Jazz Internationalism

Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.