Wilfried Raussert

Halifax's former Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya - a dialogue between image and text. Cooper translates Raussert's photos into poetry, painting a profound image of what disembodied historical facts might look like when they are embodied in contemporary characters. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance.

El libro proporciona una mirada innovadora a la relaci n entre la m sica y lo social. Traza la presencia de la m sica en el mundo de la pol tica, la pol tica de la identidad, el patrimonio cultural y el arte y la literatura. El libro establece la m sica como un actor clave en los procesos de reinvenci n de lo social. La serie "Ensayos Interamericanos" est editada por Wilfried Raussert y Olaf Kaltmeier.

Exploring the temporal dimension of African American music in its development from early forms of blues and jazz to the free and fast-paced sequences of jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, this volume addresses music as a key metaphor for the analysis of time in African American culture. Two narrative strategies emerge from tracing the impact of musical time on narrativity in an intercultural sphere - novels by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ismael Reed, and Ntozake Shange representing the textual basis for critical analysis. First, the excursions into the field of music illustrate blues' and jazz's pivotal role in shaping and redefining a particular African American sense of time from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary period. Second, the exploration of the writers' historical imagination unfolds a story about alternating concepts of history and culture, as they emerge from the impact of musical time on the novelistic discourse. This volume will be of interest to scholars of literature, music, and cultural studies.