Antagonistic Cooperation

Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture

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Pub Date 01 Mar 2022 | Archive Date 28 Jun 2022

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Description

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.

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.

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...


Advance Praise

"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!"

—Fred Moten


"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."

—William J. Maxwell, author of F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature


"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, Ralph Ellison and others. His luminous prose and clear analysis is itself a contribution to the body of work under consideration. An extraordinary accomplishment.

—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

"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...


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ISBN 9780231189194
PRICE $30.00 (USD)

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