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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.
List of contents
Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Making Soundwaves 1
1. Jazz en Liberté: The US Military and the Soundscapes of Liberation 17
2. Writing Black, Talking Back: Jazz and the Value of African American Identity 43
3. Spinning Race: The French Record Industry and the Production of African American Music 71
4. Speaking in Tongues: The Negro Spiritual and the Circuits of Black Internationalism 103
5. The Voice of America: Radio, Race, and the Sounds of the Cold War 133
6. Liberation Revisited: African American Music and the Postcolonial Landscape 161
Epilogue: Sounding like a Revolution 195
Notes 201
Sources 251
Index 283
About the author
Celeste Day Moore is Assistant Professor of History at Hamilton College.
Summary
Celeste Day Moore traces the popularity of African American music in postwar France to outline how it came to signify both state power and liberation for Francophone audiences throughout the world.
