How the Slave Trade and the Shoah Gave Rise to a Musical Marvel. An Interview with Jacques Schwarz-Bart

Author(s)

  • William F.S. Miles Northeastern University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief11444

Keywords:

André Schwarz-Bart, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jewish music, Caribbean music

Abstract

Four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade bequeathed enduring legacies of pain and suffering from Africa to the Antilles, not to mention the Americas. Four years of the Holocaust (Shoah, in Hebrew) compressed millennia of persecutions of the Jewish people, with repercussions from Europe to the Middle East. The shockwaves of those two heinous epochs have fused in a most unexpected and artistically creative way, giving rise to the incomparable jazz composer and saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart. In this interview with William Miles, the son of the 1959 Prix Goncourt laureate André Schwarz-Bart and the award-winning Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Simone Schwarz-Bart reflects on his life, inspirations and career.

Author Biography

  • William F.S. Miles, Northeastern University

    William F.S. Miles is Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University in Boston and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University. He is the author of Paradox in Paradise: Elections in Martinique (New York: Praeger; trans. Paris: l'Harmattan) and numerous articles on the political culture of the French West Indies.

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Published

2021-12-27

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2021): Intertextualities in the works of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart

Section

Interviews

License

Copyright (c) 2021 William B. Miles

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

“How the Slave Trade and the Shoah Gave Rise to a Musical Marvel. An Interview with Jacques Schwarz-Bart ” (2021) RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 15(2), pp. 106–116. doi:10.51777/relief11444.