Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France
Celeste Day Moore
Duke University Press
Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest, where African American musicians found financial and personal success as well as discrimination. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media and 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. 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.