Guest Blog Post: Professor Tsitsi Jaji, author of Africa in Stereo

In Week 3 of Race, Writing, Sound we had a wonderful discussion on Tsitsi Jaji's Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (2014) Professor Jaji graciously agreed to engage us in a follow-up discussion. Here are some of our questions, and her responses:

1. Given the "dazzling interdisciplinarity" of the project, how did you juggle the questions that emerged from scholars in various fields in response to this book, and it what ways were those discussions challenging/fruitful?

"In the years leading up to the publication of the book I was fortunate to be part of a number of interdisciplinary working groups. I was a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell my last year of grad school when the theme was "Improvisation". There were a few people who shared my interests in music, but many other fields were represented -- everything from history of science to medieval Spanish cartography. And at Penn & elsewhere there were colleagues in Africana, English, French and Music who workshopped portions. The manuscript was read by reviewers who seemed to have expertise in African studies and in African American studies...which is all to say that I had a LOT of feedback and indeed one of the challenges was how to sift through conversations that were simply about how buddies in another building think (the curiosity of encountering another discipline) and conversations that actually pushed the arguments that I was invested in making further along (where bringing two or more methodologies or lines of questioning that were often segregated into contact with each other generated insights that wouldn't otherwise arise). I change my optic to a different media form and location in each chapter, and (perhaps as a poet) I was interested in letting the form of each chapter match the content -- it has never made sense to me to think of these as two discrete categories. So having different groups of readers for each chapter may have elicited responses that varied not so much because of their discipline but because the writing itself was performative in different ways. 

The most fruitful feedback (besides some amazing bibliographical and structural notes from my reviewers at Oxford and elsewhere) was from people in what I consider my "home field," literary and cultural studies, who helped me notice where I could work more at being a better translator -- whether in writing about music/musicology without jargon, in providing enough historical context to make the stakes clear, or in carrying over from one chapter to the next a big sustained argument. Like many scholars I love archival work and I might easily have fallen too much in love with the singular texts I was writing about without the encouragement to keep telling a bigger story. I fought hard to make sure the book was not assigned an ML cataloging number from the Library of Congress (after many calls and e mails, I actually managed to speak to a head honcho there and convinced them to change it to a PL designation that at least kept it with other books on literature and film!) Because it was my first book, it was very important to me that however interdisciplinary its reach it should be most legible to my colleagues in literature departments."

2. How and why did pan-Africanism became so important to the book?

"There are so many terms that have been useful for coming to grips with the enduring significance of geographically dispersed and yet culturally entangled black lives across the globe. Black Atlantic, diaspora (particularly as practice), transnational, Afropolitan. But for me, the double valence of P/pan-Africanism as indexing both a specific set of public political assemblies and the agenda undergirding them, on the one hand, and the experiments in cultural affinity in less formalized and less explicitly political, on the other, is productive. Pan-Africanism signifies a social compact of sorts -- a will to notice, reinforce and build upon those areas where political and cultural interests overlap among diverse, and even divergent black populations. It also keeps "Africa" in the conversation (literally, inscribed in the word pan-AFRICAnism). Historically, Pan-Africanism (big P) also exposed how race was only one axis of alignment, and a very localized one at that. So the uneven economic power of the U.S. in relation to the other countries examined, which determines how music by and about U.S. African Americans circulates is easier to index with pan-Africanism than say with Afropolitan or even broad notions of diaspora. So, too, are the ways that an elite scholar-activist like Du Bois and a working class character like Tom the soldier from Detroit in Camp de Thiraoye would have different perspectives on what Africa might mean to them. Pan-Africanism is edgier than some of its alternatives, to my mind. As I say in the book, there is a general sense that pan-Africanism is an obsolete concept, sort of like a slightly embarrassing uncle who still wears his dashiki to special events. And I think that is a profound loss -- given that so many of the absolutely central figures of 20th century black history and letters devoted much intellectual and material labor to a project that was always about transformation, about trying in each historical moment to think about what liberation would truly entail, particularly for those subject to multiple layers of oppression. If we forget those histories then many current frictions seem intractable. One might consider the unspoken tensions in the U.S. academy (around questions of, say, affirmative action for African Americans and first generation immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa), or the seeming disinterest of Americans, including African Americans in the economic impact on small African economies of the global economic crash in 2007 in driving waves of lethally dangerous migration. But if we have the histories of earlier collaborations in mind, these are easier to recognize as just the most recent chapters in a long book. Or put differently, as new voicings for the chords in a chart that all the greats have soloed on, but that one has to play new and in one's own style in order to carry on the tradition. The point is that the tradition can only exist by making itself new each time, but there is a tradition. Some black folk have chosen to think in terms of solidarity and alignment for decades, and some black folk could continue to do so -- I'm not claiming that all have, or should, but that these histories are a resource for thinking together about problems that while local in their impact are connected to some shared global sources, the most acute of which are capitalism and (often implicit structures of) white supremacy."

3. What are you working on now?

"A couple new projects. The first, Cassava Westerns: Refiguring the American Frontier Myth in Global Black Imaginaries, examines the way writers, filmmakers and musicians of Africa and the Black Diaspora have critically engaged with tropes and mythologies of the U.S. West. The second, Classic Black: Art Songs of the Black Atlantic analyzes the literary commentary that composers of color have performed through setting poetry to classical music."

Thanks, Professor Jaji!