Musical(ized) Biographies: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

My paper deals with two musical(ized) biographies: Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) and Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). These literary works share features, at once thematic, since the protagonist is a musical performer, and formal, as both writers’ prose is drenched with musicality. The two narratives can thus be considered what Emily Petermann (2014) calls “musical novels”, as both display sonic and structural patterns as well as elements of improvisation (the imitation of orality; the use of different narrators and the inclusion of various types of texts such as lyrics, interviews, excerpts from newspapers, and the solo performances through improvised jazzy breaks and the repetition of the same lexical item).
In my paper, I will take my cue from Eric Prieto, who writes that interart analogies should not be taken as ends in themselves, and I will try to show the purpose of such intermediality and how it can contribute to the biographical genre. Among other things, I will examine whether these musicalized biographies have, through their unusual forms, particular social and political relevance and how approaching them from this methodological angle can serve as interpretative aid.