Jazz-Shaped Bodies:
\nMapping City Space, Time, and Sound
\nin Black Transnational Literature

“Jazz-Shaped Bodies” addresses representations of the city in black transnational
\nliterature, with a focus on sonic schemas and mapping. Drawing on cultural
\ngeography, posthumanist thought, and the discourse of diaspora, the thesis
\nexamines the extent to which the urban landscape is figured as a panoptic structure
\nin twentieth and twenty-first century diasporic texts, and how the mimetic function
\nof artistic performance challenges this structure. Through comparative analysis of
\nworks emerging from and/or invested with sites in American, Canadian, and
\nCaribbean landscapes, the study develops accretively and is structured
\nthematically, tracing how selected texts: map the socio-spatial dialectic through
\nvisual and sonic schemas; develop the metaphorical use of the phonograph in the
\nfolding of space and time; revive ancestral memory and renew an engagement with
\nthe landscape; negotiate and transcend shifting national, cultural, and geographical
\nborderlines and boundaries that seek to encode and enclose black subjectivity.The project focuses on literary works such as James Baldwin’s intimate
\ncartographies of New York in Another Country (1962), Earl Lovelace’s carnivalising
\nof city space in The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), Toni Morrison’s creative blending of
\nthe sounds of black music in Jazz (1992), and the postbody poetics of Wayde
\nCompton’s Performance Bond (2004), among other texts that enact crossings of, or
\notherwise pierce, binaries and borderlines, innovating portals for alternative
\ninterpellation and subverting racially hegemonic visual regimes concretised in the
\narchitecture of the city. An examination of the specificity of the cityscape against
\nthe wider arc of transnationalism establishes how African American, AfroCaribbean, and Black Canadian texts share and exchange touchstones such as jazz,
\nkinesis, liminality, and hauntedness, while remaining sensitive to the distinct sociohistorical
\ncontexts and intensities at each locus, underscoring the significance of
\nrendition — of body, space, time, and sound — to black transnational writing.

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