Abstract
This chapter explores how Jean-Claude Izzo transposes black Atlantic musical culture into the aesthetic, cultural, and geographic settings of the Mediterranean noir. This essay locates Izzo’s aesthetic within a history of opaque relations between the textual, the visual, and the sonic that participate in the constitution of blackness in noir fiction. It focuses on Izzo’s neo-noir trilogy, set in his hometown Marseille, which includes the novels Total Khéops (1995), Chourmo (1996), and Soléa (1998). From beginning to end, Izzo marks his texts under the sound/sign of musical culture: Total Khéops references DJ Khéops and the inaugural mix-tape of Marseille rap group IAM; Chourmo references an album by the Marseille group Massilia Sound System; and Soléa references a Miles Davis / Gil Evans recording, Sketches of Spain. The essay will suggest that, if the noir novel evolves as a genre, as Izzo explains, “in parallel with an investigation into the social conditions of contemporary man, the modern form of fate,” then Izzo’s engagement with musical culture represents a deep, embodied meditation on unimagined yet vital futures—modeled and molded in the hybrid, borrowed, clandestine, and popular forms of cultural relation and collectivity that mark the black Atlantic.
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