Crossovers

John Szwed is John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including So What: The Life of Miles Davis and Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, and coauthor (with Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer, and Robert Farris Thompson) of Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"In this collection of thirty-one short articles, essays, and reviews written over a thirty-six-year period, John Szwed consistently displays the extraordinary imagination and ingenuity that have made him one of the most respected scholars in African-American and Afro-diasporic Studies. Crossovers is both a revealing intellectual history of Szwed's development as a scholar and critic, and a unified and integrated argument on behalf of the aesthetic, moral, and political genius of the African diaspora."-George Lipsitz, H-Urban

• 1. Introduction2. Musical style and racial conflict3. Musical adaptation among Afro-Americans4. An American anthropological dilemma: the politics of Afro-American culture5. Reconsideration: the myth of the Negro past6. Reconsideration: Lafcadio Hearn in Cincinnati7. The forest as moral document: the achievement of Lydia Cabrera8. Race and the embodiment of culture9. After the myth: studying Afro-American cultural patterns in the plantation literature10. Speaking people, in their own terms11. The lizards fake the fake12. As it is prophesied, so it used to be13. Greenwich's good gnosis14. Free samples: Roy Nathanson and Anthony Coleman15. Milling at the mall16. Childhood's ends17. Sweet feet18. From "Messin' around" to "Funky western civilization": the rise and fall of dance instruction songs19. The Afro-American transformation of European set dances and dance suites20. All that beef, and symbolic action, too! : notes on the occasion of the banning of 2 Live Crew's As nasty as they wanna be21. The real old school22. Josef Skvorecky and the tradition of jazz literature23. World views collide: the history of jazz and hot dance24. Way down yonder in Buenos Aires25. Improvising under apartheid: Afro blue26. Sonny Rollins in the age of mechanical reproduction27. Sun Ra, 1914-199328. Ornette Coleman: ?civilization29. The local and the express: Anthony Braxton's title-drawings30. Magnificent declension: Solibo magnificent31. Metaphors of incommensurability