Siv B. Lie

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) won the 2022 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe for her book "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

This article explores how music professionals promote interdiscursive oppositions between musical aurality and musical literacy to unsettle the terms of their racialization. For many French Manouches (a subgroup of Romanies/“Gypsies”), music is a source of pride, profit, and public recognition. Manouche musicians often valorize their own sensorially centered pedagogical approaches in distinction to music literacy as espoused by French schools and conservatories. In doing so, they link notions of expressivity, naturalness, and ethical behavior to their Manouche identity in contrast to White French society. They construct parallel contrasts between Black and White musicalities in the jazz world to convey their value as racialized musicians, pointing to transnational formations of race and White supremacy. Because French color-blind policy constrains speech about race and racism, advocacy for an aurally centered approach to music pedagogy becomes a way for speakers to denounce the discrimination Manouches face as racialized subjects. For these musicians, self-exoticization is a multifaceted tactic to develop a market niche, to prove themselves as good neoliberal subjects, and to disrupt the racial logics that render such alterity both an asset and a burden. Their discourse remains powerful even if, in practice, some make use of the very music-theoretical frameworks they critique.

Published in October 2021 with the University of Chicago Press, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.

Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.

In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.

Visit the book's multimedia companion website.

Through talk and performance, participants in the genre of jazz manouche articulate Manouche (French Romani/“Gypsy”) ethnoracial identities. This article takes a semiotic approach to exploring how ethnoracial differences are perceived sonically and reified through language about jazz manouche guitar technique. By analyzing interlocutors' sensory descriptors such as power, rawness, and even the feeling of ethnoracial identity itself, this article reveals continuities between individual sonic perceptions of race and ethnicity and broader semiotic ideologies about race and ethnicity. These discourses can serve or compromise Manouche interests as they naturalize ideas about social difference.

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston on November 1. The paper, titled "Django in Paris: Curating Patrimony, Acoustic Territory, and Ethnoracial Marginality," explored the racialization of Romanies in a museum exhibition and was part of a panel called "The Guitar in History." She also participated in a roundtable titled "Ambivalent Populisms: Musical Politics and Policy in Contemporary Europe" at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on November 7. Her contribution, "Cultural Activism's Living Legacies," explored the musical and activist history of a pro-Romani nonprofit in France.

Based on the music of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt, jazz manouche is a popular genre that emerged during the late twentieth century. This article examines the historical development of jazz manouche in relation to ideologies about ethnoracial identity in France. Jazz manouche is strongly associated with French Manouches, the subgroup of Romanies (“Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. In the decades following Reinhardt's death in 1953, some Manouches adopted his music as a community practice. Simultaneously, critics, promoters, and activists extolled the putative ethnoracial character of this music, giving rise to the “jazz manouche” label as a cornerstone of both socially conscious and profit-generating strategies. Drawing on analysis of published criticism, archival research, and interviews, I argue that ethnoracial and generic categories can develop symbiotically, each informing and reflecting ideologies about cultural identity and its sonic expressions. Jazz manouche grew out of essentializing notions about Manouche identity, while Manouches have been racialized through reductive narratives about jazz manouche. In this case, an investigation of genre formation can inform understandings of ethnoracial identity and national belonging.

Siv B. Lie and Benjamin Givan collaborated to create the entry on "Jazz Manouche" for Grove Music Online.  

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston on November 1. The paper, titled "Django in Paris: Curating Patrimony, Acoustic Territory, and Ethnoracial Marginality," explored the racialization of Romanies in a museum exhibition and was part of a panel called "The Guitar in History." She also participated in a roundtable titled "Ambivalent Populisms: Musical Politics and Policy in Contemporary Europe" at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on November 7. Her contribution, "Cultural Activism's Living Legacies," explored the musical and activist history of a pro-Romani nonprofit in France.