Journal of Transnational American Studies

Candace Allen’s 2004 novel Valaida illustrates the migratory patterns of early twentieth-century jazz music and musicians, positing the art form and its performers as “heterotopians”: simultaneously in and outside of the power relations of hegemonic time-space compression, traveling in an alternate and progressive space, signified by the music. Through a reading of heterotopic spaces in Valaida, this article seeks to complicate the notion of heterotopias as purely progressive spaces for reversal and liberation. It does so by emphasizing the double nature of heterotopias as both progressive and reactionary and suggests that the way time is employed in a heterotopic space determines its progressive potential. Spaces of cumulative, static, or frozen time refuse to yield any utopian promise, whereas fluid, dynamic, and ephemeral time offers moments of agency. In the case of Valaida, music and performance offer an alternate space, where the radical potential lies in the moment of communication and community, constituting a diasporic practice and heterUtopian spaces of sound and time.