George Stade

Robert G. O'Meally

Herman Melville

Contains short fiction from the nineteenth-century American novelist, and features his unfinished novella entitled "Billy Budd, Sailor," along with the "Piazza Tales," which includes "Bartleby," "The Bell-Tower," and others; and includes a brief biography of the author.

Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales

Langston Hughes

Black Misery (Iona and Peter Opie Library of Children's Literature)

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.

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

Antagonistic Cooperation

The Craft of Ralph Ellison

Stephanie Mayer Heydt

Rachael Z. Delue

Paul Devlin

In November 1977, The New Yorker published a feature-length biography of artist Romare Bearden by Calvin Tomkins as part of its ?Profiles? series. The essay, titled Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else (using Bearden?s words to describe the creative process), brought national focus to Bearden, whose rise had seemed meteoric since the late 1960s. The experience of the interview prompted Bearden to launch an autobiographical collection he called Profiles. He sequenced the project in two parts: Part I, The Twenties, featuring memories from his youth in the South and in Pittsburgh, and Part II, The Thirties, about his early adult life in New York. Bearden collaborated with friend and writer Albert Murray on a short statement to accompany each piece. These appeared scripted onto the walls of the Profile exhibition to lead viewers on a visual and poetic journey. This landmark volume, reassembles and reconsiders Bearden?s Profile series. Beyond providing the opportunity to explore an understudied body of work, the project will investigate the roles of narrative and self-presentation for an artist who made a career of creating works based on memory and experience. It will also reveal Bearden?s own gestures away from the autobiographical and toward a broader view.

Romare Bearden's Profile Series

Something Over Something Else

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Brent Hayes Edwards

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define—it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures. Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed Jazz Cadence of American Culture, these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing—such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscott's autobiography Songs of the Unsung—share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

The New Jazz Studies

Uptown Conversation

Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)

William L. Andrews

Nellie Y. McKay

Professor of African American Literature Nellie Y McKay

W E B DuBois Professor of Humanities Chair of Afro-American Studies and Director of the W E B DuBois Institute for for Afro-American Research Henry Louis Gates, Jr

Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Arnold Rampersad

Director Houston A Baker

Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Womens Studies Frances Smith Foster

Deborah E. McDowell

Hortense Spillers

Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor Cheryl A Wall

Welcomed on publication as "brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from," The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights.

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art. Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

The Romare Bearden Reader

Romare Bearden

D.C. Moore Gallery

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, DC Moore Gallery, November 13, 2007 - January 5, 2008.

A Black Odyssey

A collection of essays on Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man.

New Essays on Invisible Man

Robert G. O'Meally

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