Migration Blues in Jazz Styling
Spinning Them Overlooked Jazz and Blues Numbers in Brian Chikwava's Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9251111 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher N Okonkwo (corresponding author), Christopher N Okonkwo Christopher N Okonkwo |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 152 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/reseafrilite.47.4.09 |
| OpenAlex | W2587519476 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This essay contends that the narrator’s invocations of music in Harare North are not as serendipitous and isolated as they seem. Rather, jazz and blues function semiotically and axially in the story. I argue that together they serve, on the one hand, as a reminder of and an indirect authorial salute to Harare’s and, by extension, Zimbabwe’s urban music history, particularly its long tradition of jazz and blues. As one of Zimbabwe’s “cultural workers” (Dube), as part of what Stuart Nicholson calls “the global jazz scene,” and as the author of what Tsitsi Ella Jaji would dub an African stereomodernist text, Chikwava partakes of those illustrious legacies. On the other hand, although they are linked with the characters, jazz and blues extrapolate as joint signifiers of Harare North ’s postmodernist form and overtones. They codify and consolidate its metafictionality, its allusions, playfulness, contingencies, and irresolution, but then its crisis- and migration-engendered undertones of melancholia and stoicism
Art · Art history · Blues · Jazz · Literature · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Where is my home? Rethinking person, family, ethnicity and home under increased transnational migration by Zimbabweans
The warmth of other suns
Music, Performance and African Identities
Between Seventh Street, Goblins and Ordinary People
Transnational mothering and forced migration
The Regulatory Function of the Blues
Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse
Human Rights, Child-Soldier Narratives, and the Problem of Form
Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the Blues Tradition
Towards an embodied securityscape
Joining the BBC (British Bottom Cleaners)
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |