Comparisons of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism reveal that the two movements bore more similarities than differences and often emulated each other. In their cultural policies, both embraced corporatism in organizing their cultural workforce, both invested heavily in cultural institutions and high-profile events, and, despite their authoritarian and racist practices, both exercised considerable caution in implementing censorship, contrary to postwar assumptions. Following a comparative overview of Nazi and Fascist approaches to architecture, visual art, film and theater, this chapter explores the challenges both systems faced in censoring music. Practiced in a wide range of amateur and professional performance experiences, music was by its very nature extremely difficult to control. Strong rhetoric denouncing ‘alien’ musical forces was far more pronounced in Germany than in Italy, but both countries needed to hold back on aggressive censorship practices that might risk alienating the public. The only arena in which censorship could be effectively imposed was upon Germany’s oppressed Jewish community.

In the post-World War II moment, four novels set in New Orleans emerged, each featuring male anti-heroes transcending their misadventures through poised dissidence. Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors offer insights into the ways that mid-century “cool” operates in New Orleans literature – even in the unlikely figure of the bumbling Ignatius J. Reilly. The final portion of the chapter offers reflections on the “end of cool,” as the coolness of the ethical rebel loners slips into the studied cynicism of the character of the DJ Rheinhardt from A Hall of Mirrors as he sells out his talents to a white supremacist radio station.

Me and Juliet (1953) is on the surface a backstage musical comedy that pays loving homage to the musicals of the 1930s. What Rodgers and Hammerstein did with it, though, was to infuse the libretto and the score with contemporary inflections, including songs in jazz and Latin styles. This musical, more than any other by Rodgers and Hammerstein, reflects notions of metatheatricality, whereby the musical comments on the nature and practice of making musicals. It also offers commentary on the role of the audience and its characters include not just those who appear onstage in the show-within-the-show but also those who work behind the scenes.

Steeped in African American traditions, jazz frequently invites conversations about race, Black artistry, and White commercialization of Black culture. To illustrate jazz’s slippage between art and the popular, this chapter considers jazz’s characterization and definition in advertising, movies, and popular music. These categories represent jazz as a cultural form through the embodiment and performance of jazz musicians. Companies like Nike, Honda, and Apple Computers intertwined a cultural aura around jazz with their merchandise. Hollywood movies in the post-World War II era conferred new authority on White swing musicians and erased anxiety about appropriation of Black culture by offering both White and Black jazz musicians’ performances. Late twentieth-century musicians — Steely Dan, Sting, Joni Mitchell — explicitly engaged jazz and jazz musicians for albums that aspired to artistic status rather than that of pop music. Throughout, definitions and separations between jazz as art and as the popular get blurred and remade.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

This chapter traces how Langston Hughes (1901–1967) documented the Black experience in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movemen and some key legacies of the Black world building he pursued by engaging with social justice and political activism. To this end, the chapter details overlooked correspondence to reveal the mentoring Hughes provided to Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Amiri Baraka. These letters illuminate the unmistakable confidence Hughes instilled in both Brooks and Walker while the often overamplified tension between Hughes and Baraka quietens into a spirit of working admiration among equals.

This chapter focuses on the women who pioneered Black Power poetry recordings alongside the male artists whose work dominates critical discussions about the genre. Beginning with Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks’s contributions to Folkways’ Anthology of Negro Poetry (1954), the chapter explores the rapid growth of the genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, examining the work of Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Laini Mataka (formerly Wanda Robinson), Sarah Webster Fabio, and Jayne Cortez. Their records represent women in control: as the leaders of bands, as publishers and producers, and as owners of record labels. Drawing on the inspiration of black music and musicians to infuse popular and avant-garde dimensions into their performances, these recordings catalyze personal and social transformation. Such multifaceted performances of blackness were carried out in the articulation of a dissident black femininity within and against a vigorously ambivalent commercialization.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.

This essay offers an overview both of Alejo Carpentier’s writings and González Echevarría’s own work as a literary critic, especially as it pertains to his monograph, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977). He traces the arc of Carpentier’s works, beginning with ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and ending with El arpa y la sombra pointing to recurrent, highly original themes such as Afro-Cuban culture, classical music and jazz, colonial history, and exile, all the while noting Carpentier’s dialogue with a younger generation of Latin American writers. González Echevarría comments on the influence exerted by the concept of “the marvelous real” on Boom writers and magical realism. The essay ends by reflecting on Carpentier’s lies about his biography and points to similarities in his last novel, El arpa y la sombra (1978), between the character Christopher Columbus’s penchant to lie and his foreignness, and Carpentier himself.

This chapter follows Tocqueville in arguing that civic culture must support formal learning in schools and colleges, by providing a social spirit of reflective patriotism. A particular challenge given America’s civic fracture of angry polarization, but also widespread apathy, is to motivate citizens to care about America, citizenship education, and a discursive patriotism; thus, civics now should emphasize stories of American hope and achievement, forging an e pluribus unum out of our pluralism. It then develops the sections: (a) E Pluribus Unum and Civic Hope: Jazz, Constitutionalism, Religious Liberty – with subsections on (i) American Story and Song, Especially Jazz – featuring the Ray Charles version of American the Beautiful, Justice O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis in conversation, and jazz pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, (ii) The Declaration and Constitution as Achievements of Harmony, and (iii) Religious Liberty and Pluralism as American Harmony, featuring George Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

This poses the problem of American civic fracture and failing civic attachment, and points to renewed civics as the remedy.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

A comprehensive examination of the plays and prose of Adrienne Kennedy, with particular focus on two works she premiered in 1976: A Rat’ s Mass / Procession in Shout, an operatic adaptation of her early play A Rat’ s Mass, composed and directed by the jazz composer and pianist Cecil Taylor; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, a play derived from Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood film and her memory of her brother’s devastating car accident. The chapter also explores Kennedy’s experiments in visual art, with particular attention to her own and her mother’s scrapbooks, her assemblage of photographed objects ("Cherished Objects from the Past"), her use of quotation, and the mixed-media nature of her manuscripts.

This chapter discusses the search for a modernist musical culture in Czechoslovakia after 1918 and the ideological underpinnings of this search. The chapter also focuses on three specific modernist tendencies: neoclassicism, neofolklorism, and a set of musical trends termed civilism, which runs parallel to the German New Objectivity movement. Although based on different techniques and viewpoints, the three tendencies are marked by internal similarities. All three approaches to modern composition aim at abandoning Romantic sensibilities and avoiding romanticism through different means: neoclassicism by a recourse to pre-Romantic music; neofolklorism in an exploration of musical traditions of the common people from different ethnic groups; and civilism in a reliance on jazz.