Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa  (Boydell and Brewer, 2017) is a comparative study of the interwar reception of jazz in France and of the impact of this jazz imaginary on a generation of Francophone African authors. Writers rangingfrom Ousmane Socé to Léonora and Fiston Mwanza Mujila repeatedly turn to jazz as an idea, a contested site, a formation, through and around which they negotiate notions of race and identity, resistance and expression. Indeed, no other musical form has so consistently appeared in the Francophone African tradition. Yet, as this book shows, because of jazz’s early reception in France, it’s subsequent appearance in Francophone African fiction traces a complex route that this study attempts to map and to explain.

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