Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.
Jazz manoucheodash;a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunestdash;is among Franceisquo;s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the Manouche subgroup of Romanies, also known somewhat pejoratively as dquo;Gypsies,,dquo; to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, a practice in which many take pleasure and pride, while facing pervasive discrimination at the same time. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of Francessquo;s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.
In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
