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    Start Over Subject Term African Americans Subject Term Caribbean area Subject Term Music

    1. "Reggae got Blues": The blues aesthetic in African American literature as a lens for the reggae aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean literature

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    Collection:
    Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
    Contributers:
    Washington,Lynn (Author)
    Format:
    Dissertation/Thesis
    Publication Date:
    2013
    Published:
    Maryland: Morgan State University
    Location:
    African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Journal Title:
    ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
    Notes:
    193 p., Kwame Dawes coined the term "reggae aesthetic" to explain the paradigm shift in 1960s-70s Caribbean literature that also dovetailed the rise of reggae music in Jamaica. By exploring the impact of popular music on the social developments in late 1960s and early 1970s Jamaica, Dawes offered a new method of Caribbean literary analysis reminiscent of the extant blues tradition in African American literature--similar to the way that reggae music borrows from the blues--and in so doing, highlighted the artistic and cultural influences that link people of color across the "Black Atlantic." This dissertation builds on Dawes's theory by exploring the history and function of music as an aesthetic form and narrative trope in literature of the Black Atlantic. Blues and reggae in contemporary fiction manifest the oral tradition in African storytelling.

    2. Flight as improvisational solo in jazz and blues fiction

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    Collection:
    Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
    Contributers:
    Kosse,Jeffrey P. (Author)
    Format:
    Dissertation/Thesis
    Publication Date:
    2012
    Published:
    Lincoln, Nebraska: The University of Nebraska
    Location:
    African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Journal Title:
    ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
    Notes:
    204 p., This dissertation examines the roles played by jazz and blues in African American fiction of the post-World War II era. The author contends that scholars of jazz and blues fiction generally discuss the authors' treatment of the music in terms of how it shows up, is alluded to, or is played; however, few address performative elements that are central to much African American literature. Their performances, whether as narratives or geosocial movements, often draw upon forms of flight as defining actions that send them into new territories and necessitate acts of improvisation. Forms of flight manifest themselves as improvised solos in numerous ways, including in this dissertation the path of Ellison's narrator going north and ultimately underground in Invisible Man , brothers leaving their Harlem pasts and coming together while on ever-divergent paths in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Milkman Dead discovering the secret of literal flight by improvising through a journey to his familial past in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon , or the members of Macon Street's "flesh-and-blood triangle" choosing the expatriate route of Paris instead of America in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King.