Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, Race, and Intellectuals in France, 1918-1945

Jeremy Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is a bold challenge to the existing homogenous picture of the reception of American jazz in world-war era France. Lane’s book is the first to examine the responses of diasporic French Africans and Antilleans to the music they first heard in Paris in the interwar years, analyzing the place of jazz within the emerging negritude and creolite movements. Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is also the first study of the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic relationship between these intellectuals of color and contemporary white jazz critics. Through close readings of the work of early white French jazz critics, alongside the essays and poems of intellectuals of color such as the Nardal sisters, Leon-Gontran Damas, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Rene Menil, the book highlights the ways in which the French reception of jazz was bound up with a series of urgent contemporary debates about primitivism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, black and Creole consciousness, and the effects of American machine-age technologies on the minds and bodies of French citizens.