Tsitsi Jaji Awarded African Literature Association Prize

Tsitsi Jaji was awarded the First Book Award by the African Literature Association during their annual meeting in Atlanta, GA, this past weekend for her work Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity.

Africa in Stereo analyzes how African have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890-2011) to offer a new cultural history attesting to pan-Africanism's ongoing and open theoretical potential. Tsitsi Jaji argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly, an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered what Jaji terms "stereomodernism." Attending to the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted-poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites-stereomodernism accounts for the role of cultural practice in the emergence of solidarity, tapping music's capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth-century black transnational ties.

The First Book Award is awarded by the African Literature Association for an outstanding book in African literary studies.  To be eligible for consideration, the literary work must be the first book by the author, and published in the preceding calendar year.