Antagonistic Cooperation

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 <i>Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature</i> 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 <i>F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature</i> 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