Content area
Abstract
This interdisciplinary project, adopting methodologies from literary criticism, new musicology, and postcolonial criticism, explores the way ideas about black sound define aesthetic values, represent transnational dynamics, and position the meaning of imperialism in the French West Indies. The title, which evokes my systematic theoretical grounding in the work of Frantz Fanon and his seminal Black Skin, White Masks, refers at base to the colonial and racial dynamics that condition black Atlantic musical performance on the French stage, specifically the context of the 1930s Parisian success of the biguine, a hybrid genre from Guadeloupe and Martinique (Chapter 2: "To Begin the Biguine: Re-membering Antillean Musical Life").
"Black Soundscapes, White Stages" builds a broad postcolonial discursive analysis around the sonic drama between Antillean letters and music by locating its resonance with colonial mythologies staging French West Indian women and the sexual politics of musical beauty (Chapter 1: "Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard: The Doudou in the Antillean Transatlantic"), the situation of the "black" poetic voice on the page and on the French literary scene (Chapter 3: "Le Cri, or Black Orpheus and the Tyranny of the Beat"), and the meaning of new sound technologies for French and francophone global relations (Chapter 4: "Le Poste Colonial: Technologies of the Minor").
Using Fanon's critique of language, voice and sound in the construction of desire and subjectivity, my dissertation analyzes the sound/text dynamics of foundational mythologies about the French West Indies and locates the cultural dynamics of sound structuring black Atlantic transnational relations and French imperial discourse.