Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781439900314)

Intrigued by "texted" sonorities--the rhythms, musics, ordinary noises, and sounds of language in narratives--Julie Huntington examines the soundscapes in contemporary Francophone novels such as Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood (Senegal), and Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent (Martinique). Through an ethnomusicological perspective, Huntington argues in Sounding Off that the range of sounds --footsteps, heartbeats, drumbeats--represented in West African and Caribbean works provides a rhythmic polyphony that creates spaces for configuring social and cultural identities.

Huntington's analysis shows how these writers and others challenge the aesthetic and political conventions that privilege written texts over orality and invite readers-listeners to participate in critical dialogues--to sound off, as it were, in local and global communities.

Author: Julie Huntington
ISBN-10: 1439900310
ISBN-13: 9781439900314
Publisher: Temple University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.20w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 11/06/2009 pg. 22
Choice 04/01/2010