Africa~Diaspora Forum: Peter Hulme

In the 1920s in New York the jazz cabaret was seen as offering what the writer Eric Walrond called “Africa undraped”, and its sound was the tom-tom.  This talk will explore the period’s fascination with that instrument and with what it might signify, focusing on two texts entitled Tom-Tom, both of which offer to associate contemporary Harlem with “Africa”, in one or another of its manifestations.