[ecrea] Book announcement - How the public debate on jazz shaped French identity

> Matthew F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity, 
> University of Illinois Press
>
> How the public debate on jazz shaped French identity
>
> In Le Jazz, Matthew F. Jordan deftly blends textual analysis, 
> critical theory, and cultural history in a wide-ranging and highly 
> readable account of how jazz progressed from a foreign cultural 
> innovation met with resistance by French traditionalists to a 
> naturalized component of the country's identity. Jordan draws on 
> sources including ephemeral critical writing in the press and 
> twentieth-century French literature to trace the country's reception 
> of jazz, from the Cakewalk dance craze and the music's significance 
> as a harbinger of cultural recovery after World War II to its place 
> within French ethnography and cultural hybridity.
>
> Countering the histories of jazz's celebratory reception in France, 
> Jordan delves into the reluctance of many French citizens to accept 
> jazz with the same enthusiasm as the liberal humanists and 
> cosmopolitan crowds of the 1930s. Jordan argues that some listeners 
> and critics perceived jazz as a threat to traditional French 
> culture, and only as France modernized its identity did jazz become 
> compatible with notions of Frenchness. Le Jazz speaks to the power 
> of enlivened debate about popular culture, art, and expression as 
> the means for constructing a vibrant cultural identity, revealing 
> crucial keys to understanding how the French have come to see 
> themselves in the postwar world.
>
> "This illuminating study of cultural discourses on jazz makes an 
> original contribution to French popular music studies. Jordan 
> scrutinizes an impressively wide range of texts, with perceptive and 
> astute analyses."--David Looseley, author of Popular Music in 
> Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate
>
> http://go.illinois.edu/s10jordan

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Nico Carpentier (Phd)
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Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University of Brussels
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
Pleinlaan 2 - B-1050 Brussels - Belgium
T: ++ 32 (0)2-629.18.56
F: ++ 32 (0)2-629.36.84
Office: 5B.401a
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (Nico.Carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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