Jazz griots : music as history in the 1960s African American poem / Jean-Philippe Marcoux.

9780739166734 hardcover alkaline paper
0739166735 hardcover alkaline paper

Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, [2012]

©2012

English

x, 233 pages ; 24 cm

PS310.J39 M37 2012

811/.509357

"Jazz Griots studies how four representative African American poets of the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and black history. In so doing they narrate--using jazz as meta-language--genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and in turn formulated a black aesthetic based on jazz performativity: on a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues. This form of poetic call-and-response becomes a definitional literary template for these poets, as it allows both the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians and dialogic potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, between vernacular continuums"--P. [4] of cover.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-217) and index.

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