Bruce Evan Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publications are Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, co-edited with Marit Grøtta, and LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class. His research interests include African American literature, post-Marxist theory, jazz, and Caribbean aesthetics.

"The interesting text is Quicksand, right? Because it shows a couple of engagements with jazz, and there's a certain point in which the protagonist of Quicksand dances to music in a cabaret, and it's described as 'jungle music'. So we would think of Duke Ellington's Jungle Music Band of the 1920s, and we would also notice the kind of reactionary, racial ideas that go with labeling something as from the jungle. And so there's a way in which jazz is trying to be America's responding to jazz by containing it, thinking of it as something kind of primitive. But this is something that's codified or themetized in Nella Larsen's novel.

The protagonist goes in here, and one, she's like the music drives her with a certain kind of intensity, something like ecstasy that's really unparalleled throughout the rest of the novel. And so it's exciting, and it moves her in a certain way, but she knows that if she becomes part of this 'jungle music', she'll be figured as a certain kind of woman. And so there are all sorts of racial assumptions, including primitivism that work to kind of limit recognition of its sophistication and its brilliance and its importance."

www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/people/aca/bruceb

www.routledge.com/Temporal-Experiments-Seven-Ways-of-Configuring-Time-in-Art-and-Literature/Barnhart-Grotta/p/book/9781032350240

https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/groups/temporal-experiments/

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