senghor’s engagement with (American) jazz to rethink Négritude. Jaji contends that he “was mining jazz for a set of metaphors and shared references that could tune local political challenges to the song of transnational black political solidarity” (74). Departing from common critiques of Senghorian Négritude as problematic and impractical, Jaji convincingly argues that his poetry, references to jazz, allusions to US black authors, and even the state-sponsored Pan-African event FESMAN, all contributed to his dynamic thinking about how global black solidarity can be forged.

The most captivating chapter interestingly is not centrally about music. In chapter three, “What Women Want,” Jaji asserts that African women used the magazines Zonk! (South Africa) and Bingo (Senegal and France) circa 1950 to rethink gender, affirm the beauty of black women, and navigate apartheid’s conditions. She names this “sheen reading,” which is the engagement with glossy magazines that invites consumers to “[imagine] alternative realities and creative forms of resistance” (118). This discussion considers how subversive struggle often can materialize within the logic of consumerism and consumption. Chapter five explores how Ghana’s 1971 “Soul to Soul” concert and its recording and reproductions uses the echo as an analytic in Black Atlantic music cultures to recover Middle Passage histories. The visual texts of the concert capture how various artists, like Kamau Brathwaite, Les McCann, Amoah Azangeo, Roberta Flack, and others, participate in “Black Atlantic echo-locating,” by engaging with the themes of the slave trade, transatlantic return, diaspora, and unity.

Chapter six considers Pan-African futurity by analyzing films like Camp de Thiaroye and The Last Angel of History and the web platform Pan African Space Station. Thinking beyond state-sponsored culture events, Jaji argues...