Beyond romance: Rethinking time and narrative in jazz histories

Abstract

This article analyses narrative, time and causality in current general histories of jazz, in the context of the ontological turn in the field. It proposes that jazz studies should go beyond romance as the dominant historical emplotment, pluralize their narratives, and establish a new historiographical relationship to the past in order to produce a truly global, decentred and decolonized history of the genre. The article is divided in three sections, which successively explore historical narratives, representations of time and causality in the past, and some theoretical problems in global and local histories.