Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York written by Fiona I. B. Ngô is an interdisciplinary approach that employs urban studies, queer studies, cultural history, literary and cultural analysis that provides a comprehensive perspective on Jazz Age New York. “Revisiting the Jazz Age through the lens of imperialism renders visible (as well as audible) previously underaknowledged connections and collaborations between domestic and imperial discourses of race and empire.” (5)
In chapter 1 Ngô attempts to truly stage a scene of imperial logic, offering us a broad glimpse of Harlem's and jazz music's racial and sexual stakes and how they combine with imperial discourse. She peruses questions that “reconfigure the meaning and management of race and sex in through differential knowledge that bringing empire home places before us.”(32)
In Ngô‘s book histories
of intimacy and distance are crucial for understanding and reconsidering what “political
stories inform the categories of race and sex and what other stories we might
tell from the confusion of those categories.” (32) This interest for the
intimate is crucial for my own research and for understanding, rearranging and intertwining
images, politics, literature, art, life. The figuration and creation of spaces,
these “contact zones”.
No comments:
Post a Comment