Chocolate Surrealism

<In Chocolate Surrealism Njoroge Njoroge highlights connections among the production performance and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework. Calypso reigned during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism. The Cuban rumba/son complex enlivened the postwar era of American empire. Jazz exploded in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization. And lastly Nuyorican Salsa coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. He pays close attention to the fractures fragmentations and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region's sounds. At the same time he engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world.Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music movement memory and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race nationalism and musical practice and geopolitical connections. Further music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system through local popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles times and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.