Reveals the importance of the jazz craze in France between the two world wars and the French construction of jazz as a "black music" - an exoticization which had wide-reaching effects on the artistic output of the African diaspora and on contemporary perceptions of black writers, musicians and film makers. What are the cultural implications of Louis Armstrong's 1960 visit to Africa? Why are so many postcolonial novels in French fascinated with jazz? In defining jazz as "black music", France's "jazzophilia" has had wide-reaching effects on contemporary perceptions of the artistic and political efficacy of black writers, musicians, and their aesthetic productions. Scoring Race explores how jazz masters Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane became touchstones for claims to African authorship and aesthetic subjectivity across the long twentieth century. The book focuses on how this naturalization of black musicality occurred and its impact on Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represented an epistemological obstacle. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz's profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects. In Scoring Race Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies,musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine the convergence of aesthetics and race in Western thought and to explore its impact on Francophone African literature. How and why, Pim Higginson asks, did these writers and filmmakers approach jazz and its participation in and formalization of the "racial score"? To what extent did they reproduce the terms of their own systematic expulsion into music and to what extent, in their impossible demand for writing(or film-making), did they arrive at tactical means of working through, around, or beyond the strictures of their assumed musicality? Pim Higginson is Professor of Global French Studies at the University of New Mexico,Albuquerque.

Under the pseudonym Eza Boto, Mongo Beti wrote Ville cruelle (Cruel City) in 1954 before he came to the world's attention with the publication of Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba). Cruel City tells the story of a young man's attempt to cope with capitalism and the rapid urbanization of his country. Banda, the protagonist, sets off to sell the year's cocoa harvest to earn the bride price for the woman he has chosen to wed. Due to a series of misfortunes, Banda loses both his crop and his bride to be. Making his way to the city, Banda is witness to a changing Africa, and as his journey progresses, the novel mirrors these changes in its style and language. Published here with the author's essay "Romancing Africa," the novel signifies a pivotal moment in African literature, a deliberate challenge to colonialism, and a new kind of African writing. -- Indiana University Press