Improvising Resistance: Jazz, Poetry, and the Black Arts Movement, 1960–1969

This thesis is an interdisciplinary analysis of jazz music and poetry produced by AfricanAmerican artists, primarily in New York, over the course of the 1960s, set within the broad
context of the civil-rights and black-nationalist movements of the same period. Its principal contention is that the two forms afford each other symbiotic illumination. Close reading of jazz musicology in particular illuminates the directions taken by the literature of the period in a manner that has rarely been fully explored. By giving equal critical attention to the two artistic
forms in relation to each other, the epistemological and social radicalism latent and explicit within them can more fully be understood.