In this ambitious and provocative book, Walton M. Muyumba establishes connections between the ways Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka draw upon jazz improvisation to underpin their cultural criticism and creative writing. Like Michael Magee, whose book Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (2004) provides a useful counterpoint to the present study, Muyumba sees a fundamental relationship between the improvisational impulses of jazz and the tradition of philosophical pragmatism inaugurated by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James in the 1890s.

From Muyumba's perspective, this relationship is made expressly clear when African American writers “present improvisation as a pragmatic metaphor for creating more discourse about individual identities and freedoms and for shifting the American social mainstream toward a more inclusive form of democracy” (ix–x). Muyumba argues that Ellison, Baldwin and Baraka theorize jazz improvisation as “an illustration of the social usefulness of Negro cultural rituals, and a way of communicating philosophical attitudes befitting the shifts in American political and social life during the 1950s and '60s,” and in this “demonstration of cosmopolitan blackness” he sees a process of creative revision – of the self and, ostensibly, of society – that corresponds with the instrumentalism and creativity at the heart of pragmatist thinking (24–25).

Muyumba goes against the grain of previous criticism by linking Baraka and Ellison. Because of the tensions between Ellison's liberal individualist perspective and Baraka's cultural nationalism and Marxism, the two writers have rarely been considered in tandem, and to do so here is a bold and challenging move. Indeed, it is difficult to swallow the notion of Baraka as pragmatist – the literary instrumentalism he theorized during the 1960s was far more attack-minded (poems were conceived as “weapons” with which to bring down the white power structure and so on) than the open, democratic approach pragmatist thinkers take to culture – and his inclusion in the discussion is perhaps the least convincing aspect of the book.

Much stronger is Muyumba's skilful dissection of Ellison and Baldwin's revision of Burke's theory of language as symbolic action. “Both the harmonies and dissonant counterplay” between them can be better understood, he argues, by studying the different ways in which they represent iconic jazz personalities such as Charlie Parker in their literary works (25). While both believed that “novels could symbolically illustrate democratic attitudes,” Baldwin moved beyond Ellison's conviction that symbolic cultural action is a sufficient means in itself to promote democratic attitudes by “representing his critical and political views physically” (35). Instead of simply accepting Ellison's suggestion that Parker was being dehumanized by white writers as they mythologized him, Baldwin approached the jazz great as “a symbol of the tragic human trial and a mechanism for discussing improvised expressions of black manhood” (36).

One problem with the book, whilst not overly detrimental, is the light treatment it gives to pragmatism itself. Muyumba is well versed in the literature about jazz and its influence on African American literature, but perhaps less so, on this evidence, in the peculiarities of the pragmatist tradition. A project that examines the ways African American writers have revised that tradition is without doubt an interesting and potentially fruitful one, but the question of what exactly is being recalibrated is never satisfactorily defined. Because we only get a snap definition of pragmatism in the introduction, one of the book's main arguments – that jazz improvisation is akin to pragmatist experimentalism because of the democratic possibilities it implies – arguably lacks weight.

This said, The Shadow and the Act (itself a riff on Ellison's famous 1964 essay collection Shadow and Act) is an engaging and accessible work of scholarship that opens up several fascinating avenues of enquiry for students of African American expressive culture. Muyumba's close readings of Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952) and Baldwin's short story “Sonny's Blues” (1957) are highly sophisticated and instructive, and because the relationship between jazz and pragmatism remains relatively underexplored, the fact that the book poses more questions than it answers can be viewed as a strength in itself.