Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music

Description

Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities ”and challenges ”of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 16 1. “Harlem Jazzing”: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, and Jazz Internationalism......Page 42 2. “Black Man’s Verse”: The Black Chicago Renaissance and the Popular Front Jazz Poetics of Frank Marshall Davis ......Page 74 3. “Do You Sing for a Living?”: Ann Petry, The Street, and the Gender Politics of World War II Jazz......Page 104 4. “Cultural Exchange”: Cold War Jazz and the Political Aesthetics of Langston Hughes’s Long Poems......Page 126 5. “A Silent Beat in Between the Drums”: Bebop, Post-Bop, and the Black Beat Poetics of Bob Kaufman......Page 146 Conclusion. “A New Kind of Music”: Paule Marshall, The Fisher King, and the Dissonance of Diaspora......Page 174 Notes......Page 196 Works Cited......Page 220 Index......Page 236