Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

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...