Jazz anxiety and the European fear of cultural change: towards a transnational history of a political emotion

From the interwar period onwards, music now known as jazz transcended geographic and political boundaries thanks to increased mobility and new media. Commonly associated with American mass culture, jazz music and jazz musicianship evoked strong emotions, ranging from love to hate. In this paper, feelings about jazz as a new form of cultural anxiety are the main subject of analysis. By looking at jazz as an emblem of different kinds of fear of the non-European, we can reconstruct the changing perception of Europe's internal frontiers from the dissolution of Europe's continental empires to the early Cold War.