| This dissertation examines how members of the French Manouche subgroup of Romanies ("Gypsies") represent themselves politically through the genre of "jazz manouche". Jazz manouche, grounded in the recorded work of guitarist Django Reinhardt, is a source of pleasure, pride, and income for many Manouches. As a means of asserting Manouche identity, jazz manouche constitutes a field of cultural politics in which notions of ethnicity, race, and citizenship are negotiated. The close association between Manouches and jazz manouche in the French popular imagination may also contribute to the further essentialization and exploitation of this already-maligned group. For Manouches, representation through music reveals anxieties and ambivalences about how ethnic identification impacts their social, economic, and political horizons. Musicians and their audiences use jazz manouche to articulate desires for social transformation while questioning whether music is an appropriate means to define ethnic belonging and to pursue collective goals. I argue that through such contradictory processes, musical performance both strengthens and stratifies the communities with which it is associated.;Drawing on several years of ethnographic, archival, and performance-based research within the jazz manouche circuit and among Manouche communities in Paris and Alsace, this dissertation investigates how jazz manouche shapes contemporary minority-majority relations in France. In conversation with literature on ethnic identification, the commodification of ethnicity, and cultural activism, I explore the ways in which cultural producers succeed or fail in advocating for the rights of populations only tenuously united through expressive practices. |
