An in-depth study of how kindred music-making traditions affected divergent cultural and political identities among the Black African, Caribbean, and African American networks in interwar Paris, this work offers richly engaging material for both connoisseurs of this story and newcomers.
Rachel Anne Gillett lectures in cultural history at the University of Utrecht and writes about race, popular culture, and empire. She focuses on the French Empire but her interests range from Marvel movies, to early jazz, to rugby. Her writing appears in blogs and magazines as well as in academic literature and she can be heard on "Unsettling Knowledge", a podcast about how empire shaped European societies. She is deeply interested in how popular
culture reflects and influences social and political life and has pursued that theme wherever she has lived and worked, from New Zealand, to America, to the Netherlands.