Highlights - BRUCE EVAN BARNHART - Author of “Jazz in the Time of the Novel”, “Temporal Experiments”

Spela upp

"The interesting text is Quicksand, right? Because it shows a couple of engagements with jazz, and there's a certain point in which the protagonist of Quicksand dances to music in a cabaret, and it's described as 'jungle music'. So we would think of Duke Ellington's Jungle Music Band of the 1920s, and we would also notice the kind of reactionary, racial ideas that go with labeling something as from the jungle. And so there's a way in which jazz is trying to be America's responding to jazz by containing it, thinking of it as something kind of primitive. But this is something that's codified or themetized in Nella Larsen's novel.