Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)

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.\nFrom 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.

Arts & Photography

O'Meally, Robert

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

"Billie Holiday deserves a biography in which her musicianship isn't overshadowed by the tragic events of her life. O'Meally has written that book," says Entertainment Weekly about this absorbing and authoritative account of the greatest jazz singer in history. O'Meally emphasizes Holiday's artistry and training rather than her personal miseries, and he uses voluminous archival material to correct common myths about Holiday. Chronicling her rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, particularly Lester Young, Lady Day is an impassioned testament to Holiday's genius that confirms her place in American jazz.

Lady Day: The Many Faces Of Billie Holiday

Humor & Entertainment

Da Capo Press

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) had a true Renaissance sensibility. He was a fine artist who also successfully turned his hand to printmaking, writing, costume and set design, as well as composing jazz music. In addition, he helped to found the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York's Cinque Gallery and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, and was once even offered an opportunity to play professional baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics. But it is for his rich and textured collages that Bearden is best known today. In 1977, Bearden created a sequence of 20 collages based on episodes from Homer's Odyssey. It may come as a surprise to even his most avid followers that this devoted chronicler of African American culture and the Harlem Renaissance would gravitate to such a canonical text. But in the essay accompanying Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, scholar Robert G. O'Meally argues for their thematic consistency and suggests that, in the figures of Odysseus, Penelope, Poseidon, Nausicca and others, Bearden found themes sympathetic to the African American experience. These motifs of wandering, mourning and the questing for home--considering Bearden's scores of interiors and exteriors, country and city life and depictions of family love--emerge as the central themes of all his art. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, the first in-depth consideration of these collages since they were originally exhibited 30 years ago, will prove a surprise to Bearden fans and newcomers alike.

Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey

DC Moore Gallery

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Books by O'Meally, Robert