Music (s) in the literary and artistic creation of the French-speaking Black Atlantic

Venue : Maison Internationale de la Recherche / Forum de Vauréal

“To study the place of music in the black Atlantic is to examine both the idea that the musicians who conceived it had of themselves, the symbolic use that other black artists and writers made of it and the social relationships that produced and reproduced this unique expressive culture, where music plays a central and even defining role”, Paul Gilroy says. Following on from the work brought together in L'Imaginaire musical dans les littératures africaines (Mangoua, 2009) and in Afrique, musique et écriture (Teulié, 2001), this conference aims to study both this music and the way it nourishes all the artistic and literary practices of the Black Atlantic, and testifies to the social relationships which animate it.
The music of the black Atlantic, jazz and rap in particular, but also beguine, reggae, funk, soul, the list goes on, allow us to think of the black Atlantic as a rhizomatic set, in which cultures and identities are built by meetings and resurgences: “Music and its rituals can be used to create a model where identity is no longer conceived either as an immutable essence or as a vague and absolutely contingent construction, capable of being reinvented at the whim of aesthetes , rhetoricians and symbol makers . ” The study of how artists build these diasporic identities by mobilizing music will be at the heart of our reflections.

 The programme and the Zoom link are available on the CYU page dedicated to this event