Africa in Stereo. Modernism, Music, And Pan-African Solidarity

Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Leopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).
"Meticulously researched, historically and politically exigent, and adventurous in its archival reach, Africa in Stereo is a path-breaking book that pulsates to the beat of literary, visual, sonic and cultural studies. Tsitsi Jaji has built a bold new sound system for diaspora studies that challenges us to listen closely to the crosscurrents of African aesthetic technologies that forge and inform our modern world." --Daphne Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910"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 o fthe sonic, visual, and literary practices used by Africans in the elaboration and pursuit of pan-Africanism at home and abroad." --Bhekizizwe Peterson, author of Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals