Jazz as Diaspora Space

Within this chapter, rather than examining global diasporas as detached from—or established in opposition to—US-based aesthetic models and dominant histories, I seek to go beyond these binary configurations to explore ways in which diasporas in jazz can be both theorized and understood as historically contingent genealogies. I draw on the development of the field of diaspora studies to explore some of the limitations of current approaches to jazz as a distributed, global, diasporic form, and draw on Avtah Brah’s theory of “diaspora space” in particular to examine potential ways of understanding the transnational character of jazz, rethinking the music’s relationship to people, place, history and tradition. The chapter concludes with a revisiting of work on micro-histories and suggests a new way of thinking about jazz that moves beyond the binary configuration of center and periphery yet does not, at the same time, seek to dismantle the canon of American jazz.