Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture(Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)

Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as "antagonistic cooperation." Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O'Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics. From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O'Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O'Meally's readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. This Music Demanded Action: Ellison, Armstrong, and the Imperatives of Jazz 2. We Are All a Collage: Armstrong’s Operatic Blues, Bearden’s Black Odyssey, and Morrison’s Jazz 3. The “Open Corner” of Black Community and Creativity: From Romare Bearden to Duke Ellington and Toni Morrison 4. Hare and Bear: The Racial Politics of Satchmo’s Smile 5. The White Trombone and the Unruly Black Cosmopolitan Trumpet, or How Paris Blues Came to Be Unfinished Coda Notes Index

About the Author :
Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also founder and director of the Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1989); editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia, 1998); and coeditor of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia, 2004), among many other books.

Review :
A "Best Books of Summer 2022" Pick A masterpiece—from the Angela Davis moment at the beginning to the incredible and inimitable readings of Paris Blues at the end! O'Meally has given the world (with all of your unruly Black cosmopolitanism!) the definitive takes on Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Toni Morrison and Romare Bearden of and for our generation! Embrace disturbs. Accompaniment unsettles. Musically, Robert O’Meally tells us that black visual and literary art always tell us that black music always tells us this with love. O’Meally’s generously receptive perception is attuned to collage’s rich austerities. In showing that antagonistic cooperation is our program, Antagonistic Cooperation is a wonder! Robert O'Meally's interdisciplinary brilliance shines throughout the pages of Antagonistic Cooperation. Here he brings a lifetime of reading, listening, looking, learning, and leading to bear upon extraordinary works by America’s most innovative artists, among them Romare Bearden, Louis Armstrong, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison. His luminous prose and clear analysis make this book itself a contribution to the body of work under consideration. An extraordinary accomplishment. Ever lively and cautiously optimistic, Antagonistic Cooperation is a moving revival of jazz-democracy discourse in downbeat times. O’Meally passes on a lifetime of tales and insights, vivid and learned, revealing rhymes among Black music, African American writing, and American political thought. In a masterful manner befitting his decades at the helm of the New Jazz Studies, Robert O’Meally in Antagonistic Cooperation narrates the contrapuntal encounters that have provided the dynamic tension driving African American arts forward. What O’Meally makes profoundly clear is that artistic energy is uncontainable, that great artists are uncategorizable, and that conflict is not something to fear; when understood in its highest aspect, it is the key to evolution and transcendence within the polyphony and polyrhythm of human life. Highly recommended. A rich and rewarding read that provides a new understanding of Black cultural expression and hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy. Antagonistic Cooperation puts three of the most influential African American artists of the twentieth century – Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden – in conversation in an accessibly interdisciplinary text.