Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France, Lie Siv B.

Jazz manouche--a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes--is among Frances 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 Frances assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.