Africa in Stereo

Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity

Tsitsi Ella Jaji

 

Synopsis

Africa in Stereo analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890-2011) to offer a new cultural history attesting to pan-Africanism's ongoing and open theoretical potential. Tsitsi Jaji argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly, an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony.

Review

This book is unique in its attentiveness to the intricacies, significances and pleasures of listening, notation and reading. It recasts - with great subtlety and eloquence - our understanding of the sonic, visual, and literary practices used by Africans in the elaboration and pursuit of pan-Africanism at home and abroad. -Bhekizizwe Peterson, Wits University

Author

Tsitsi Ella Jaji is an Associate Professor in English at Duke University. She is also a poet.