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.

Reviews

A "Best Books of Summer 2022" Pick
*Boston Globe*

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!
*Cornel West*

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*

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

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*

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.
*Michael E. Veal, Henry L. and Lucy G Moses Professor of Music, Yale University*

Highly recommended.
*Choice Reviews*

A rich and rewarding read that provides a new understanding of Black cultural expression and hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.
*Journal of Jazz Studies*

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.
*U.S. Studies Online*