ABSTRACT
The narrative strategy of Nathaniel Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), the second volume of his ongoing series From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, presents an exposition of African American cultural visibility. As the narrator, a West Coast composer/ multi-instrumentalist known as N., searches for a drummer to fill the rhythmic void in his jazz group, the Mystic Horn Society, he writes letters to the textually absent Angel of Dust. The letters blur boundaries between fiction and theory, narration and critique, presence and absence, music and discourse. N., as well as the reader, must create theoretical cultural fictions to fill perceived gaps of meaning among the letters.
